How Good Is Your Demand Intelligence?

I was meeting with Martin, the CEO of a fortune 1000 Company.  He talked about sales productivity as a significant opportunity and an area of strategic focus for 2010.  “We have been selling this product for years. Yet, every day is ground hog’s day for our sales reps. What I mean by that is every sales call and quote request is treated as if we have never sold this product before!”.

In the B2B markets there are distinctive patterns in the product choices that customers make. It isn’t really customer intelligence as much as demand intelligence. The B2B markets are different from B2C. The average purchase value is typically larger, the frequency of the same end-customer is lower, but there are distinctive patterns in the product purchases. The purchase patterns exist by product choice combinations, customer type, vertical, usage, geographic region, price point and so on.

“I know that there are patterns in what our customers buy,” added Martin. He was previously the VP of Sales and has knowledge of what products customers buy. “We need our sales reps to have access to that intelligence so that they can be better advisors to customers and close the deal faster.  I have sat in sales meetings with a company exactly like the one we sold to 3 months ago, and watched my sales rep grill the prospect on product requirements. That hurts our sales more than anything else.”

In a recent blog, Michael Gerard from IDC wrote a very interesting article on the same topic. He mentions a story where a CIO from a $10B+ company had to continuously teach a vendor sales reps what he had purchased from them in the past. The article goes on to state that this can lead to poor credibility on the sales front lines.

There is a solution for this problem. Every company is sitting on tons of sales data. It is a wealth of data that can reveal what their customers are buying and where they are willing to spend their money. Emcien offers analytics that auto-detects the choice combinations in sales data. What are they buying? What are popular product choice combinations? What are popular choice combinations by vertical? What combinations are profitable? Which ones are not?  This is the demand intelligence that makes each day NOT be ground hog’s day!!

As a first step, it is invaluable to arm your sales reps with this intelligence so that they can be smart on every deal. In fact, every sales channel can benefit from this intelligence. Here are a few examples -

• Sales reps can use demand intelligence to be better advisors to customers, convert requests to quotes faster and recommend good choices to close the deal. Even a simple report on what is the fastest selling product choices will empower your sales reps, and drive to the bottom line.
• Your ecommerce site can use demand intelligence to quickly recommend the best products to help the customers to self-serve on and make better decisions.
• Inside sales team can use demand intelligence to quickly complete quotes and close the deal.  I was talking to an inside sales rep and he told me that his biggest challenge is quickly responding to a quote with a price.  ”We have done this so many times before,” he said. “Why does it take us to long to get a price?  We lose deals because we cannot respond fast. The first to respond with a quote locks in the deal 90% of the times, even if the price is higher. We lose deals by being slow.”
• Call centers can use demand intelligence to cross sell/up sell based on buying patterns. The turn over in call centers is high. Automating the cross/up sell with demand intelligence will dramatically improve productivity and profit.

Quoting Michael Gerard “This is only the tip of the iceberg of course.” Demand intelligence can dramatically improve your sales performance, customer satisfaction and profit margins.