The drive for “Big Data” has created information overload. However, Big Data momentum is useless without the ability to collect, to analyze and to execute on it. More information than ever is available to digest and disseminate throughout your organization. This compounds existing problems for many companies since no plans or tools are in place to begin with. So with limited time, resources, and frozen IT budgets, it is critical to get the right level and amount of reporting to provide the front-line sales force information that will drive better actions to fuel the bottom line.
Front-line sales force tools are limited by other constraints: simple simple simple tools; limited connectivity; working in connected and in disconnected mode; quick and accurate information retrieval; and the move to mobile devices. These issues can constrain an already overloaded IT infrastructure and resources. What is the best way to disseminate this abundance of actionable information to your sales force: By email? Through a SharePoint site? Integrated into your CRM or ERP platform? or Via hard copy?
At Codarex we have over a decade of experience working with pricing, sales and marketing organizations across many industries to deliver software tools. We have developed a series of best practices regarding how to get the right information to the right user in an efficient and effective manner. We have a five-step process:
- Business Issue reviews to create requirements documents & SOW
- Map the data architecture and elements available:
- Identify the internally available data in data warehouses
- Identify existing and non-existing external data
- Determine security policy constraints
- Identify the best publication platform to display the information
- Identify the key informatics and metrics (KPIs) that the sales force can control, influence and drive customer actions like price, pricing programs, discount structures, product mix, customer mix or other metrics
- Identify the key attributes or dimensions that the sales force can affect change in the informatics
- Deploy software tools to enable the sales force
In designing and deploying software always “start with the end in mind”. Outlining the end goals at the very start of the process helps align resources and development. For example, it may be determined that certain metrics are required that currently do not have supporting data. The end result would be to create a task to start collecting the needed data as soon as possible. Furthermore, employing Agile Software Development principles will help keep the software on purpose, on time, on budget, reduce risk, and ultimately increase final user adoption rates. Software design and deployment that misses the mark is wasted time, inefficient use of resources and irresponsible use of rare capital funds.
Business Issue Documentation
Too often software projects are initiated without properly identifying, a priori, the business issues that the firm is trying to solve. It is difficult enough to reach agreement or consensus on what the business issues are without the complications of the methods and tools to solve the business problems muddying the discussions. Start by defining the current state of your business problems and identify the future state with no consideration for how to bridge the gap. Business requirements documents document the results of these types of discussions. Business requirement documents are translated into design documents that are used by developers to build the necessary tool set to solve your business issues. Business requirement documents and software design documents serve three purposes:
- Establishes the current state; identifies the future state; and itemizes the gaps to get there
- Forces inter-department teams to discuss the business issues together
- Gets multi-disciplinary and multi-department teams on the same page
The end goal is to reduce the risk of producing solutions that miss solving business issues and ultimately result in little to no adoption by users.
Data, Data, Data
Data is the single task on a project plan with the greatest variance. Donald Rumsfeld’s famous or infamous quote directly applies:
“There are known knowns;
there are known unknowns;
and there are unknown unknowns”.
Even simple data elements like cost may have multiple definitions at multiple levels, complex formulae, and disparate sources. The data may have quality issues and require cleansing. Be prepared to be flexible to include data elements that invariably will be missed on the first iteration.
Sources of data can be varied and require different connectors to retrieve it. Today most firms do employ enterprise data warehouses and central data marts but they may not contain the necessary data for sales and pricing analysis and reporting. Furthermore, the data may not present itself in relatively easy to access data warehouses. Furthermore, supporting data may exist in Excel files, flat files, and other formats that will require manual manipulations.
A proper data design document will outline data sources, data formats, connectors and ultimately help plan the resources and time required to complete the tasks.
Determine Key Informatics
There are two issues to consider for defining key informatics: metrics and publication method. The business issues that are being solved will require reporting or summarizing both historical and forward-looking metrics. However, it is important to stay focused and limit the data published in dashboards and reports. Data overload will result in over-developed software systems. Less is More! Furthermore how the data is published or presented to users can have a profound impact on its use and adoption. Focus and consider only KPIs that the sales force can control, influence and drive customer actions like price, margin, product mix, pricing programs, and discounting to name but a few.
Make sure that the data is easy to consume. Different sales organizations have different analytical capabilities, so finding the right balance of numbers, charts, and qualitative results for your team is important. Present data in a manner that simple clicks will produce results. Create scorecards that summarize customer or product information in a standard format. This will facilitate discussions and the standardized reports can be absorbed into sales toll-gate processes. Lastly, every sales representative is focused on their targets, goals and current performance level and a view into their compensation presents a compelling argument to the use the software system.
Identify Dimensions & Attributes
Identifying dimensions and attributes is separate from key informatics because key informatics answers the question of “What you want?” The dimension and attributes answer the question of “How do you want it?” You may want to include the geography dimension but only report at the city level and ignore region and territory. Dimensions and attributes slice the data to the level on which you wish to report the key informatics. The dimensions could include customer geography, product line, customer segment, marketing segment, etc. The attributes could be a specific city within a region, the customer segment revenue Leaders & Bleeders, customers who received off-contract discounting, etc.
Deploy Software Tools
The sales force will always profess that they have limited time to get the right data in their hands before meeting with their customers. Keep in mind that there is a distribution of software and analytical aptitude among your sales force. On average most users only use software to meet their minimal needs. However, there will be a group of users that are considered masters and use the data beyond its imagined use. On the hand, the bottom of the distribution will contain users that will not adopt the software for different reasons such as they:
- Believe they employ a different sales relationship paradigm with their customers
- Believe that invariably the customer and competitors drive the sales process
- Are not tech savvy or did not receive the proper level of training to use the software
- Do not understand how to embed software into their day-to-day workflows
Training and multi-touch points is the only way to ensure proper and continued usage of any software tools. Too often the training centers only on how to use the software or what we call “click training” – click here to see this dashboard or report. However, in order to truly benefit from tools, training should center on workflow cases that demonstrate how sales dashboards and reports can become part of their natural work flow whether it is for preparing for customer rotations, for face-to-face customer meetings, for monthly sales and planning meetings, or any other sales activity.
With the right planning and focus, you can deploy amazingly powerful sales tools, sales dashboards and reporting.