“Smart data”: a generational issue?
Gilles Dallest
Perhaps it’s because I’m slowly but steadily approaching the big 60, but there is a type of comment that really gets on my nerves: when a customer – or potential customer – tells me ‘our sales teams are too traditional [read: on the older side] to manage sell-out data’.
If a salesperson truly lives up to this noble title (and as someone who went from Sales Representative to CEO, I believe they should), his/her passion is selling and they he/she thrives on getting answers to questions like: How much have I sold? What have I sold? How have I sold it? Have I sold more than last year? More than my competition? More than my colleagues…? For the salesperson, these questions are crucial. I’m not referring to the company’s total sales, but rather his/her own individual sales, where he/she channels all his/her efforts and professionalism — would it be in a single shop, a channel or for a whole region.
“Everything was simpler before…”
Well, in a way, it was, since direct delivery to shops allowed salespersons to know the exact quantities purchased. However, this method required a lot of work: manual collection of delivery notes, summing up of computer printouts, etc. And for what? All this work still resulted in a very basic level of information.
‘they are not ready for the change’ Aren’t they? Really? Today, with the availability of sell-out data, Business Intelligence tools, and smart data, we’re all just a click away from our results, goals and potential. If my 82-year-old mother can master Facebook and WhatsApp, it would be putting very little faith in the ability of sales teams to think they’re not capable of tracking and analyzing their sales with the help of well-thought-out, user-friendly and effective report.
It’s true that in order to transmit information to the teams, it must be ‘ergonomic’ and adapted to each user so that they all have easy access to the data that will enable them to sell more and better.
But if they are still not interested, well… Maybe you should be asking yourself a different question altogether about the profile of the sales team as for me, a salesperson who doesn’t care about how much he/she is selling is simply doing the wrong job!
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