How to Tell When Your Pocket Has Been Picked

Sales Management Plus is a powerful tool that allows you to proactively manage your sales process, and monitor sales trends. With Sales Management Plus, you can be sure the business you were receiving in the past is business you’re still receiving from your customers today. Business is tough for everyone in this day and age; you want to be sure and know immediately if your pocket has been picked. Here’s how.

Keep Your Eye on the Big Picture

Sales Management Plus makes it easy to take a “big picture” look at the overall health of your business. For example, using the Business Totals subject area, a salesperson is able to quickly see all the product groups he sells to his customers – month by month. Hopefully those dollars are going up; but if they’re not, it’s better to catch it early than after it’s too late to change the trend. You can use the Business Totals subject area to hone in on what Product Levels may show declining sales, and then use other subject areas in Sales Management Plus to gain insight into exactly what those customers were buying before, but aren’t today.

Dig Deeper: Pinpoint Customers Who Are Not Buying at the Rate They Have in the Past

The Market Analysis subject area has a quick way for you to identify all customers who are not performing as well as you may like. By running a YTD vs. Prev. YTD comparison it is easy to identify those customers who are, for example, projecting to be at less than 100% of where they were last year.

What makes SMP so powerful is the ability to then select one of your product groups and run the same query, easily identifying the customers who are down in one or more of the targeted product groups that appeared to be lagging when you looked at your big picture sales. Once you have the results, its easy to see where your pocket has been picked by a competitor.

Target Concern Customers and Develop a Strategy to Win Back the Business

Now that you’ve identified these “concern” customers, save the group a ‘concern customer list” so you can watch the sales progression of these customers over the coming months.

Using Sales Management Plus’ standard reporting options, you can export the customer sales data to an Excel Pivot Table, or run one of many other reports that allow you to dig deep into the sales detail for those customers. Then you can formulate a strategy to win back the lost business. You can use your ‘concern’ customer list to ensure that business is rebounding.