Business Information

Many CEOs and CFOs have poor visibility of Marketing and Sales inputs and outputs – both from an historical and future perspective.

It is imperative that senior executives can readily and easily access quality Business Information regarding Marketing activity designed to enhance the brand and generate leads, and Sales activity and reports, plus accurate sales forecasts.

Therefore, as part of WT’s diagnostic approach, we undertake a Business Information analysis to identify aspects such as:

Quality and accuracy of Business Information regarding brand enhancement, campaign management, lead management, opportunity management, pipeline management, forecasting, etc.
Timeliness and ready availability of the Business Information, e.g. is it available 2 weeks after the end of each month or on a daily basis?
How easily accessible is the Business Information, e.g. is it only available in a report format/spreadsheet or is it readily accessible from anywhere via a secure web access?
Can the Business Information be readily “sliced and diced” to provide new insights and assist better/quicker decision making?

Scenario
The CEO of a global organisation was frustrated because they didn’t have adequate and timely visibility of future sales. Rather, at the end of each month, each sales executive summarised their sales opportunities in an Excel spreadsheet which was then aggregated into countries, regions and globally. Further, each country and regional manager would continually change the probability of each opportunity. “It was like driving forward whilst continually looking into the rear vision mirror.”

Approach
WT undertook a review of the opportunity management, pipeline management and forecast management processes as well as a review of the Marketing and Sales ICT systems. WT then re-designed and integrated these into the Marketing and Sales processes and systems. A new behavioural approach to developing the probability of Sales opportunities was designed and implemented to ensure a consistent probability input. This provided the basis for a new, more insightful and accurate Business Information/Reporting system.

Outcome
The CEO and CFO are now able to review the pipeline management and forecast management daily, based on the input of the sales personnel. They are thus able to make much better and more informed decisions. Finance was also saved considerable time by not having to undertake many re-works of forecasts. A considerable amount of “hidden cost” was also removed, because all of the global sales teams and sales managers didn’t have to be distracted at the end of the month to provide inconsistent and out-of-date forecasts.