CLIENT:
Client is a global supplier of products, systems, and services
for drive, control, and motion technologies with fourteen distinct
sales forces, each focused on their own technology group. Their
sales team includes direct sales people, distributor groups, and
a multi-level sales management hierarchy matrixed by both technology
group and geographical region.
CHALLENGE:
Client's sales rep/territory/sales management information was
stored in dozens of locations with inconsistent data structures
and display formats. In addition, many of these locations were redundant
with one another, containing different versions of essentially the
same coverage data.
Accordingly, members of the sales team and sales support groups
were often forced to rely on outdated copies of maps or reports.
This often resulted in prospects being routed to the wrong distributor,
in violation of their contracts. In some cases, prospects were even
being routed to distributors who now represented the client's competitors.
An extensive amount of sales and marketing management time was also
spent in trying to correctly maintain the redundant databases. This
often resulted in situations where incorrect information was provided
because a change was made in one location, but not in another redundant
one.
SOLUTION:
MarketSense worked with the Client to standardize, clean, and
consolidate all of this sales rep and territory information into
a centralized, web-accessible database. This database allows the
flexibility to record territory coverage by entire states, counties,
and zip code ranges and contains checks to ensure that there are
no coverage gaps or overlaps. A table was also created to link product
interests to the proper sales force.
MarketSense also built a variety of web-based tools to deliver this
data to the various business users in exactly the manner they needed
it.
RESULTS:
With this solution in place, sales rep or territory coverage
changes can now be made once and be instantly accessible to all
users.
For example, web site visitors can enter their zip code and product
interests and be presented with the name and contact information
of the distributor in their area. Sales managers can view coverage
information for their areas of responsibility and download it into
Excel or use it to prepare coverage maps.
The system has also freed up significant amounts of sales and marketing
management time and virtually eliminated situations in which customers
and prospects are directed to the wrong sales person.
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