CRM - January 2009 - (Page 41)

nalytics and business intelligence have long been major topics in CRM. These dicers and slicers of data help with the here and now, but also enable reps to expand beyond the immediate tactical needs of the current sale to see older trends and future predictions. “Imagine it’s Q4,” Dickie says. “You and your department are below plan, and you need business that will close in three months or less.” Many organizations would offer double commissions on deals that close in Q4, but that doesn’t really help anybody sell—it just rewards those who do, and might even promote slow selling if your team comes to expect those bonus commissions. Analytics can help here. “Mine your own catalog to see what products have a threemonth sales cycle,” Dickie suggests. “Then narrow those down by what has a 70 percent or greater close rate.” Continue to narrow down the choices until you have a list of options to concentrate on selling. If there aren’t enough products when you’re done, head back to the catalog with a new set of parameters. That’s just one limited example of how analytical tools can help the sales team. Another possibility is to see what you know about “soft” data, such as an analysis of the people at the other end of the deal. “Sometimes you have to find other approaches to make the sale,” Dickie says. “If you sell to hospitals and the purchasing department hates the product, but nursing loves it—sell to nursing and let them pressure purchasing for you.” It’s a smart tactic, but one that would be overlooked without some kind of report on the facts. “Mine your existing customer base,” says Vinay Iyer, vice president of CRM marketing at SAP.“Identify happy customers and have an understanding of which are the most attractive for follow-up.” Knowing which customers pay on time and which are habitually 90 days late can be a powerful piece of info.“You can do a lot of smart things once you have insight,” he says. SAP’s Rothschild says that without analytics of some kind, salespeople might see little difference between a happy customer who purchases 500 widgets and a difficult one who demands a lot of attention before purchasing 1,000 widgets and returning half of them. Many of the tools for sales analytics fall into the category of pipeline management. “Pipeline management can be Big Brother, or it can be collaborative,” Rothschild says. It all depends on how the information is presented to the sales team—and how it’s used.“[Analytics] can help prioritize tasks based on likelihood or profitability [and can] identify stalls or other changes in the process,” Rothschild says. “Predictive THE ANALYTICAL analytics lets you compare new prospects to other customers.” Iyer adds that a good analytics tool looks into your company as well as out at your customers. “‘What’s available for me to sell? What’s sitting with my partners?’” he asks, rhetorically. “Visibility into the supply chain can be very important to the sales process.” That sort of sales ammunition doesn’t have to be loaded by hand, either; it can be automated as part of the sales process. “We can set business rules for automatic follow-up on these issues—we call it the account fact sheet,” Rothschild says. “Open orders, payment history, service/support history, etc.— we autocreate a PDF for the salesperson with all the details. You have complete visibility before you walk in the door.” “Information is there, but not always in a form that’s useful,” says Ray Taylor, senior vice president of sales for Signature Worldwide, an international marketing and training company specializing in developing long-term customer relationships. To get its Salesforce.com CRM info into a useful form, Signature enhanced its setup with Cloud 9 Analytics. “Every Sunday night I get a report telling me what happened with the pipeline,” Taylor says. “I can query it for how many deals in the pipeline are at the proposal stage, see who’s involved, and keep digging until I know what I need to know.” Despite the number of options at his disposal, Taylor finds it a focused way of working. “Drill-down doesn’t make you get lost in data, clicking away.” Given Signature’s distributed sales force—“60 percent of my team isn’t local,” he says—it’s important to have tools that allow universal access. “The opportunity…with a remote sales force is very powerful,” he says, adding that the benefits aren’t solely a matter of oversight—analytics helps keep the team together. “I open [the pipeline report] and look it over while having a discussion with the team,”he says.“We ask questions, and it inspires storytelling and conversations. ‘What’s Mike doing that generated $3 million?’ is a conversation that we all want to have.” CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2009 “MINE YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMER BASE…. YOU CAN DO A LOT OF SMART THINGS ONCE YOU HAVE INSIGHT.” www.destinationCRM.com analytical 41 http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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