In this post we look at solving the critical business problem of managing the customer buying cycle, and how tools — simple to advanced — can help sales people support their customers. In a repeat run rate business, customers are buying many categories of products and replenishing supplies and inventory on a weekly basis. With so many transactions from customer orders that reps must contend with, it is easy to forget about the customers who are NOT ordering, who are ordering less or not ordering the core high-value products any more. While we are a predictive analytics company and have a solution to offer here, we also explore with customers and prospects who are starting out this question: What is the right fit for their needs? Here are three options in the order of features, scale and cost, with pros and cons we’ve discussed with them: SALES PROCESS SOFTWARE Primarily focuses on mechanically guiding rep actions through a rules engine: “call today … email next week … follow-up in 3 days.” Stand-alone or blends with CRM. Pros: Most simple/easy to follow, ideal for a small team within a larger sales force. Cons: Does not consider customer attributes and responses or historical sales data, and is not predictive. MARKETING …Read More
Tag Archives: buying cycle
Knowing when to call customers: It’s about time
5 ways sales can benefit from marketing automation
Marketing automation has evolved over the last decade from typically managing a single channel (direct mail or email) to facilitating multi-channel, multi-touch campaigns that are at the core of revenue performance. One valuable aspect of marketing automation tools is to nurture a lead until the prospect is ready to engage with sales. Coupled with the new reality that prospective customers do not contact the sales person until well into the decision process, marketing automation is now front and center to enabling sales to maximize the chance of winning new customers. While lead nurturing and scoring are well-documented uses of marketing automation, we focus here on a few tactical examples of further leveraging marketing automation tools by adding data and analytic capabilities to benefit the sales teams. You can use analytics in marketing automation to: 1. Estimate an early outcome: Early in the sales process, look at pivotal needs that leads and customers might be searching for, and what critical paths they might take within your organization. You can develop and use analytic models to predict what path the prospect is most likely to take. For example, you might be interested to predict that prospects would be likely to ”buy 50+ units” or want to talk about …Read More
Customer Retention: It’s not too late to catch that pass
I was rooting for our hometown Chicago Bears team in the NFC championship game last Sunday night. Guess that didn’t work out so well. We learned the value of backups aka deep bench, but it wasn’t enough to save the game. I watched the game while working on a customer retention project, so I couldn’t help but see parallels between retaining a transactional customer and the wide receiver catching the ball on the deep passes. After a customer places an order, the customer is like the ball out of the QB’s hands as it soars above the field to its intended destination. But as the saying goes, “When you throw a ball, three things can happen and two of them are bad.” Here is where the customer correlation comes in. Just like the ball must come back to earth, the customer must buy again. On the bad side: your competition intercepts (gets the order at the right time) or you did not anticipate and get to the position at the right time or simply fumbled (did not make proactive calls or relevant upsell/cross-sell offers). Why? Other priorities can get in the way or there is poor communication between teams, systems or processes. The result is the ball gets dropped, literally and figuratively. …Read More
Great Fruit Salad or just Apples and Oranges? A recipe for managing customers and prospects
Sales organizations – particularly inside sales — choose between reps managing only customers, only prospecting, or having both in their portfolio mix. This happens for a lot of reasons, such as geography, industry and product specialization of the rep or even workload and efficiency considerations. While customers are often measured by trailing twelve month sales, prospects are all about future revenue. So which prospects does a rep focus on, and how can sales reps allocate time that yields the best future gains from both prospects and customers? There are several simple ways you can guide sales reps towards managing their time to call these diverse customers. Rotate based on value: Set up a pattern where the reps are calling out from low to high value, of course where the current low value customers are prioritized through scoring. For every hour, allocate 15 minutes for low value customers and prospects, 15 minutes for high value prospects and 30 minutes for high value customers. Something like this should help them work across the entire portfolio every 60 minutes: Standardize on future value only: Using modeling and predictive methods, create a future value index for both customers and prospects. You do not have to predict an exact number. Even …Read More