It’s known that a great majority of office products dealers place a strong reliance on metrics from traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions. This includes computations from sales history, generally on a daily basis.
The valuable metrics provide a myriad of information at both the customer and company-wide level. We won’t get into specific metrics except to note it gravitates down to numbers and trends that relate to the company down to the individual customer levels including product. As dealers know this information presents itself in colorful and easy to understand graphical dashboards for users at corporate and management levels and individual salespeople as well.
A Need to Go Beyond Traditional BI
There is a need however for dealers to transcend – to Go Beyond the traditional use of BI and customer metrics and integrate this information with world class CRM & CX: (Customer Experience) systems. The result of this transcendence brings a multitude of additional benefits for many that come from the following enhancements:
Customizable BI dashboards: These come from the expanded use of high-level CRM reporting quickly converted to dashboards, bringing customer metrics to varied and more useful levels. As ERP information is integrated daily dashboard information becomes unlimited. This is unlike out of the box dashboards from traditional BI systems.
Workflow Automation: The impact of workflow automation can be staggering throughout the company. Manual tedious and time-consuming repetitive tasks are automated across multiple departments. Ongoing customer follow up across the customer journey for new and existing customers does not fall through the cracks. This is one example among many that adds to an extraordinary customer experience ongoing that greatly reduces customer churn and is instrumental in attracting new customers.
Dealer Salespeople benefit greatly here. They spend more time selling and less time on admin tasks. As an example, customer and prospect automated call and email follow up leaves salespeople for sales- building activities such as pipeline management and lead nurturing, most of which can be automated as well to help maximize new customer development.
These factors greatly enhance their CRM user adoption. Most tedious follow up and data entry is automated. It’s estimated salespeople on average spend up to two hours daily on tedious data entry and manual follow up.
Predictive Analytics: AI! insights unique to your business even with limited or incomplete CRM data taps vast external data sources to analyze factors your data doesn’t cover—and makes predictions that enable dealers to make better decisions and focus on the highest priority sales activities. A key use case here is for salespeople to receive predictability on the chances for success with ongoing leads and opportunities, and to increase their rate of success and overall deal close ratios.
Relationship Intelligence: This technology is the ultimate virtual sales assistant for salespeople. Entering a web address and or email address provides the ultimate in helping to gain customer and prospect understanding. A broad range of social, news, and business sources provides research directly into the CRM. As related above eliminating data entry frees salespeople for more selling time and provides additional factors to enhance CRM user adoption.
In summation our message encourages dealers to go beyond traditional BI and adopt a level of CRM that brings them to a use of technology with automation and use of information that is tantamount to the beginning of a digital transformation. A transformation where workflow automation assists with processes from sales and marketing to overall customer management. And where intelligence artificially helps to provide information to successfully manage customers and prospective customers through an ongoing positive customer experience.
