Improving sales in the long run

If the forces acting on your market have affected demand for your product and services
the only reasonable solution is to find a new market.

This is not an easy task, considered that our company would have a strong liability
made of its existing technological capability, organizational structure and localization preferences.

Finding a market that matches these liabilities is tough enough when you have time and resources.

I experienced this first hand when I helped a nice SMB serving the Power Generation industry few years ago.
It took a few years to move the bow of this company to the new Aerospace market.
The organization had to accept the unavoidable destiny if keep doing the same things,
and dive different scenarios untill a plausable new route was identified.
It required a change of perspective and we were fortunate enough to make it.

When you do not have the luxury of time and resources,
a way to explore possible new trajectories in a systematic way,
may be the use of latest NPL (Natural Language Processing) technologies.

What NLP software does is basically build a bridge between the set of documents recording your know-how,
and a different set of documents, linked to new industries and markets.

This is something that you cannot achieve just searching for good ideas with Google,
or bringing in your industry experts: You would end up steering the same old stuff.

NLP frees up you from the chains of your domain of competences
and flyes you over the fences, to make you land on unchartered territories.

Not all the NLP softwares can help a high-tech company do this.
You need an NLP software specialized in reading and connecting engineering documentation.

I have used the services of ErreQuadro - cognitive engines
to search the Oil & Gas industry and connect it with the latest AI and Machine Learning developments
and the hints I collected have been presented to ANIMP association in their latest annual meeting.

Improving sales in the short run

If you can't count on quantity anymore, you have to improve quality.

In sales this means improve your ability to:

• Qualify the deals in your hands
• Support your sales process

Qualifying the deal

allows you to concentrate your best resources on your best opportunities
in order to improve won/lost ratio and maximize price.

A simple tool to gouge the quality of a deal are the price curves.
If you are able to find a price driver that allows you to see your next deal in comparison with other deals, quick and easy: assigning the right priority becomes routine.

The simplest form of a price driver for industrial products could be
something as simple as Price per Kilograms,
or require a bit of math to identify the right one, with a Principal Components Analysis.

If you need a hand in this type of analysis, our sister company CRAZYDATA
is ready to help.

Supporting your sales process

is about monitoring your portfolio of opportunities.

Unfortunately most of the CRMs offer a view of the deals in portfolio
that is suiting only the CFO of the Company.

The portfolio is reduced at an aggregate number
and very few is left to represent the intense dynamic
of a real selling process.

This CRM dashboard it is a good example of what I mean:
a representation good for a quarterly meeting
but of no use for a day to day Sales manager job.

A better tool is for example the one I recently developed with CRAZYDATA,
for an industrial SMB, whose Sales Director can now drill down or filter
the deals portfolio in just few clicks.

The visualization of the portfolio gets rid of bars and lines
and takes advantage of a more readable bubble chart.

Each deal has its individual representation,
and labeled according to special criteria in terms of
importance, risk, status, advancement, etc.

if you need a hand to develop a similar CRM dashboard, just let me know.