Your sales team is constantly on the go, making calls, visiting customers, and executing sales. While managing future accounts and sales, they are also trying to keep their current customers happy. Your team can easily get caught up in customer satisfaction, disregarding the net revenue associated with their efforts by forgetting the value of their own time.
Your sales team is constantly on the go, making calls, visiting customers, and executing sales. While managing future accounts and sales, they are also trying to keep their current customers happy. Your team can easily get caught up in customer satisfaction, disregarding the net revenue associated with their efforts by forgetting the value of their own time.Frequently, smaller accounts require the most work while providing the least ROI. Your job as the manager is to know when this is occurring and provide the necessary feedback to prevent it in the future.
To do this, you need to know two things:
- Who are your most profitable producers?
- Who is your sales team spending the most time with?
Who are your most profitable producers?
As a manager, you need to know which accounts are the most profitable. These are customers that typically:
- Spend the most money with you
- Give you the most “wallet share”
- Provide a good reference
- Require the least amount of effort to keep happy
Without the proper tools, tracking this information is nearly impossible, because it requires you to:
Gather reports from multiple teams on an on-going basis
Find time to digest and absorb the reports
Share the relevant information with your team
Ideally, you should have instant access to this information in real time.
Who is your sales team spending the most time with?
As a manager, you probably request weekly reports of who your agronomy/grain/feed/fuel reps are working with and the results of their activities.
Your team is most likely spending several hours every Friday putting this information together for you.
You then spend valuable time reviewing the reports and potentially suggesting new approaches for your sales people (based on the account profitability reports). This time spent creating, sharing, and reviewing reports could be better utilized by everyone.
A Better Way to Track Customer ROI
An ag co-op general manager in South Dakota is using Insight for CRM to streamline the entire process of measuring customer ROI. His team tracks activities as they happen, from their mobile device in the field or at their desk in the office.
The information automatically populates a report, without hours of effort every week. It also gives the manager quick and easy access to top customers. He can chart activities associated with each account and the revenue generated as a result.
Other teams are generating data such as the ratio of completed activities to signed contracts per merchandiser per month.
Having this information served up in a chart and instantly accessible saves these teams hours of work each week. Now they can focus their time on activities that increase revenue.
This is the kind of efficiency and relevant information that can take you and your organization into the future of agriculture.