Lets assume you fall into the 80/20 rule and find yourself amongst the majority B2B sales organisations, ie you sell your widgets or wares down a channel to an end user/consumer via a dominant player in between in the form of a wholesaler or distributor. And subsequently, you only have partial “line of sight” on your sales volume to the end user/consumer due to partial data sharing co-operation from the wholesaler/distributor. In this “usual” scenario, any data you are able to access from the middle man will highly likely be CV only ……….. not PV.

In order to execute the “backfill”, you will need to mobilise the sales team (+/- some tele-qualification resource) to profile as close to all customers (and prospects) as possible. Design and set auditable , objective profiling factors for the sales team members to “score” each of their customers when on site eg number of pupils in a school, number of staff in a retail outlet, number of beds in an aged care facility etc. The chosen factors MUST represent the best proxies for absent real PV data. Simultaneously, leverage all strong rep-customer relationships to call on a favour. Ask those very loyal customers to divulge their real PV data (revenue +/- margin). Now you should have close to a top-to-bottom set of PV proxy/profile scores for the customer base in question from the sales team profiling exercise along with a partial set of real data from the favourite customer divulge exercise. For all customers where you have both – proxy and real PV data – run statistical correlations to assess the strength of each proxy used. Narrow down the proxies to be used in the next step to those that reach a level of correlation strength and statistical significance. Mathematically convert the scores for those selected proxies to real data PV equivalent. Continue this process for all customers for which you only have PV proxy scores. Viola – now you have a derived set of revenue/margin PV for all customers – whether the data was divulged by the customer or not.

The same principle will apply for CV, although this time you may not need to ask strong relationship customers to divulge their real data. Depending on the trading dynamic of your wholesale/reseller channel partners, we usually find that some level of end customer real CV data is available to you. In some cases you may have to pay for it. Then complete the same analytical techniques as above for PV. Ok – hop to it. Nothing like real data to help direct your sales team members on which customers to visit and how often, esp when cost-of-visit when properly loaded these days can run into several hundreds of dollars a visit.