Industrial products maker A.W. Chesterton wanted to ratchet up sales, but its manual processes and siloed data just weren't doing the job anymore. The company didn't have a way to pull reports and analytics from 20-plus years of data on 1.5 million products that were locked away in disparate data sources in 100 countries.
"Our sales guys really didn't want to deal with complex systems, but they desperately needed information about where to find customers, where they were in their orders [and] their margins, and what they had left to sell in the month," says Tom Meier, vice president of IT.
A.W. Chesterton Tom Meier, vice president of IT, A.W. Chesterton
The company decided to use Targit Decision Suite business intelligence and analytics software to help the sales team develop a more strategic, holistic approach to decision-making. The new platform allows sales managers to identify opportunities and direct sales reps to underserved regions and industries. It also shows users their sales and margin numbers by month or quarter from any mobile device.
"The guys in the field can actually use it and really benefit from it," says Meier. "The name of the game is increasing the number of quotes to receptive customers per quarter from 30 to as many as 100" per sales rep.
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