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. And what so-called gold standard PV data looks like.  But sometimes this level of PV data is simply not available.  What do you do then?  Give up on it?  No way.  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.

Silver standard PV (Potential Value data) ….  The next best thing when gold standard PV is simply not available

Unlike gold standard, silver level will require active Sales Exec and customer involvement, but set up as an exercise that requires nothing more than best practices input from the Sales Execs in doing the job of Account and Customer Relationship Management.  In other words, this  exercise leverages best practice profiling and account management disciplines that should already be in place and on-going , eg Sales Execs operate to a reasonably well drilled and up to date customer profiling system from which data elements are accessed to feed PV proxy or $ estimates.

• Pro = becomes “best bet” when gold not attainable
• Con = usually not as accurate in terms of data integrity as gold; and usually not as quick and easy

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