Sales is one of the most important departments of any company. After all, the sales department is responsible for determining how much turnover is generated at the end of the year. For this purpose, a suitable sales strategy is needed. A large lever is hidden behind sales efficiency.
Measures of sales prediction
The Corona crisis has made it clear to all of us that sales activities can work effectively despite everything. A number of measures need to be considered to achieve this. First of all, the sales resources must be re-optimized, because not every sales visit is worthwhile. Instead, the expensive visits must be focused on customers with high sales expectations.
But which customer has which sales expectation? Various predictive analytics forecasts are used for this purpose. Based on AI, they are able to forecast the sales of each individual customer and the expected values of the individual sales visits. The appropriate sales strategy emphasizes a better allocation of resources – when is a sales visit really necessary and when should the phone be picked up?
Drive each customer’s sales recommendations across all channels – what should the customer buy now at this point in time? By saving sales resources, important potentials can be conquered.
Use of the CVP and VVP
Our Customer Value- (CVP) and Visit Value Prediction (VVP) create the basis for the allocation of sales visits. While Customer Value Prediction forecasts the expected sales of a customer for a specific product group, Visit Value Prediction predicts the expected sales of a visit per customer. On the one hand, this allows the general customer potential for the next period to be evaluated and, on the other hand, visit and tour planning can be optimized by sales allocation.
Optimization of the contribution margin through the visit prediction
Many sales employees claim that in retrospect they are always smarter about which customers a sales visit was worthwhile. But the Visit Value Prediction we have developed is able to predict in advance which 70% of sales activities will be completely inefficient. These inefficient sales activities do not lead to sales, as they are associated with a negative contribution margin. Visit Value Prediction makes it clear that in the future, it will often not always be necessary to visit the same customers as in the past. The high proportion of sales resources freed up can in turn be used to acquire new customers and reactivate customers with high sales potential.
Assessing a customer
But what options are now available for assessing a customer and tailoring the service to that customer? On the one hand, there is the objective sales potential, in order to answer the question of how high a customer’s utilization is. On the other hand, the Visit Value Prediction serves as an opportunity to see which customer should be visited first next week, ranked by the top-down list that has been created. For this purpose, the Potential Prediction optimally complements the Visit Value Prediction (see figure). The combination of these two key figures enables a sensible, resource-saving and objective distribution of visit capacities.
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