Maintain CRM with Big Data Software
Customer relationship management (CRM) incorporates the use of big data software to analyze a company’s customers, product sales, and other business processes with the primary goal of understanding and evaluating the needs and preferences of their customers. This allows companies to provide the most appropriate products at the best price that their consumers will buy. Using historical and current real time data to examine sales information, businesses can more efficiently and effectively maintain customer interactions and identify opportunities to improve relationships and ultimately impacting potential sales and profit margins.
Insight on Buyer Behavior
Data software programs are useful in gaining a superior understanding of a company’s customer base and their buying behavior. Sales analytics assesses historical transactions to discover how specific products are performing with certain categories of customers. Data can distinguish if specific products are more profitable than others or are creating losses. It also can ascertain if the price is optimal, and how it may compare to other prices for the same product in the market. It also may provide insight information regarding how products and a sales team are performing in comparison to revenue goals, market share, and profit expectations. Insight is also provided as it related to the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and advertising efforts. Once all of the data is collected and accessible, the software can generate recommendations on actions to take that may ensure appropriate pricing and support customer relationships.
“It’s absolutely CRM, you see”. Anthony Lye briefs the media on Social CRM by Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco 2009, on Flickr. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
How Software Aides in Predicting Future Sales
Software that looks at historical sales information is often effective in predicting future sales. By evaluating sales data and purchasing patterns for a specific customer or product, business decision makers may be able to forecast what sales might be and develop a favorable customer management strategy that would be most appropriate. One of the advantages of analytics software is that it can offer the opportunity to model the influence of a price change prior to committing to the change. By conducting differing scenarios, and applying different what-if variables, changes in price can be analyzed to predict their potential financial effect, allowing business owners to formulate an idea of how changes may impact future sales and consumer behavior.
Centralize Company Data to Understand Business Operations
Big data applications can coordinate data into one system providing companies with the ability to streamline company-wide operations, and enhance access to data from one resource that covers all products, business subsets, sales regions, and customer markets. Having consumer and pricing information originate from one primary source often results in prices that can be set and adjusted efficiently from a single location simultaneously. This provides more effective management of prices and enhanced accuracy of price manipulation addressing all customers with more accurate responses to market changes and volatility.
Determine Business Opportunities and Increase Sales
One advantage of data software is contributing to BI and providing support to managers by recommending strategic steps to make to create an edge over market competitors. Analytics can ascertain product assets and product liabilities in certain markets. Hidden characteristics of operations may become apparent through sales analytics that may not have been anticipated previously. Having this information gives managers the tools they need develop informed decisions regarding appropriate pricing solutions. It can support strategies to evaluate sales and profit potential and provide direction for company goals and objectives. Analyzing data may be critical in cultivating the management of customer groups and contributing to general sales growth.
Investing in the data rooted in a business can generate opportunities that may not be evident without the implementation of big data applications. Incorporating analytics to aide in evaluating data, and guiding decisions, business managers can influence their potential to create a competitive advantage, bolster effective consumer management, as well as strengthen more knowledgeable product price strategies.
Related Reading
BI in the High Tech Sector: Driving Differentiation in a Crowded Industry
