Your Action Plan for Uncovering Hidden Sales Opportunities

SMP users have many strategies at their fingertips for uncovering hidden sales opportunities and with the support of the right combination of CRM and business intelligence, these strategies can be fairly easy to implement. The key to success is action planning. You can create and log your action plans inside of SMP using activities and make sure everyone on the team has a role and knows what they’re responsible for. By tracking your results and managing your progress, you will have a proven track record on your path to continuous improvement.

Here are some ideas to get you started uncovering hidden sales opportunities.

Target Lists

It’s important to provide target lists for your salespeople. Start with some basic profiles such as title, purchase history, geography and more. Then move up to some competitive replacement campaigns or complementary product targeting. Then have your reps start using report cards to initiate conversations about new product lines and help offer quotes for more business.

Activity Assignment and Management

Activity plans can be as simple as assigning calls to a target list or as complex as a list of activities and dates that correspond to your typical sales cycle. Some distributors tie their activity plans to specific marketing activities. Others manage the activity plans by customer or customer groups. You know that nothing will fall through the cracks because your CRM system will remind you of the important activities you need to accomplish and your managers can run reports to view the activity levels of their teams.

Initiate Marketing Cover

No matter how efficient your sales people are, they’ll need marketing assistance to support them in achieving their goals. Marketing can help support with content and assets related to specific opportunities and they can also generate new leads with campaigns. As you start tracking competitive information in your CRM system, your marketing team can create campaigns that target specific competitors and their customers. Marketing can help your team be the first to market with new ideas from vendors or from the field by dynamically creating lists from your CRM and ERP data and targeting the right customers with email campaigns.

Bring in Your Vendors

Start with your top four or five vendors. Identify how much of their product you’re selling and where there are sales opportunities for their products with a group of key customers. Then, invite your vendor to the table to share the lists of customers you identified as good targets for your products. Your vendor might assist you by adding new targets to your list. When you agree on that list, you and your vendor can coordinate joint sales calls and incentives. Your vendors will be much more likely to share their time and resources with a well planned and data rich strategy and your customers will prefer to work with a distributor who has such close ties to their vendors.