I was talking to a manager at a telemarketing company the other day and he mentioned that they had a hit rate of 8%, meaning that out of 100 calls they could book 8 meetings. He seemed very satisfied with that.
My question to him was, "why isn't it higher?" and I got stories about weather, traffic, bad music on the radio and angry wives, but when it came down to business he didn't know.
When we go to the doctor, data is used to conclude whether we are sick or need treatment.
At the mechanic, they plug the car to a computer which will reveal a log of events making it possible to diagnose and find the right solution.
Imagine that you sold that medicine which was needed, or the spare parts needed at the mechanics. Those customers would be defined as hot and relevant leads right?
I bet a cold call to them would turn out a lot better than if you knew nothing about the problems they faced today.
I experience this in my line of business which is in printer management business.
Now printers sound boring but imagine you have hundreds of printers that need to be managed. You can't do that in Excel or manually track volumes, toner replacements, etc.
But you still need the data to make important conclusions! So first step is getting access that data.
It depends on your line of business, but take a look of the data you have access to, and see how you can benefit from it. Maybe you already have a lot of data available which you can utilize with a simple import to Excel.
If you are working in office printer sales, you probably already have access to a lot of data already such as print volumes, shipped supplies and tickets received.
Next, consider working with a client score.
Why add a score? Because if 5 is the best you can give, and you have 10 clients out of 100 with the score of 5, who would you start with? ... Precisely.
With more than 20 years experience in the printing industry, I have been working in sales, doing audits, automation, designed document solutions, so I know there is a lot of data available.
The problem is to make it simple to understand and ready to be used in a busy workday.
For example, if you are an account manager within the office printing business you could score clients after:
Printer volume vs recommended volume
End-of-life
End-of-contract
A high number of critical alerts
This is an example of a 3manager dashboard showing many indicators out of the box which normally would take a lot of time to produce:
This is just to give an example, but by utilizing the data you have available, you will be able to manage your business cases much more actively.
Data doesn't lie, and when you are looking at the data together with the client, there is no doubt about the situation. Next step is what to do about it.
This is where you begin designing a new solution.
Suggested ideas to measure on for Office Printer account managers:
Printer utilization (recommended vs. actual volume)
Expenses
End-of-life
Number of critical events
By scoring your clients after those key performance indicators, you will be able to identify clients where i.e. expenses are increasing or printers are utilized in a bad way. All relevant reasons and important to react upon.
At 3manager we help office printer account managers manage printers in a data-driven way. It reduces time consumption and clarifies the needed actions.
If you like to know more about how data can help to make business projects shorter, leaner and profitable, feel free to sign up for our newsletter feel free try out 3manager for free.
Thanks for reading.
Best regards
Henrik Lundsholm
Co-founder