What do Sales Man Do?
They try to profile their customers. They believe they need to learn about what the customer does what he likes what hobbies he has. Or more granular, what has the customer bought in the past. I remember the Swimming with Sharks by McKay. He has a hundred item profile list of to get to know his customers or to get to know Jack.
What do Sales Men need to know?
The need to know a concept of like minded peers. That people will behave the same way or in similar fashion to people that have recently bought from you. The current context of the prospect is the most important data to get. Current needs and current context. This can be learned by asking and by evaluating data that is current not past data.
Many companies, manufacturing representatives in particular, try to plan by looking at order data or commission reports. The revenue statement will not direct you to current business. Only real time sales prospect data or business pipeline data will bring consumable buying data.
You Do Not Have to Know Jack
This is logical. This is real simple. The rear view mirror view does not direct you to the office every day or to home when day is done. The POS statement should not direct or solely direct strategy for any sales organization. Feedback from prospects or review from the most recent buyers of your products or services are the path to strategy and to sales growth.
How do you Track Emergent Behaviors?
If you are an etailer, you can add algorithms to your site to measure engagement. Link, entry trails, queries, mouse movement, exit trails, time on page and more. Virtual bookmarks or a behavioral finger prints can be created to be analyzed if you have a web site and have traffic. Way cool.
If you are a direct salesman, observe. Learn the environment. Get to the context of the engagement. People are way to busy to engage with you unless there is context data or a reason to engage. One observation may be noise. Several engagements observed and which create context shows affinity and like peer behavior.
Forecast Data can Show Emergent Behavior
Accurate sales pipeline information cam be had using the right sales tool. A sales software that can get near realtime data from directs and in-directs sales. CRM, salesforce.com, ms crm, even our product Dataforcecrm crash into the wall. There is no easy and reasonable way to get data from channels. Too expensive and too training intensive. DataForceCRM, being FREE software comes close but still user training is high.
Revolutionary software like onlinesalessoftware.net easily get sales data from in directs. Hundreds of in direct salespeople can collaborate using simple, light on line sales software and a tool called LeadNET. Data can drive lead generation, new products, new tactics and new sales. This is emergent behavior. Here is just one example where accurate sales data can drive strategy. I sell four products, case erectors, sealers, labellers and wrappers. My forecast for Q4 looks like this:
* Case erectors 800000USD
* Labellers 780000USD
* Printers 23000USD
* Sealers 42000USD
This may tell me, by the way this company sells only through distributors, that salesmen are Printer and Sealer stupid and unable to sell these products. More likely, since even a dummy can sell something sometimes, the products have issues. With this data I can determine what the issue may be. I can find out why the 2 other products with are supposed to be linked to the leading products are not performing. Here are some tactics:
* Increase laggard product sales data flow to sales teams.
* Do competitive analysis to detect laggard product weaknesses.
* Train sales qualification techniques.
* Or…. focus on the most popular products and own this space.
