Cognos solutions for sales

What drives the sales pipeline and performance?

The Sales Pipeline is a critical early warning system for future opportunities and growth, and for problem areas. By defining pipeline metrics, you can monitor and manage business trends and make positive functional changes where needed.

The Sales Pipeline should also tie into production and purchasing plans. This way, operations can more effectively manage its processes, make proactive changes to production schedules and limit reactive purchases due to short-term shortages.

With the Sales Pipeline decision area, you can set planning goals and scorecarding metrics for elements such as:

• Pipeline ratio (%).
• Pipeline revenue ($).
• Sales orders and conversions (% and #).
• Canceled order count (#).
• Active and inactive customers (#).
• Inquiries ($ and #).
• New customers and lost business (# and %).

Most importantly, you can analyze these goals and metrics by a number of dimensions to find the hidden gems in the data:

• Industry.
• Billing customer.
• Time (year, quarter, month, week).
• Market segment (macro & micro).
• Brand and product line.
• Sales territory and sales channel.

Using the Sales Pipeline decision area

You set targets based on your goals and metrics in Sales Pipeline. You monitor your success by looking at how you measure up against your targets. Further, you dive into your results to find the hidden gems.

• Pipeline revenue ($): Are we maximizing revenue in some sales territories over others?
• Inquiries ($ and #): Why do only 10 percent of customer visits lead to inquiries? What would it take to increase this ratio to 20 percent?
• Lost business count (#): Why are some orders lost?