Last week I completed my exhortations on your PiM < Position in Market > data pursuit.  Now, a useful side deviation before we come back to the fifth and final critical tranche of data you need to collect to run your annual sales team optimisation – “time : task allocation data”.  Remember from last week…

Construct a Shape-of-Curve for this market share landscape <drawing from top-to-bottom, you and your competitor’s respective market shares>…see how closely it exemplifies the classic 80/20 -> 10/10 -> 10/70.  This will show the competitive dynamic in which you play.

From your customer classification outputs – a key output from your annual sales team optimisation, you will know the precise sub-population and identities within from each class…

• Tier 1  – Loyal sub-class; star sub-class; cultivate sub-class
• Tier 2
• Cellar dwellers – who , in turn, can be sub-classed into those with enough current / potential value to warrant outbound telecalling vs those that only warrant responsive customer service

Now juxtaposing these classification outputs with your PiM outputs, if your market share position on the PiM curve places you in the top end 80/20 group, and you are in a …

• relatively steady state in terms of market share movement , then you may use a 1:1:1 ratio as your default starting position to argue the best mix of planned visit frequency to each of your Tier 1 sub-classes
  • eg monthly for each sub-class; all Tier 1s
• market share growth phase, then you may start off arguing for 1:2:2
  • eg every second month for Tier 1 Loyals; monthly for Tier 1 Stars; monthly for Tier 1 Cultivates
• market share decline phase, then you may start off arguing for 2:2:1
  • eg every month for each of T1 Loyals and T1 Stars; every second month for T1 Cultivates

All in the name of best-of-breed sales team optimisation.  Come back next week to delve into the fifth and final tranche of data you need  – current reality sales team time : task allocation.