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Business sales tips on analytics and CRM essentials from the experts at PricewaterhouseCoopers:
Knowing where your sales are coming from is important -- understanding actually where you're making your money. You often hear things like the 80-20 rule -- that 20% of your customers are generating 80% of your profits. And if that is the case, you're probably spending an awful lot of time with the other 80%, not effectively. So actually understanding which customers are profitable, which customers aren't. And a lot of businesses don't know that data very well.
Having financial information to be able to monitor what you're doing and whether it's effective will allow you to gear your sales strategy accordingly.
Understanding your sales pipeline, making sure people are following up on that pipeline, is important. If people don't follow up, there's no point in actually having a pipeline. So often, there's a whole load of companies and potential opportunities in the hopper. The difficult part is closing out on those. So making sure that people are actually focused on closing out, incentivizing sales force accordingly, will help to make sure that actually you close some of those deals.
In terms of sales tracking, and I suppose the success of going back to the origination of sales, it's actually trying to have a system that tracks it through from origination right away through to fulfilment, and then ongoing business. A lot of businesses, in terms of understanding why revenues dropped, will analyze the nature of what they're selling. And price is a key determinant at the moment. And with price comes the evaluation of margins. So I think actually businesses should look at the services they're setting, the products they're selling, down at the margin level. And think, some of this business, is it profitable business?
Sometimes it can reveal quite staggering results; it's a big contract, but you may well be losing money on it. So again, margin down to product and service levels, I think, is a key evaluation that people need to do.
There are tools around the classic CRM type systems. Which, in my experience, customers and clients and companies doesn't necessarily use to their full capabilities. So I think if you are looking to put one of these systems in, then you've got to be very committed to seeing it through and getting all the data on there and using it to its fullest extent. Because if you only partially use it, you never really get the benefit from it.
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