I challenge any self respecting Australian B2B Head of Sales to look themselves in the mirror and say he/she would not want their full customer base profiled to include reasonably accurate PV (potential value data).  Just a quick refresher………….PV is the flipside of the CV (current value data) coin.  In most simple terms, if one of your customers buys one of yours and nine of your competitors over a period of time, then CV =1; PV = 9+1 = 10.  Ideally CV and PV should be expressed in at least revenue, but preferably margin contribution from each customer.

PV data – what is it, and how it differs from CV?

CV data is generally easier for a company to access.  If transacting directly with the customer base, it will typically come straight from the finance system.  PV, by definition, cannot be extracted from the finance system.  In well drilled, disciplined sales organisations, it can extracted from the CRM system.  Sadly, a full and reasonably accurate set of PV data across a customer base, keyed in and kept up to date in a CRM, is a relative rarity.

Why?  Again, back to my opening premise……….any Head of Sales would want it.  Great for targeting and sales planning, and for those of you well versed in sales team optimisation – a critical component.  The reason we find it missing is typically related to degree of difficulty.  Very often, gathering such a data set is difficult.  Typically requires marshalling the sales team in an on-going market intelligence exercise.

How to gather PV data

Heard the one about how to eat an elephant?  A small bite at a time.  Well this little aphorism applies to PV collation.  If you cannot gather gold standard PV data, start off by gathering silver, and set yourself up to collate gold data next year.  Or even bronze standard data, and then migrate to silver, to ultimately get to gold.

Next week, I will begin the differentiation b/w gold, silver and bronze and provide some of the why and how answers.