With today’s business intelligence dashboards, end
users in every department of the organization have a more effective means of
gaining greater insight into their side of the business without having to go
back to IT or business analysts for more data. And that data in the hands of
your sales and marketing team in particular can mean huge improvements for
those departments.
Here are three ways business intelligence software can
help improve your sales and marketing efforts.
Identify and focus on higher-profit customers.
Your best customer might not actually be the one who places
the biggest order (although every sales team loves to land a “big fish”), but
rather those dependable, repeat customers who consistently place good sized
orders. With business intelligence software, you can rank your customers based
on the recency, frequency, and value of their purchases to determine exactly who
the best customers are. And once you build an accurate profile of those
most-profitable customers, you can better focus your marketing efforts to
target similar prospects.
It makes sense to seek prospective customers that have
similar attributes and to focus your customer acquisition efforts on adding
them to the fold. With a little imagination and good business
intelligence software in place, you can begin by implementing simple measures
to enable you to rank your current customers according to their relative value
to your organization. Initially, try ranking them by profit contribution alone,
then you can add more sophisticated factors later, if you choose (timely
payment, returns, complaints, etc.).
Once you’ve arranged customers from high to low value, you
can do two powerful things right off the bat. First, you can better target your
customer-acquisition initiatives by focusing your customer-acquisition efforts
around the attributes common to high-value customers. Second, you can begin to
engineer your overall customer mix by targeting high-value replacements for
low-value customers.
Increase the accuracy of sales forecasts.
Information concerning future revenue answers the questions
of ”what” you’re going to sell, “to whom” you’re going to sell it, and “when”
you will make the sale. When it’s accurate and timely, this information has
immense business value. Industry studies have found that an improvement
in forecast accuracy produces significant downstream improvements such as
perfected order fill rates, reduced inventory levels, and higher profit
margins.
By leveraging the insights provided by business intelligence
software, marketing and sales teams can improve the accuracy of their forecasts
by accommodating for seasonal demand, product promotions, slow-moving items,
causal variables, outliers and much more. The forecasting burden can be
considerably eased and the reliability of the forecast much improved when the
right information is at hand to support the underlying analysis. BI tools give
decision makers ready access to information that provides a detailed portrait
of sales history. Easy and direct access to historical sales information
supports both forecast accuracy and better, faster procurement and inventory
decisions.
Measure the effect of your marketing programs.
BI software can also help you easily plan, monitor and
assess the success of your promotional activities to see what marketing
campaigns/promotions your customer base is reacting the best too. That way,
marketing budgets can be shuffled and allocated to the more successful
campaigns that produce the best possible ROI. For instance, if Promotion A
generated $1000 in sales but cost the company $250, that program is not
actually more cost-effective than Promotion B that generated $700 in sales but
only cost $100 to run. By leveraging information from your BI system, you can
maximize the revenue returned from each advertising dollar spent. By comparing
actual to expected results by campaign, you can “market” smarter and better
identify opportunities to increase sales and growth.
According to me , effective use of business intelligence by
the sales and marketing team can lead to improved customer retention rates,
higher revenues from up-sell/cross-sell campaigns, and enhanced levels of
customer satisfaction. And at the end of the day happy customers mean more
revenue for your company.
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