Sponsor: Infor

By employing data science, sales teams can make predictions that are accurate enough to reach out to the right customers with the right messaging. To achieve this, you need two things: access to data that shows what your customers are doing across all channels, and the right methodology to analyze that data and deliver actionable recommendations.

Staying on top of all the moving pieces that accompany marketing, planning, and management can be extremely challenging—especially if you lack clear line-of-sight to staff, budgets, priorities, or time lines. Learn how you can overcome this hurdle, and provide the real-time information needed for planning and executing effective marketing programs.

Customers often make it though a majority of the buying journey themselves before ever engaging with sales. But are you providing them with great and differentiated experiences when they are not interacting with you?

Innovation and acquisitions result in more product variety, more options, and more customizations—all of which can make your products more attractive to your customers. But this variety can also be difficult for your sales reps—especially recent hires—to effectively sell. Manufacturers who sell customizable products are quickly discovering that using a configure-price-quote (CPQ) system can simplify this complexity and streamline the selling process. Read to find out more.

Read more about the 4 strategies to move beyond lean:

• Dynamically generate bills of materials and routings
• Automate the production of shop floor drawings
• Feed quote data to forecasting for a better master schedule
• Change the products and features you offer for sale dynamically.

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Every sales team needs analytics. You’re probably already tracking pipeline and performance metrics, and that’s a great start. However, if you don’t have an analytics solution in place, you lack the ability to go deeper—to gain actionable insights into your business and make the changes you need to improve results all along the sales process. Read to learn more about the data discovery process and how to gain the insights metrics won't provide.

Configure-price-quote (CPQ) software is one of the main technologies helping distributors become more competitive. An integrated, rules-based CPQ solution can provide you with an interactive visual catalog that speeds complex orders, while capturing and codifying the insights and approaches of your organization’s top salespeople.

This software can also simplify the kitting and bundling of multi-product solutions and systems, while shortening lead times, enhancing revenues, and reducing costs.

Read to find out more about the 3 ways CPQ software creates a competitive advantage:

• Simplify customer choices
• Create a standardized body of knowledge
• Diversify the business with new services

Customer relationship management (CRM) boosts both productivity and effectiveness, yet 22% of professionals don’t know what CRM is used for—and 40% still store customer data in a spreadsheet or email. Read this guide to learn the five ways that CRM can increase the productivity of your sales team.