Best Practice Solutions for Distributors

Using Data to Drive Sales Effectiveness

Using Data to Drive Sales Effectiveness

Your data is your sales team’s biggest asset. Ready to arm them with insights that will not only fuel their performance but also help them excel in their roles? Let’s go.
Get Sales the Data Visibility They Need

Your first step is to seamlessly blend your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system into Salesforce. This ensures your team can access any and all relevant data without breaking a sweat.

Integrate Your ERP to Pull In Useful Data
  • Customer Accounts: Start with pulling in customer account data. This allows you to understand your customers like never before, providing insight into their behaviors and preferences to drive personalized selling.
  • Quotes: Keep track of all quotes by account, including the full history and quotes that are currently open. Use this data to give your sales team an edge, allowing them to follow up on customer discussions and proactively engage customers to fill their pipeline.

  • Orders: Feed your sales team the critical data they’re hungry for, from order increases and decreases to entirely new product opportunities.

  • Shipments: Get visibility into what has left your dock and the status of each shipment to manage expectations and communicate effectively with customers.
Surface Proactive Insights to Guide Sales

Keep tabs on trends to give your sales efforts better direction. Enable reps to track sales at the account and territory level against plan to gain insight into individual and overall performance month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year. Surfacing these trends has two major benefits:

  • Like a friendly heads-up, these trends can highlight accounts at risk of churn, enabling reps to take proactive measures.

  • Reps can use the trends to spot product categories that need attention OR those that present new opportunities but are buried within the overall numbers.

Empower Sales to Minimize Your Collections Risk

Avoid surprises and preserve strong customer relationships by giving your sales team a summary of accounts receivable status by account, along with credit limits. This can help reps get in front of customers who are overdue and avoid an unpleasant call from your credit department, boosting loyalty, goodwill, and long-term sales.

Expose “White Space” to Grow Revenue

Do you know what your customers are buying from competitors but should be buying from you? Use data and intelligence to surface complementary and supplementary products that your customers could be buying from you, but aren’t. Which product categories or sub-categories represent the best sales growth opportunities? This “white space” is a goldmine waiting to be tapped — time to dig in.

Foster Cross-Collaboration

Data visibility isn’t just for the sales team. Integrating and sharing customer data enhances collaboration and efficiency across your organization. Reduce Service calls by empowering Sales with the data they need to answer customer questions. Share this data with Service reps to make handling customer inquiries easier, faster, and more proactive. Marketing can also use sales data to create targeted campaigns to re-energize dark accounts or promote specific product categories.

Boost Sales Efficiency With Salesforce

Now that you have a strategy in mind, here are the best Salesforce products that can help you make this vision a reality.

Manufacturing Cloud: Enhance your forecasting capabilities, minimize stockouts, and improve business visibility.

MuleSoft: Connect apps, data, and devices, driving your business towards greater efficiency.

CRM Analytics: Use data analysis and visualization to make informed decisions and create effective strategies.

By integrating departments and fostering a no-silo approach, you create an environment of digital transformation. A smooth, data-driven sales process doesn’t just enhance your sales team’s performance — it’s a game-changer for your entire business.

Transformation starts here