Sales Data Management
To ensure fast and accurate processing of sales, sales compensation, and sales performance information and to quickly respond to business changes, companies need a way to efficiently manage all of their sales-related data.
When sales organizations lack a single data repository and robust processes to transform, cleanse, validate, and maintain data, they experience the negative consequences of inaccurate, inconsistent, incomplete, or delayed information, which limits the ability of the sales organization to execute its strategy.
Challenges
Without effective sales data management, organizations may face the following challenges:
- inefficient utilization of the data needed to drive execution of sales strategy due to constraints in data availability, accuracy, or consistency
- inconsistent data that is scattered across multiple sources and that cannot be easily collected, loaded, and integrated
- inaccurate data that is not properly validated and cleansed before it is used in compensation calculations and on reports provided to the sales force
- lack of internal controls and audit trails to meet compliance standards and requirements regarding sales performance data
- inflexible systems that fail to incorporate new data sources and changes to data to address evolving needs of the sales organization
Capabilities
To solve these sales data management challenges, companies need the ability to:
- design and build a centralized data repository that enables effective sales compensation management and execution of all supporting sales processes
- access and use all of the data needed to provide a complete and comprehensive view of performance for the sales force
- validate data, and cleanse data, and identify and resolve root causes of errors
- establish and maintain secure and auditable processes for loading data and making adjustments and exceptions to data
- quickly and easily change the structure and content of the data repository and related data processes
