The next six months are all about three vital things – retaining profitable customers, maximising on any new selling opportunities and improving efficiencies whilst cutting costs.

In the current financial climate, organisations cannot afford to have missed opportunities and customers falling by the wayside due to a lack of simple business intelligence. It is imperative that companies ensure that its sales and marketing teams have up to date data and key customer buying information instantly available. By following the tips below it could help you to not only survive the recession, but even thrive during and after it:

• Focus on retaining and advising your existing customers.

It costs around six times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one. Go into each customer sales call armed with an in-depth knowledge of your customer and not only the products they are currently purchasing from you, when they last bought from you and how much they bought – but more importantly what they should be buying (link, cross, switch sell opportunities) that they are currently sourcing elsewhere. Knowing exactly what services and equipment your customers are buying from your competitors will enable you to advise them if this is something they should be looking at buying from you.

• Get to grips with a customer’s buying patterns and behaviour.
Customers are under the same pressures you are in a recession. The natural reaction is to cut spending which means their purchasing behaviour will change as they focus on non-discretionary purchases, better value products and low-cost services. It is vital that you spend more efforts and effectively use your customer data to understand customers' behaviour if you are to respond to customers with value propositions tailor-made for a recession. Just spending more time on pushing the wrong products is not going to work. Returns and rebates may also be on the increase so efficient management of credits will be imperative.

• Don’t panic and buy a complete new CRM or ERP system.
In this current climate this is a waste of money -instead look at using a bolt on software as a service to your current ERP service. These can be rented on a monthly basis with no upfront costs and you will see your return on investment through one sale!

• Maximise your time by identifying your most profitable initiatives and product lines
This is the ideal time to use your data to identify customers who are either unprofitable, or who you cannot really serve well enough to grow their profitability. In a tough climate even the top sales professionals can waste time trying only for the big sale to find out they have no budget, or servicing customers who may spend but who are no longer profitable.

phocas, specialists in Simple Business Intelligence  and sales analytics, provide an out of the box solution which enable salespeople, finance and Senior Management  to successfully identify profitable opportunities, cost reductions and ways in which the business can harvest extra value from their most profitable initiatives and product lines.

For more information on how business intelligence can help increase sales and retain customers please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.