Cognos solutions for sales

What drives sales effectiveness and performance?

Sales Tactics focus on which sales activities and mechanics are most effective. The key is to understand what resources, activities and tools are needed to achieve targets for specific channels and accounts. This decision area focuses on two viewpoints:

• The what: Information such as time spent on research and cold calls, number of prospects available and proportion of direct to indirect sales.
• The how: Understanding how the cost and time spent on activities like pricing, promotions and free samples will drive sales.

Sales Tactics help you optimize time and resources. Your frontline Sales reps must be able to access this information to direct their efforts and learn from the success of others for better performance management.

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

• Average selling price ($).
• Direct cost ($).
• Discount (%).
• Sales calls and Sales rep days (#).
• Sales orders ($).
• Units quoted (#).

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

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

Using the Sales Tactics decision area

You set targets based on your goals and metrics in Sales Tactics. You monitor your success by looking at how you measure up against your targets. Further, you dive into your results to find these performance factors:

• Direct cost ($): What is the cost of catalog production and distribution versus sales revenue?
• Discount (%): What is the impact of discounts on revenue in a specific region? Are sales up or down?
• Sales calls (#): How much time is spent with existing customers versus new customers? How many cold and warm calls do we make?