A Sales Operations Dilemma and How to Solve It

Recently I supported a CRM transition for a mid-size company that is a B2B distributor of industrial equipment. The company needed to migrate its sales operations from a ten-year-old and outdated on-premise system that had been "hobbling along for the past few years."

The salespeople considered it more manual than actually helpful. Five of the seven current salespeople had stopped using and updating data gradually over the past couple of years. Like most sales organizations, there had also been turnover, and much of the company data was considered to be "stale" or "not current."

The Sales Director truly had a major problem and not a lot of extra budget but knew instinctively his team needed to replace it with something better.

One major question that became central to the new platform was, "how far back is prospect and customer data meaningful?" 

Cleaning up data is expensive in both labor hours and new software configuration, data loading, as well as updating past accounts by the salespeople. The time required and the cost were a function of how many months of historical data is desired and meaningful towards future success. 

Answering this question requires a Sales Leader with industry experience and the ability to make a judgment call based on representative data, and the ability to look forward.

Specifically, understanding the demand of current and future products and the changing mix of customers going forward is critical. Many of the products had a "pre-pandemic" and "post-pandemic" bi-modal looking distribution of sales, such as below.

Additionally, many of the previous contacts may have been part of the recent "great resignation" and pandemic-accelerated retirements. Reviewing a random sampling of past years of data, the team could easily see some of the accounts have disappeared completely or changed based on acquisitions and mergers.

"Rearview mirror" looking in terms of setting goals and performance is often used as a baseline. These reports and dashboards help us to understand and visualize where we have been. The sales director determined it is far more productive to forecast what is ahead based on recent activity and current signals.

For this reason, we decided that we would migrate only Contacts and Accounts with current year activity (most recent 12 months) and known future opportunities into the system. When prospects or former customers contacted the team, they would input the new current data, at that point, as a new account. Thus, saving hours of data migration and providing a new signal to forecast returning customer accounts. 

A sales leader’s job is to maximize the future success of their team. Contact Us to find out how a Vendux sales leader with experience and expertise in your markets can help you strike the right balance of historical data and future focus in determining the best path for your future success.