Are you a Business Leader with talented, hardworking commercial and IT teams, but still seeing profitability declining or growing less than you know it should?

Are your Marketing and Sales teams struggling, buried in data, but unable to get the information needed to grow your business?

Strat-Wise® can help. We work primarily with the commercial leadership of companies in a wide variety of product and service industries.

If your investment in information systems (e.g. ERP, CRM, BI) is not providing a real competitive advantage and helping your team increase market share, revenue and profit, you are not alone.

Strategic Business Leaders often find their marketing and sales teams struggling to increase profitability because their Business Intelligence is not accurate, clear or strategic; In other words it is inefficient and improperly designed to support commercial operations’ needs.

If your commercial team is frustrated by not being able to get the information they need, they probably realize that your corporate information consists mostly of internal raw data that neither has strategic meaning nor provides the immediate strategic analysis and direction necessary to grow your businesses profitably.

Do You Recognize Any of These Situations?

Your company employs highly competent IT professionals and runs sophisticated enterprise software (ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence) to support the day-to-day operation. However, folks in strategic functions cannot easily and quickly find the information they need to grow market share, revenue and profit.

Your Marketing and Sales organization feel like they are drowning in an ocean of data yet they’re thirsty for the strategic knowledge they need to grow the business. Every time someone needs a quick answer about market share, profitability or growth of a particular market, product line or customer, it takes weeks to go through the process of running the right queries, exporting them to Microsoft Excel, manually cleaning data errors, adding look-ups from other data sources, and finally creating pivot tables to find the right answers. Even worse, they have to go through the entire process over and over again every time they need a progress update, either the following week or at month-end, quarter-end or year-end for each one of the business units and markets you serve. You can’t help but ask, “Is this a good use of my marketing and sales people’s time?” Shouldn’t they be investing that time doing market research or in front of customers finding opportunities to grow the business?

You cannot instantly monitor which parts of the business are ahead of forecast and who is far behind plan and understand why. You know that the growth can vary dramatically across different business units, markets, customers, products and sales people. You need this detailed information to develop an immediate action plan to promote the growth of underperforming areas.

Your team cannot clearly visualize the business opportunity pipeline. Nobody knows whether next year’s growth will be organic, if it will come from new markets or from aggressively taking market share from your competitors and at what price.

You risk losing a major customer because your organization gives the same priority to a five thousand dollar customer as a 50 million dollar one. Outside the commercial areas, your employees cannot recognize your strategic customers— much less understand why you deem them so.

It is nearly impossible to quickly visualize the profitability of global products or develop a Key Account Strategy for global customers. This is a tedious and time consuming manual process because different companies, subsidiaries and business units use disparate and incompatible legacy systems that classify business units, markets, segments, customers and product lines differently. You know there has to be a better way to organize and automate the information so the sum of the country views makes up the regional views and their integration, in turn results in the global view–instantly.

Your sales people seek volume at the expense of profit. Actually, they don’t have a clue about how profitable their customers are across their territories. They have never seen a P&L of their own territories showing which customers and products generate profits and which ones drain cash. If you pay them a commission, shouldn’t it be based on profitable growth and not on volume or revenue?

Business Intelligence is much more than software. Business Intelligence should be a reliable, analytical process that transforms raw data into relevant, accurate and useable strategic knowledge. We use BI software to integrate your enterprise data with your market intelligence and execute this analytical process fast and effectively so your strategic teams can focus on growing your business.

Marketing and Sales folks get the information they need to increase market share, profitability and cash flow. Our electronic Strategic Analysis Toolbox™ help them:

• Immediately identify the products, customers and markets that drain cash, and visualize the reasons for poor performance and take corrective actions.
• Find segments that are extraordinarily profitable, understand the reasons behind them and design new products or services to replicate the success.
• Keep track of the competitive opportunities pipeline and monitor each competitor’s market share.
• Gain a clear understanding of how profit is generated in each sales territory and stop pursuing unprofitable volume. They will be able to see a profit & loss statement of their territories and for each individual customer and account location instantly.
• Quickly analyze the profitability of the entire product line at any point in time and eliminate low performing products accordingly.
• Monitor Product Innovation Metrics fast and regularly. It will be easy to measure the year-to-year profitability progress of new products and the product differentiation-to-commodity index.

As a result of our work, clients have reduced working capital by 42% in as little as three months and increased profitability consistently by 10% per year.

We have transformed raw data into interactive strategic analytics that our internal and external clients have used to increase profitability since 2001. We know that our record of success can work for you too.

Explore our website to find out how your strategic and commercial teams can grow your business profitably. You can learn about the kind of companies we work with and the issues they face by clicking here.

You can also visit our free resources page to see and download reports, our Corporate IQ test and other utilities. Thanks for your visit.

Bill Cabiró
Managing Director
Strat-Wise, LLC