Last week I 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.

Gold standard PV (Potential Value data)…… the holy grail of sales team productivity and targeting

Gold standard PV data requires negligible involvement of the sales team and the customers, because it draws data about your customer base from a Management or structural level level above your Sales Execs and the customers themselves.  A typical example would feature Sales management nominee(s) from your company, who would procure this PV data from wholesalers or other controlling intermediaries that sit “above” your customers.  Ideally this data will reflect the revenue and margin value of all products/services in the categories in which you compete for each and every customer………and ideally prospects too!

• Pro = high data integrity; usually quicker and easier than other options
• Con = sometimes , simply just not available

Next week, I will explore how you can obtain silver level PV data, when you can’t obtain gold standard.