Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

CUSTOMER-LEVEL PERFORMANCE TRACKING

This section is about how to set targets and optimize resources spent on campaigns that are already being executed or that have been executed in the past. It is a characteristic of these campaigns that you have data on all the prospects that your organization approached and on the result of the sales efforts.

Based on these results, you can make what is known as a sales funnel, which is a model where more goes in than comes out. How you describe the different stages in your sales funnel is up to your selling process and the data that you have available. The sales funnel can be used as an operational tool during the campaign by the campaign managers to monitor how well they are performing. Thus, they will, at an early stage, be able to take corrective action or change the offer or the whole setup. The sales funnel will provide your organization with valuable input on how to set targets for future campaigns. It also will provide your strategy and sales departments with insight on which market segments are relatively easy to penetrate.

The sales funnel presented in Exhibit 7.10 is an example of a telephone sales campaign seeking to acquire new customers. Similar tracking can be done on retention and sales campaigns aimed at the existing customer base. The process is divided into six steps. Since all the steps have different heights, we can at least say that they represent six different elements in the sales process that have the potential to be ...