First, getting back to basics is important. This includes reviewing your sales processes from identifying prospects to caring and feeding your existing customers. Second, is building the proper data sets around your customers and consumers. Third, is deriving insights so you can better attract new customers and serve your existing ones.
While the basics include defining your sales process, how you are going to organize your sales force, and most importantly how you will compensate them. It also includes setting up the software you will use to capture information about your customers, track activity throughout the sales process, and manage customer contacts post the sales close.
Many companies have a CRM software already picked out. For Red Wing Shoe Company, we use Salesforce. com. Most CRM’s can provide a sales force work flow capability, customer activity tracking, and a case management system for customer service inquiries. However, it can be a struggle to gain adoption, have a clear picture of their customers, and access data and more importantly derive insights. A common mistake is looking to the software to solve broader underlying deficiencies. So many companies believe if they implement a CRM, their sales woes will disappear. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Like any software, you have to start with defining your business.
Sales operations functions can span from reinforcing the sales processes, to training and coaching on sales tools
With the basics defined, getting into key data sets to measure and drive your business can now be accomplished. Once you start to build out your customer profiles into your sales systems, you can start to augment that data with external sources. These sources can include Dunn and Bradstreet information, stock prices of your customers, key industry data such as the number of barrels of oil produced or the latest employment numbers. With the availability of public cloud and Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence services, you can now start to capture social sentiment about your market segment or even customers. Capturing this external information, when combined with your internal data, results in a rich data set that you can use to power your business.
Some popular software vendors, like Salesforce.com have already introduced “Intelligent” computing. Salesforce.com’s Einstein technology can start to correlate activities of a customer and recommend next best action steps to a sales rep or customer service agent. Using the external data sets listed above, a company could create correlations between market trends and customer buying habits, potentially enabling them to take advantage of an early buying trend or prepare for a pending slow down in business due to a negative sentiment analysis.
Focusing on the basics, enriching your data with external information leads to insights. Capturing that full 360 degree of your customer now allows you to derive better insights creating a refined customer segmentation. This ultimately allows a company to better personalize each interaction with their current customers and prospects. As we know and mentioned earlier in this article, the customer and consumers have more information at their finger tips and have more choices than ever on whom they do business with. Knowing as much as you can about your customers, making it easy for them to do business with you, and ensuring your sales team can react in near real time to market changes, is critical for success in today’s business environment.
