Who is Impacted?
Benny, an associate on the Sales team, is responsible for managing ACME’s retailer / distributor data. It is part of their responsibility to assist in identifying and realizing ACME’s sales opportunities. Do to so, Benny relies on ACME’s reporting platform to help with their sales analysis.
What is the Business Problem?
ACME relies on their reporting platform and sales team to generate new sales leads and maximizing on existing relationships with their current customers. Having a holistic understanding of such relationships and even relationships between customers drives identifying sales opportunities, risk management, and other reporting and analytics exercises.
As a business that relies heavily on distribution channels and retailers to reach the end consumer, it is of particular importance that ACME has a strategic understanding of their relationship with customers and relationships between customers. Realizing how corporations are often related to each other helps sales realize new leads and opportunities. Apart from day-to-day interactions with their customers, ACME lacks third-party industry data to truly maximize their reporting and analytics capabilities.
Furthermore, third-party industry data may also help ACME realize and mitigate risks involving regulatory compliance across various product lines and services that ACME offers.
Current Process
In the example of understanding and maximizing customer relationships, two of ACME’s customers are subsidiaries of the same parent company. However, this is not realized by the sales team and without the third-party industry profile data, the chances of ACME realizing this relationship is minimal.
As customer data is synchronized from the CRM application to the reporting platform, information provided by the sales team is all that Benny can rely on to extract their sales analysis. Without third-party industry data available to enrich their customer data, potential sales opportunities are not realized.
Future Process
With the introduction of third-party Dun & Bradstreet data, ACME may leverage DUNS numbers to build out customer hierarchies which map newly discovered relationships between existing and prospective customers.
In the example above, BlueBox and All-Products are existing ACME customers. However, the sales team was not aware both customers belong to the same parent company, Blue Parent, Inc. Armed with this information, the sales team can negotiate bulk pricing at a discounted rate and increase their order throughput. Furthermore, ACME can aggregate BlueBox, All-Product, and Blue Parent into a single account grouping and better manage future agreements.