Over recent weeks I have floated the notion that most Australian B2B sales organisations struggle to profile their customer base, top to bottom, with good profiling data that can be used to assess the potential value of each customer against each other, as vital input to sales team targeting. And what so-called gold standard PV data looks like.  What silver standard looks like when gold standard is not attainable.  And what bronze standard looks like, when an organisation is ready to start the journey towards silver and gold.  Remember, as Heads –of – Sales we must attain some level of PV data across the customer base and prospect pool in order to undertake annual sales team optimisation modelling.

Bronze standard PV (Potential Value data) ….  The starting block on the journey towards silver and gold standard

Unlike gold standard, but like silver, bronze standard will require active Sales Exec and customer involvement.  However this time it will be a primary exercise because there is nil or not enough data of a silver level type to leverage (refer last week post for definitions).  For bronze standard you only need to attain or estimate market size data (either national or state level).  Then you need to apply an industry/channel/market appropriate shape-of-curve (level 4) to that data.   Then brief and engage the Sales Execs to undertake a desktop “forced distribution” exercise,  using their knowledge and intuition of each customer to allocate each customer into one of  3 defined shape-of-curve sub populations (pareto peak group; midrange group, tail end charlies) according to hard and fast sub population limits and PV size cut-offs as defined by the behind-the-scenes shape-of-curve analysis.

• Pro = becomes “best bet” when nothing else exists to support silver or gold ; great way to “start the journey” toward (PV) data continuous improvement; and facilitates the start of a data driven classification and targeting system in one simple desktop exercise; also starts disciplines of profiling and CRM
• Con = less accurate and relies to some degree on rep subjectivity; more labour intensive for reps than silver or gold…. Requiring someone with analytical skills to run shape-of-curve analyses

Naturally, call us at The Next Level on (03) 9012 7378 for help at any level……..bronze, silver or gold.