The term “sales intelligence” most often refers to the practice of gathering, organizing and analyzing data to help improve the performance of a company’s sales processes. At many companies, however, the process of developing sales intelligence stops at the organizing step due to the amount of time it takes to conduct a meaningful data analysis.
For manufacturers with an ERP platform there is no reason to only organize and report on basic sales data. In fact, an investment to develop an automated sales intelligence process on top of your ERP data can deliver one of the easiest to measure returns on investment.
Sales Teams Need Help
A recent study by sales researcher Marc Wayshak found that 61% of salespeople said selling was harder or much harder now than just five years ago. This finding was backed by the fact that only 24% of sales people reported meeting their 2018 sales goals.
A big portion of the current sales challenge is created by the need for today’s sales people to manage existing relationships while developing new ones. Where sales intelligence can be especially powerful is in automating the monitoring of existing relationships.
Making Sales Data Smart
Much like the operations side of manufacturing, ERP solutions have added many new levels of data available to the sales process but very few sales teams have automated the processing and analysis of that data. Instead, teams spend hundreds of hours a month manually aggregating and reviewing customer and prospect data just to see how they are doing…much less looking for new opportunities. Automating that analysis can provide a big boost to their productivity.
For example, a small investment to automate the analysis of customer sales data can deliver sales intelligence to the team on-demand, allowing them to see problems and opportunities in minutes instead of days. Imagine your sales team being able to pull up a customer order trends report that instantly highlights customers whose recent orders have deviated from their norm. In a couple of minutes, the salesperson will know which customers they need to talk with immediately to determine if there is a problem with the relationship or a shift in their needs.
While an intelligent, automated report should never replace real relationship building activities, having an early warning can make sales efforts more efficient and free salespeople to spend more time prospecting than firefighting. An increase in new customer growth coupled with a decrease in customer attrition would provide a double return for a single investment.
Triple Helix has a proven track record of helping manufacturers and other companies organize and improve access and use of their critical data. Contact us for a no-obligation consultation to see how we could help you.
