Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales Force Analytics (SFA), customer behavior analytics, and other enterprise initiatives have a long history of under-delivering on their promises. With so much potential and so much hype, why? We believe this is because of the fundamental lack of alignment between the business needs and the data assets of organizations. Many of these initiatives are executed in silos and do not consider the strategic plans, the business processes, and the data available and needed across the organization. OK, so how can you approach sales and customer analytics differently?
To begin with, you need to understand your organization's sales continuum. We defined the sales continuum for a Fortune 50 wealth management organization like this:
This strategic and comprehensive view of the sales continuum created visibility into the sales pipeline to:
- improve sales velocity,
- increase close rate,
- manage product sales mix,
- improve visibility into and productivity of the producers' efforts,
- analyze compensation to incent actions necessary to meet goals,
- enhance producer coaching, and
- drive adoption of the CRM system.