Supporting Sales Leaders with Data Visualization

Sales people plan their work and work their plan. To stay on top of their plan, your sales leaders need a real-time understanding of exactly how your products and services meet customer needs.

Some of the best sales people might be able to get by on raw intuition. Still, all sales employees can benefit from combining core skill training and coaching with real-time data and analytics. Data-driven sales leaders are more confident in their decisions, which puts their entire team in position for long-term and sustainable growth.

Unfortunately, many distributors are not making the most of their data. They have limited reporting and analytic capabilities and systems that are not integrated. IT departments are often overworked trying to provide the right reports that deliver the right insights to sales leaders. Because these different reports come from different data sources, the data can sometimes conflict with other data.

That’s why SMP developed The New Distribution Platform that combines CRM with business intelligence. It is no longer a “nice to have,” in your business. It is a requirement. There is no other way to remain competitive in today’s distribution industry and with competition from all fronts such as new competitor branches, online sales, manufacturers selling direct and more.

This platform puts sales leaders in control of their plan and their destiny. Self-service data analytics gives your sales employees the information they need, when they need it, in easy to create visualizations. SMP is also tightly integrated to the leading distribution software ERP systems, giving you a central repository of your most important organization.

Here are some examples of how SMP, The New Distribution Platform supports your sales leaders:

Sales Management Dashboards

Because SMP’s data visualization tools are so easy to use, your sales leaders can create their own dashboards to monitor important KPIs like revenue, margins, product line analysis, and other important details. You can analyze on the fly by multiple dimensions like margin by rep, revenue by product line, trending sales averages and more.

Market Analysis

Your sales and marketing leaders can analyze data by industry, region, company size and more. You can compare pipelines and forecasts against close revenues to really understand which trends and segments could benefit from more focus and investment. SMP’s data visualizations can help you drill into customer accounts to determine places to win higher share of wallet.

Pipeline Analysis

SMP can help you improve your forecasts, budgets, market planning and even expenses and AR. Sales leaders can explore team performance against goals easily, even on the fly during meetings to help coach reps through important deals and situations. It can be incredibly helpful to analyze territories, open orders, buying behaviors together as a team with easy to understand visualizations.

Customer Relationships

SMP helps you analyze your customer engagement and channels, track your call rates, notes, conversations, activity levels and more. You can easily analyze and discuss which customer are the most valuable to your organization. More knowledge of customer behaviors means that your sales activities are more focused, and especially focused on ways to add value to your customer relationships.

Product Line Analysis

With SMP, sales organizations can explore pricing, promotions, margins and sales opportunities. Your sales leaders can see which product categories are trending up or down and create new product and service scenarios to improve margins, understand demand or seasonality and identify cross-selling opportunities.