The Challenge:

Manual Sales Planning

Like many manufacturing and food distribution companies, Company X has needed to constantly pivot, strategize, and adapt across their organization. This was especially pronounced in their sales teams, which have to be dynamic and innovative in their approach while factoring economic uncertainty with certain products and markets.

The sales director of Company X individually met with each sales team member across XX agent locations on a quarterly and annual basis across the mid-west United States. 

These meetings were primarily paper-centric with heavy reliance on reports that required grueling manual review to identify sales and productivity irregularities between the current and previous year.  

These meetings were active brainstorming sessions including in-depth discussion of:

But the time these meetings required, the room for human error, and the constant need for updated and accurate data made it difficult for the sales team to remain agile in response to changing market needs.

The Solution:

Sales Planning with IDA

IDA is an active work space to Company X during their meetings. These sessions were opportunity finders. They often identified low performing sales products that became a topic of discussion for identifying new ways to bolster sales.

For Client, multiple reports were created and printed out in preparation of these meetings by manually extracting information from different data sources including:

For example, sales team leadership identified that Product A sales are 15% in August. The upcoming holiday season would be a good opportunity to push and promote this product heavily with special promos to retailer partners. They agree to aim for an increase in 20% sales during the October and November with the hopes that it would meet Q4 goals.

Without the right data leading the way, there are still questions:

How is that 20% calculated?
How does that sales goal affect the overall revenue stream?
Will the sales promotion be effective?
How will the 20%> adjusted sales push affect the revenue stream?

This is where IDA jumps in and turns a typical sales discussion into a spectacular one.

The Results

IDA creates the big picture immediately. She eliminates the paper, the spreadsheets, and all of the reports the sales team used to pull snippets of data to cobble together a big picture.

Instead, IDA creates and extrapolates the data in real time for them, creating which translates to more data centric sales discussion and planning. She shows all crucial information all at once and has the ability to provide micro and macro reports quickly.

IDA allows Company X to easily isolate data and create opportunities for each sales team member and customer. She can even present details on the product level of sales.

Company X was able to:

Introducing IDA

IDA supports the human thought process and helps isolate possibilities and opportunities by providing instant visualization.  See the cause and effects of your sales decisions.

IDA does just that.

She allows sales teams to be dynamic and strategic with a data centric core and see instant visualizations. With IDA, sales teams are more confident in their strategies and decision making. She eliminates the guesswork of conceivable results sourced in rough calculations and allows you to see into the future, today.