Growing the Top Line
Improve your shareholder value by improving marketing, sales, and promotions
Very few organizations can save their way to market dominance. In fact, the highest returns on investment (ROI) usually come from increasing sales rather than slashing costs. That's why giving brand, marketing, and sales managers the knowledge they need to strongly impact the top line will have the greatest effect on the bottom line. Business intelligence (BI) is a great means to achieving gains in brand, sales, and promotion/marketing management
Brand and Marketing Performance Improvement
Brand and marketing managers have long been hampered by the difficulties of getting accurate sales, lift, and profit information quickly. With BI, they can get near-real time measures by account, channel/channel segment, promotion, and campaign-which they can then use to improve the effectiveness of other cycles.
Business intelligence delivers the full range of brand, portfolio, and product analyses along with the ability to ask random, ad hoc questions. With BI, you can:
- Plan the introduction of new products - while reducing inventories of the products being replaced
- Track the effectiveness of trade promotions, ad campaigns, and other marketing elements
- Use the knowledge gained to plan more effectively
And BI systems alert them whenever actual performance varies substantially from plan. So your managers can spend their time learning and improving rather than searching for data and performance variances.
Sales Performance Improvement
Business intelligence delivers a full range of sales management analyses. Some executives, after using BI, have been stunned to learn of the wide variations in profitability for different retail accounts-discovering they'd been losing money regularly on some very large accounts:
- Sales representatives can learn about customer issues before meeting with those customers, as well as know the full volume and profitability of a customer's business accounts throughout their territories. They are also alerted sales performance issues as they emerge. This way, the reps can take proactive steps to keep their best customers happy.
- Sales managers can measure the long-term value and profitability by account, account executive, channel, and a myriad of other criteria. They can easily re-apportion accounts and regions as personnel and business situations change. Additionally, managers can use BI to control customer presentations, as well as the offers made by account executives, brokers, and customer-accessed websites. BI also alerts them to performance variances before the close of the month or quarter in order to make appropriate plans.
Promotion and Campaign Performance Improvement
When selling a promotion to a retailer, sales executives fare better when they show the buyer what the full category impact of the promotion will be. Business intelligence lets them do this.
When devising promotions, many marketing and brand managers do not understand the full impact that a proposed promotion will have on other products due to cannibalization or affinity lifts. In other words, the likelihood of other products selling along with the specifically promoted product. Many also don't understand the impact in the next time period because of pantry loading-which, in this case, relates to consumers, based on erratic purchasing behavior, affecting the forecasts of promotional products in future ads and promotions.
Using BI, however, these managers can understand the facts, assess trends, and forecast the future much more accurately, continuously improving the financial performance of promotions over time.
And they can start improving the performance of groups of promotions-or entire campaigns. Top brand managers can measure how an entire marketing mix delivers the best results. By getting fast and accurate feedback on evolving marketing plans, they can optimize the mix of lower prices, including affects on other products and time periods, and higher sales for optimized total business performance.
Customer Story
TaylorMade-Adidas, one of the world's largest, global golf organizations, has increased the effectiveness and customer-knowledge excellence of its sales force using remotely accessed business intelligence.
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