Salespeople usually don’t have the best reputations and, as a salesperson, I can admit that we often deserve this lack of respect. For the most part, we’re motivated to make as much money with as little work as possible. I personally have a hard time finding any flaws with this philosophy and very proud of my single-digit golf handicap :).
But seriously, why spend a lot of time creating reports and analysis when you could be spending your valuable time selling your products (or golfing). This is why I’m such a huge fan of our new Dashboard which allows me to create the one report I need to understand what my competition is up to and have it sent to me whenever something changes.
For example, if I work for a large TV manufacturer and responsible for driving revenue through Best Buy, I need to know any time a competitor places a product there, reduces a price, runs a promotion, etc. In other words, I need to know anything that could affect the sales of my products. gap intelligence does a great job of providing this data but, in the past, I would need to:
1) Open our Data Center
2) Download our TV Pricing and Promotions Report
3) Filter for Best Buy
4) Filter for Net Price
5) Filter for no-blanks in the most recent week
Going through these 5 steps certainly isn’t the end of the world, but I would need to do the same thing every week to see what has changed since the previous week. Given our nature, this isn’t something most salespeople are motivated to do every Monday… Fortunately, thanks to our new Dashboard, I now only need to:
1) Open my report
This is something most of us can handle! All I need to do is create the report I want (e.g., show net prices for all TVs at Best Buy), and our super-smart system will automatically refresh my report AND send it to my inbox every week when the latest pricing and promotions data has been published. The screen shots below illustrate how this is done but, if you’d like some help, send an email to info@gapintelligence.com and we’ll create the report for you.
