Last week I completed my exhortations on your CV data pursuit.  Now onto the second critical tranche of data you need to collect to run your annual sales team optimisation- “PV”.  Remember from installment number 1 in this series…

• PV (potential value)…for each customer and prospect, again top to bottom generate/collect the data representing each customer/prospects total through put/consumption/spend of all products/services within  the categories in which you compete and as relevant to the sales team being optimised

Similar what and how considerations apply here as we have seen with CV data.  One major difference, is that you are very unlikely to be able to access actual financial data (revenue;margin) as you may for CV data.  So the CV considerations of trading directly vs indirectly vs conditionally become irrelevant for PV.  So you will almost certainly need to negotiate the “proxy” pathway to firstly define your PV parameters and model.  And also the methodology to gather that  data.  Here are some guiding principles…

• If you can access industry/channel data
  • At individual customer/prospect level
    • “gold”
  • If you don’t have gold level data, but have the customer base and prospect pool profiled
    • Design a “weight and rate” proxy model
      • “silver”
    • If you don’t have silver level data, but have market size data
      • Create assumed shape-of-curve and brief sales team on “forced distribution”, forcing each customer onto that curve
        • “bronze”

Come back next week to see how to build your PV model as an integral PV part of running your annual sales team optimisation .