Unlocking the Power of Analyzing your Sales and Marketing Data.
Most manufacturers are only seizing a fragment of the value that analyzing sales and marketing data have to offer to the success of their business and partnerships.
Data Analysis is the process of compiling, organizing, evaluating, and drawing conclusions based on discovered patterns. In the case of manufactures, the purpose of data analysis is mostly to discover information for verifying and validating sales and marketing programs, as well as quality control.
Extracting valuable information from available sources and analyzing sales and marketing data appears complex and time-consuming. However, there’s much to be gained from .
Benefits of Analyzing Sales and Marketing Data:
- factors that have contributed to your business programs’ success or not so desirable outcomes.
- Assists in uncovering patterns that have brought about positive or negative results.
- Serves as a tool for discovering hidden insights for creating new products and improving products.
- Aids in locating and eliminating causes of errors.
- Helps with making faster and better business decisions.
- Provides a better understanding of a business’s target market
- Presents a business with an edge over their competition.
Despite all its benefits, most manufacturers are reluctant to incorporate analysis into their business’s infrastructure.
The graph below illustrates the reasons most B2B enterprises are reluctant to adopt automated channel reporting and automated data analysis system:
Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result.
Source: McKinsey Global Institute
Top challenges for manufacturers and their partners in terms of unlocking the power of automated data analysis to drive decisions
Solution
As the volume of available data increases, manufacturers face a considerable number of choices in selecting the right tools and services for collecting and analyzing their sales and marketing data.
Computer Market Research offers a suite of automated web-based channel management solutions. These solutions address the roadblocks businesses have encountered in Dun and Bradstreet’s 2017 Enterprise Analytics Study.
Here is how we are able to address your concerns:
Budget Issues:
The Dun and Bradstreet report reveals that 40% of companies that participated in the study are still using basic technology like spreadsheets for data reporting. Gross margin management (GMM) remains a time-consuming, complex and delicate process, requiring meticulous overseeing to ensure accuracy. The manual review processes of partners’ claims are still causing thousands of dollars to be erroneously credited to partners.
However, using automated tools for calculation, verification, and payout of partners claims will reduce overhead costs associated with these time-consuming manual-based processes.
The cost of adopting a data management system may not be in your budget. Nevertheless, you should consider the long-term benefits of automating the process of analyzing your sales and marketing data: lowering costs, increasing efficiency, and driving higher ROI.
Also, while an incidental overpayment may seem small, chronic overpayments can quickly become a massive hit to your company’s bottom line.
Technology Issues:
An Automated system for analyzing sales and marketing data is no longer an “arbitrary” asset. The growth in business automation has provided many companies with more ability to access real-time and accurate data. If you are planning to compete in today’s data-driven market, you are left with no options but to embrace this shift in channel data management.
Companies that participated in Dun and Bradstreet’s study handle their B2B channel data analytics need by:
- Using in-house resources to gather and understand analytics (45%)
- Using in-house resources and outside vendors’ help (39%)
- Outsourcing all their analytics initiatives (16%)
The reasons for using a 3rd party for gathering and translating the data findings into result generating strategies were:
- The internal staff does not have the bandwidth
- Need third-party analysis to support business case internally
- Level of third-party work is superior
- Fill skills gaps
- Keep up with our competitors/ industry practice
- To make sure we are on the cutting edge
- More cost-effective to outsource than fund internally
Computer Market Research’s channel management, sales, and marketing solutions are designed to give vendors an unmatched level of control without requiring IT resources. Our solutions require no software installation, no licensing, no version upgrades, and demand no maintenance costs.
Security Concerns:
Despite the apprehension some companies have about web security, many organizations continue to increase their use and deployment of web-based solutions for analyzing their sales and marketing data.
Web-based solutions offer benefits such as:
- lower software and hardware costs
- unlimited storage
- improved partnership
- increased productivity
- reduced dependability
- and enhanced analytics
At Computer Market Research we take meticulous measures so all your data is encrypted with the latest encryption technologies. Also, all connections to your data is also encrypted to prevent .
Skills Gaps:
By now you hopefully agree with the important role channel sales and marketing data play in the success of a business. However, data alone will not help you compete in the market if your business doesn’t possess the appropriate analytical skills.
At Computer Market Research, we take a result-driven approach, giving you immediate access to the ultimate in channel intelligence. We help you collect, process, and analyze all of your channel sales and marketing data using our automated platform.
Governance Process:
Outlining a business strategy before any partner acquisition is a great place to start the governance process. However, without access to data, configuring a business strategy is like maneuvering through a maze with blindfolds.
Computer Market Research offers customizable web-based solutions with the ability to run analytics data reporting based on partners’ territory, reseller, product or distributor. The reported data can then be utilized to rationalize ROI.
