Make Business Intelligence Work for Sales and Marketing

Beating out your competition usually means being able to make better decisions faster than other distributors. This requires actionable intelligence at the push of a button. Better intelligence allows you to analyze buying patterns, target new and profitable sales opportunities and make fast decisions that give you the edge in your markets. A great business intelligence tool allows your sales and marketing teams to:

• Save time gathering useful data
• Automate the generation and dissemination of that data
• Make analysis more efficient with tools like pivot tables and graphs
• Provide an easy way to put data-driven plans into action with activities

Here are some ideas for how you can use SMP to improve your sales and marketing effectiveness:

• Integrated sales analysis: Because of SMP’s tight integration to your ERP system’s data, you can combine basic sales analysis (who sold what to whom) with richer data from your back-office system (product costs, customer details, and more). This allows you to identify your most profitable customers, markets and products so that your sales team can align their strategies and resources toward opportunities that drive the most earnings growth for your company.
• Lost customer analysis: A frequent topic in many top executive meetings is customer churn. Customers are less loyal today than they were a decade ago. Customers have their own predetermined criteria for selecting their suppliers, but they probably will not share that criteria openly. Analyzing your lost customer data can help you minimize your churn rate by measuring how many customers have left, examining the reasons they left and determining the impact of lost sales on your top-line revenue. This data will allow you to create new retention strategies to reduce customer defections.
• Measure and improve mROI: Tracking Marketing Return on Investment (mROI) allows you to maximize the value of your marketing investment. By examining which markets, geographies, programs, promotions and customers drive the most revenue, you can focus your marketing spend on the most profitable activities. Unfortunately, many sales and marketing teams experience a disconnect with finance and IT teams, making analysis difficult. SMP reduces the information overload, giving clarity to your marketing teams.
• Customer segmentation: If you treat all of your customers the same, they will feel like you are not able to work with them at an individual level. Segmentation allow you to analyze objective criteria such as industry segments, geographies, company demographics and more with behavioral data such as buying patterns, marketing response rates and customer support interactions. You will gain a much deeper insight to your customers’ habits and needs, offer them highly targeted promotions, serve them better and stave off threats from competitors.