Are your sales people kissing more frogs than princesses?

As a sales person, you need to be hitting it off regularly with both new and existing customers.

In order to kiss more princesses than frogs, it’s important to make sure every visit counts. This means prioritising visits to outlets most likely to result in sizeable orders.  In reality though, it can be difficult to make the right selections.

Here are two ways to proactively use data to alleviate this problem and find and convert more good prospects into high value customers – and make the most of the customers you already have.

Mine Catchment Area Data
Greater understanding of the population demographics surrounding the outlets you call on opens up a rich source of targeted sales opportunities. Offering products and services that appeal to local tastes will help drive traffic to the outlets you service increasing both their and your sales – a win/win situation.

Understanding the differing catchment areas surrounding your accounts will give you a clear competitive advantage.  Armed with this information, your sales team can align product mix and pricing to promote the most appropriate and saleable items in any given area.  In addition to this, if you’re seeking new outlets to stock your products, with access to such data, you’ll know the best locations to look to achieve maximum revenue and which areas should be avoided. Indeed, having an clear idea of your customer profile to apply to both new and existing accounts will give the sales person a clearer idea on how to target the account and kiss that princess!

As well as identifying the best towns and cities, you can also gain insight into the types of centres within those towns which suit your product. And undertaking such a customer analysis exercise will also give you a steer on what attracts your type of consumer to an area (attractors) and what puts them off (detractors).  Competitor outlets can also be factored into the equation when analysing and generating such data, in order to identify the best scoring accounts and prospects. With such results, you can know where to drive visits that are most likely to lead to more successful sales calls.

Having this type of information available can lead to a significant improvement when it comes to developing successful sales strategies and/or scheduling the day-to-day activities of the sales force.

Analyse Product Combinations for Cross Selling
Whilst a company and its sales force intuitively understand products that are often sold together, spatial and statistical analysis of sales data frequently throws up additional patterns of product combinations for specific geographic areas due to the nature of the population and its demographic in the catchment areas for those outlets.

Such information is really helpful to the sales force as accounts already buying the full combination can be identified and accounts nearby targeted to take the full combination. Additionally, new prospects similar to your current customers in the vicinity can be targeted, a good selling point being that you know your products sell well in that area.

Dependent on your product, you do, of course, need to be mindful of the risk of “cannibalisation” – a new outlet taking trade from an existing one.  But with the right geo-spatial analysis of your data, it is possible to calculate an exclusion zone around existing outlets to minimise any risk of this happening, particularly in larger cities which can support multiple outlets.

These are just two of the ways your company can use data to gain a competitive advantage – and encounter less frogs and more princesses.

To see how data could be used to improve your company’s performance and efficiency contact Tech4T today on 01733 890790 or complete our enquiry form