Data Accuracy:
Human is prone to mistakes. Approaches that rely on spreadsheets and manual data processing are inclined to provide miscalculations and misevaluations. Consequently, a manufacturer’s channel data is rarely complete and accurate enough to provide insight into the operational aspects of the channel.
Our channel management modules not only alert you of incorrect and improper data claim entries, but they also provide comprehensive audit trails to ensure complete data integrity.
Inability to show ROI:
Earlier in this blog post, a few statistics were shared on how organizations that have embraced systems for analyzing sales and marketing data are benefiting from their investment.
Therefore, In order for a company to generate revenue, the entire organization must focus on providing sales and marketing the necessary data for improvement.
Computer Market Research’s solutions provide quantifiable metrics that help manage net revenue and sales reports. In addition, our intuitive tracking system helps determine net revenue and brings visibility into indirect sales channels and identifies ROI for consumer trends as well as best performing partners and programs.
Lack of Adoption by Workforce:
All new concepts need an adjustment period. Automating an organization’s sales, marketing, and other departments’ data processing procedure is no exception. As soon as the B2B workforce recognize the importance of analyzing sales and marketing data and the ways to optimize data investments, they will have no choice, but to welcome the implementation of data into their business strategy.
Computer Market Research (CMR) understand the hesitations some members of a B2B organization may have. Therefore, we offer a testing period for our potential clients. Before any purchase, our team creates a sandbox for a client to examine the features and benefits of our automated channel management modules. The client’s team is then given a pre-agreed upon time frame to familiarize themselves with the platform and make suggestions that are then customized by CMR’s team to fit the client’s needs.
No Alignment Across Functions:
In today’s fast-paced B2b channel, organizations are looking for solutions that will help them work smarter and more efficient. The need to access information from one platform without weighing down bandwidth is a top organization priority when it comes to choosing a solution to help them with analyzing sales and marketing data.
All of Computer Market Research’s solutions allow integration with Salesforce, NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, and other ERPs. Using data integration, Computer Market Research customers are able to:
- Generate a variety of Point-of-Sale (POS) reports including:
- data verification reports
- reporting partner reports
- reseller reports
- product reports
- custom reports
- Employ a POS analysis tool to display multidimensional OLAP cubes, for example, to show sales by time frame, product, reseller or distributor.
- Gain secure, 24×7 online access to specific POS information relating to customer accounts, such as:
- how much a customer bought for a given time period,
- which distributors the reseller bought from
- which products the reseller sold.
ERP integration gives you the most current information about your channel’s activities.
Lack of Data-Driven Culture:
Let’s face it, this one is on you! But, CMR is here to help.
Business innovation demands top-level executives’ behavioral changes. Waiting for staff and resources to spearhead changes is not an ideal tactic. Keep in mind, it’s not easy to implement a new system in a workplace where your team still has to complete their daily tasks and projects. Therefore, rushing a new system implementation has never been a good idea.
As mentioned earlier, Computer Market Research will design and provide you access to a sandbox where your entire workforce has the opportunity to adapt to the coming changes to your operational systems.
Lack of an Enterprise-Wide Vision For Data Analytics:
A successful deployment of analytics in your organization can be challenging. Therefore, the first step in the transition requires top-level management to create a strategy and a roadmap on how the use of sales and marketing data can add value to the business’ operations, customer service, marketing, and sales.
The sandbox period Computer Market Research provides its potential clients has organizations rethink their thoughts on automated data analysis systems. Our platforms’ ease of navigation, automated data processing, and various reporting options, have made a contribution in an enterprise-wide data implementation.
No Alignment Between Enterprise Analytics and Line-of-Business Managers:
“Why change when we’ve managed so far and so well without a strategic approach to analyzing our sales and marketing data?”
That is probably something analytically challenged managers would say!
In some situations, a push for data governance and quality assurance are the only ways to make a cultural transformation and a budgetary expenditure for channel data analytics.
Again, Computer Market Research furnishes its potential clients with an up-front and customized sandbox which helps management see the value in using data to gain a competitive edge.
Inertia:
Well, this excuse is just sad!
Inertia will not come to your rescue when competitors have passed you on the road to success.
In today’s data-driven economy, lack of analytics use has left many companies vulnerable. Not all members of an organization need to know how to read or interpret sales and marketing data. However, team members – data-oriented or not – need to be educated on how analyzing sales and marketing data determines:
- marketing and sales project success or failure
- the allocation of resources
- product demands
- and improvement in customer service
The time period Computer Market Research gives its potential clients to familiarize themselves with a data management platform has assisted many top-executives in realizing the importance of automated data management. The reports CMR’s modules create have convinced these executives of potential ROI increase in terms of:
- cost reduction
- improved operations
- and increased revenue