Empower your Public Relations team with Sales Performance Management for Public Relations

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I'm Mike DeLeonardis and I'm president of North America, at beqom. With the introduction of SPM solutions that are focused on big data, all the sudden VP of Sales have access to tools that allow them to more effectively plan, to manage, and to forecast their business in real time. If you think maybe 10–15 years back the typical VP of Sales had access to two data sets: market data, which is usually built based on survey. The challenge with survey data is it's typically answered optimistically. It's what I intended to happen or what I wanted to happen not necessarily what really happened in my business. And then the access to their empirical data was always challenged because it was always lagged. The limitation and technology would mean that you might get data 3 to 6 months late which doesn't make it actionable at that point. Today big data solutions integrated into SPM capabilities allow you to get access to aggregated data sets, so being able to benchmark yourself against your peers while also getting real-time insights into the actual behavior that's happening in the field today so you can take action. The main difference for companies today in VPs of sales that have access to big data enabled SPM solutions is that they're not locked into strategies. They can pivot real time during the course of the year as they're getting insights and getting available information, daily and monthly, and then pivot based on what they're seeing in the field and what's changing in the marketplace. The key to managing large global sales organizations is that to be able to identify variation in the field and then understand why that variation exists. That variation may be product to product, region to region, or rep to rep. It may cover everything from cost of sales to commission costs you just need a flat-out no variation in sales. One example I had a financial services client and the CFO was just absolutely baffled. He didn't understand why two regions were performing at the exact same level from a revenue perspective but one region had 40% higher cost of commission. He was unable to get access to the data and he couldn't make any actionable decisions. When we put an SPM solution in for him, he was able to target that variation and get to a root cause and ultimately the root cause was a sales manager that was getting creative for his team and putting in place creative compensation plans that were driving up the cost for the exact same result There's two key things that you're seeing that's different sales organizations today with access to big data SPM solutions. One is consistency in performance, and two is the ability to drive better performance by being able to put that information in the hands of sales reps. So, today what you're able to do is in real time push out sales results and then everyone on the team can see how they're performing against their peers and that peer effect ultimately then drives up performance across your team. You're also putting that consistent information across the entire organization so everyone's getting the same message, and they're getting them more consistent performance across the organization. One of the biggest challenges for a sales organization and for a sales rep is when they're underperforming and then finding a path to performance and path to their number. with AI capabilities and machine learning we're now able to put those prescriptive plans in front of our customers and in front of their sales reps so they then have a very detailed plan on how to get to their number, how to craft a set of opportunities and craft a deal structure that helps them get to a goal and hit their targets more consistently.