Panorama Case Studies

Industry: Wholesale distribution and sales

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Business Challenges

This company is the leading coffee company in Romania, producing and distributing roast and ground coffee, instant and cappuccino. After entering the Romanian market in 1995, the company has already reached the top position with a market share of almost 50%, supported by intense promotional activities. However, en route to this enviable position there were significant challenges to be overcome throughout its sales and marketing organization.

No Way to Effectively Benchmark Sales Agents

The company was naturally striving to find ways to improve its sales system so agents in the field would use their time efficiently and be more effective when visiting retailers. However, this proved difficult since field sales managers were working exclusively from paper reports submitted by agents. As a result they had to spend much time and effort to see the comparative performance of agents, brands and retail customers. This made it quite difficult to identify areas where sales and distribution could be improved.

A Lack of Visibility into Sales Data

The job of the company’s Central Sales department is to examine the sales data sent in by field sales managers and use this data to anticipate trends in the market, make predictions and develop overall sales strategies. But this information was arriving through a hodge-podge of paper and Web reports, which Central Sales then had to enter into its databases. Then when planners needed a report ― comparing brands, counties, regions or one of many other possible criteria ― analysts had to request it from the IT department, since making queries to the database required advanced IT skills. This awkward situation meant that requests for reports took some time, and some cross-comparisons were simply not possible.

Marketing Lacks Timely Insight into Sales

Marketing staff also needed to see field sales data broken down in many ways by brand and geographic area to discover how well promotions were working, and plan new ones. In particular they need timely data to fine-tune campaigns in progress. But like the central sales planners, all database queries had to go through IT, reducing the agility of campaigns and hampering performance.

Unnecessary Labor and Opportunity Costs

With all database queries going through the IT department, the 20-person IT staff was spending about two-thirds of their time preparing reports for sales and marketing purposes. This represented a tremendous expenditure in personnel who should have been performing their core functions of support, maintenance and troubleshooting.

Challenge Highlights

• Field sales managers spending far too much time on paperwork when trying to benchmark performance and motivate agents
• Central sales planners can’t work effectively when waiting too long for comparative sales figures
• Marketers require more timely data to respond to sales trends and fine-tune campaigns
• Unnecessarily large IT staff wasting time performing database queries for sales and marketing

Solution

See and Compare Results

After deploying Panorama’s BI Solution, field sales managers can compare the performance of sales agents and brands across counties and through different retailers. They can also benchmark their own performance against other regions. The result: less than two months after implementation, the company had increased sales by 25%.  The IT manager who implemented the new system said, “Before Panorama we thought we were pretty good at selling, but it showed us problems we didn’t know were there.”

Enable Self-Service Access to Sales Data

By using Panorama, central sales planners and analysts can now create ― on their own, and in a few seconds ― highly guided sales reports broken down by brand, region, county or any other relevant criteria. This self-service approach to BI lets them anticipate trends in the market, make predictions and develop overall sales strategies much more effectively than they could before.

Timely Feedback on Marketing Campaigns

Similarly, by analyzing sales by region, brand or store, marketing staff can now get a near real-time view of how well campaigns are performing. This kind of rapid feedback saves manual effort and leads to more accurate and informed decision making about which programs are working, which aren’t and how to fix them. It is then possible to identify and expand successful programs, and discontinue or revamp ones that are underperforming.

IT More Efficient and Refocused on Core Duties

At Panorama’s launch, IT held workshops for sales managers, planner and marketers, teaching them how to work with the system, and prepared a handbook of how it should be used and what its capabilities were. Since then, IT professionals are now spending only about an hour a day assisting in database queries ― compared to the two-thirds of their time this task was previously consuming. This allows skilled and valuable staff to redeploy to their core areas of support, maintenance, troubleshooting and building for the future.

Solution Highlights

• Less than two months after launch, the company realized a 25% increase in sales across the company
• Field sales managers can now compare and motivate agents in the field and benchmark their own performance
• Self-service access to sales data for mangers across the company to improve efficiency and agility
• Track and improve performance of marketing campaigns with near real-time view of sales
• Realize significantly more value from operational IT staff

 

 

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