In most companies, when the summer many projects that have been in progress for months need to be closed in order to “go on holiday in peace”. There are also urgencies in the sales team to close contracts that allow them to face the summer months with greater peace of mind. At the same time, we have employees who bring their holidays forward and human teams see their response capacity reduced. There is nervousness and an accepted feeling that everyone has to run before they can reach their well-deserved summer break.
For all these reasons, it is very important to have prevented this during the previous months in order to achieve calmer, higher-quality contact with our clients.
If we bring pre-summer sales forward to the previous months, we can achieve a higher-quality sale and preferential treatment. That is why, instead of talking about urgency, let's talk about anticipation. Instead of creating haste, let's create a feeling of calm and anticipation that will help both the client and the sales team to know that we have done things well.
Logically, apart from simple anticipation, we can offer the client some kind of advantage or discount. In this way, instead of creating last-minute offers before the holidays, we can generate anticipation offers that will benefit us all. We will have closed the sale earlier than planned and we won't have to resort to last-minute offers to balance results.
Data processing, key
For all of this, the processing of the data we collect through our ERPs or sales managers. will be essential. It is all too common to have a large amount of data but little time to analyse it in a qualified way. Thanks to the KPIs from previous years, we can detect what purchasing patterns our clients have and anticipate them in order to generate a better relationship with clients.
The data will even tell us if there are clients who wait to buy at the last minute because they suspect that there will be “that pre-summer offer that they take advantage of every summer”. And the fact is that if anticipation is combined with a (real) loyalty offer, the client will be much more willing to bring forward a purchase that they would possibly make anyway after a few weeks or months.
Business intelligence
With the platform of Catalog Player, and its BI (Business Intelligence) system, we can create personalised alerts that segment our clients, that detect seasonal purchasing patterns and allow us to benefit from a better relationship with clients.
Sales management will be able to use the data and KPIs in an advanced way and in this way we can improve our numbers while we stop presenting ourselves as a company that only offers discounts when it needs to. We have to value loyalty in a real way and by anticipating the sale we will all come out winning.
