Put Insight Into Sale Reps’ Hands

Being a sales rep in distribution is uniquely challenging. You’re constantly on the lookout for ways to demonstrate how your combination of products and services can meet your customers’ needs while staying on top of your sales reporting and forecasts.

A lot of distribution sales reps manage to get by on pure talent and drive. At SMP, we know you can work smarter, not just harder, if you have the right access to data and actionable analytics. When you have the right data, you grow more confident in your choices, your prioritization improves and you can spend more time planning and selling and less time guessing and reporting. All of this adds up to predictable sales growth.

For many distributors, their data still remains locked up. They don’t have the right CRM systems in place and they lack the ability to quickly create reports and dashboards that could answer simple questions or provide easy insights into new sales. Many distribution IT teams feel overburdened trying to keep up with the reporting demands of sales teams. And because many of the reports come from different sources, the data can sometimes be in conflict.

That’s why SMP is so loved by both sales and IT teams. SMP combines your ERP and distribution CRM data with powerful business intelligence tools. Data access and analysis is no longer just a “nice to have,” for your sales teams. It is a requirement for top performance. If you want to compete with the leaders in distribution, you need to put data into the hands of your sales reps, your online sales teams, your branch managers and even your vendor partners.

SMP puts data in your sale reps’ hand with self-serve analytics that allow them to create new visualizations on the fly, where and when they need them. SMP integrates to the leading business distribution ERP systems so your reps can truly get a 360-degree view of customer behavior.

Here are some examples of how SMP users are achieving more with actionable intelligence.

Data-driven Sales Management

We know that sales leaders are not necessarily data scientists or IT specialists. Data can be intimidating. That’s why SMP’s data visualizations are so easy to create and share. It’s easy for your sales team to create dashboards to monitor things like revenue, margins, product line analysis and more without enlisting the help of the IT team. You can analyze numbers on the fly and while you’re in sales meetings. This helps you follow up on sales instincts with real data. How are the most profitable customers performing in other areas such as location, product line, lines per order, frequency of orders, trending sales averages or other dimensions? SMP makes it easy to find out with just a couple of clicks.

Then, when you decide on a new course of action based on the data, SMP allows you to create plans and activities for your sales reps to follow up on directly from your data visualization. Let’s say you found 12 customers during a review meeting who haven’t made a purchase in 90 days. Simply select those customers in your chart and create 12 follow up calls for that rep in a couple of clicks.

Understanding Your Market

With SMP’s data visualizations, it’s easy for your sales teams to analyze data that was once locked up in your back office system, such as sales by industry, region, company size or other information. Pipeline and forecast reporting is easy to perform – and more importantly, data visualizations are also easier to understand and explore than static reports. You can work together with your data to better understand your regions and markets, your products depth and more.

Understand Your Pipeline

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.

Analyze 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.

Perform 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.