All the things your data is telling you about buyers and sellers, sales channels, campaign performance and product success will inevitably work to define your overall sales strategy. Your data is proving to you every day what the market wants, what is changing and how you need to change with it.
The essential questions are “Who is most likely to buy?”, “What product do they want today and tomorrow?”, and “Who are the proven producers to sell to them?” A comprehensive ongoing examination of the trends in your sales data not only answers these questions but will guide you in adjusting your strategy to every significant movement in the market.
There are seven things your sales data can be telling you. The seventh is the overall wisdom gained from the first six – updated on an ongoing basis. The advisor landscape, the appetites of investors and the economic environment are always changing. Listening to what your sales data is telling you gives you the competitive advantage of understanding investors, advisors and what problems they are trying to solve.
What is your long-term sales strategy?
Your sales strategy must be based on the reality of facts on the ground. Academic theories of how to maximize sales cannot account for the changes occurring every day in the real world. Your sales data is recording these changes and contains intelligence you can be leveraging if you have the eyes to see it. You have the data but do you have what you need to bring it to life?
- Is your sales data clean, correct and compete?
- Is your firm, office and rep information validated?
- Do you have the reporting power to reveal the intelligence locked in your data?
- Do you have visualization and analytics capability?
- Is your organization able to access, organize and utilize actionable data?
- Do you prioritize a data-driven sales strategy?
Another question Is whether you intend to maximize and leverage your sales data using an in-house team or outsource to a specialized provider. The issue here is a matter of focus and economics. Data stewardship, reporting and analytics is a specialized field, the more so when focused on the asset management industry.
Experience, technology and economies of scale favor the outsourced provider. With the right provider you will save on the cost of making the most of your data, free yourself to focus on sales without the distraction managing an intricate technical process in-house and gain a valuable consultative partner able to guide you in developing, refining and modifying your process as needed.
Sales data is a gold mine. Your sales team spends time, money and energy every day assembling a set of data that, with the right tools, can give you actionable intelligence on what to do next and inform your overall sales strategy. An investment in optimizing sales data utility pays dividends in efficiency, agility and bottom line sales.
The competitive advantage goes to the one with a mastery of collecting, aggregating and acting on available data. Make the most of your sales data, a valuable resource you have already invested so much into bringing into being.
