Uncovering Sales Potential Using Database Management
Client needs:
Our client for this project was the UK sales and marketing organisation of an international manufacturing group making electromechanical products. It acts as manufacturer’s agent and distributor, both for their own products and for several complementary manufacturers. In the UK, our client utilises direct sales and distribution as channels to market. It services larger customers with its direct sales force, whilst its distributors are tasked with business expansion into the wider pervasive industrial market. The group was adopting common operational and reporting platforms. One such platform was the marketing database, that comprised some 13000 companies with approximately 18500 contacts. These contacts and companies have come from a variety of sources including exhibitions, press responses, data requests etc. Within the database are customers as well as prospects.
Database management needs:
The purpose of this project is to selectively cleanse and update information on groups of records in our client’s database. The immediate objectives were
To provide a framework in which selection could be accomplished, and
To cleanse, validate and (in some cases) augment the data fields.
The client’s parent company had decided to use a European version of the more common SIC classification used in the UK. Cleansing and augmentation therefore involved writing translation tables as well as cleansing and merging existing data with UK databases
Key outcomes:
After having cleansed segments of the client database it was in a useable condition for merging with the group data. However, an added side effect of the cleansing was our ability to help the client understand where the time, effort and results were concentrated for each of their sales regions. This was then related to geographic densities by industry type to produce a matrix by sales region of achievement into various industry sectors. This tool could then be used to not only inform sales target setting, but also to direct sales resource to where there is probable business to be taken.
The benefit to our client from using our database management skills lay not only in the data manipulation but also in using that data to direct effort where it was most likely to produce sales.
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