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.

 

 

 

This strategic and comprehensive view of the sales continuum created visibility into the sales pipeline to:

• improve your sales velocity,
• increase your close rate,
• manage your product sales mix,
• improve visibility into and productivity of your sales force and channels,
• analyze compensation to incent actions necessary to meet goals,
• enhance management and coaching of your sales force and channels, and
• drive adoption and utilization of you CRM system to manage your key relationships.

To focus on customer experiences, you need to define your customer experience continuum:

 

 

The value delivered by this comprehensive view of customer experiences includes:

• increase your institutional knowledge of customers across business functions and employees
• proactively upsell, cross-sell and extend current products and services to increase customer retention
• utilize CRM as the single point of managing all customer-related data
• integrate customer-facing applications with master customer data maintained in CRM
• deliver and manage customer-facing analytics and reporting based on CRM data and relationships

 

Every company has unique customer experience moments and a unique continuum of processes and systems that interact with your customers in those experience moments.  The data and information collected by these applications is a potential gold mine to increase your organization's:

• Productivity, by implementing customer-facing analytics and customer self-service portals
• Profitability, by identifying the 20% of your customers that drive your profits and using information in your customer experience moments to replicate the behaviors of your profitable customers across the other 80% of your customer base
• Predictability, by utilizing predictive analytics to influence the behaviors of your producers and your customers

 

Contact us today to begin defining your customer experience or sales continuum.