When it comes to providing companies with a quarterly outlook on how things are, sales managers can learn quite a lot from battle-hardened, quality journalists.
Data is everything to a reporter, journalist or news agency – it is information, knowledge, factual hard numbers that speak volumes towards a crowd’s behavior, performance, thought process and more. It’s through data that true, quality reporting is done – not with guesses, vague statements, a botched Q&A interview or conjecture. Quality comes from the use of hard data.
How that Applies to Sales
When it comes to creating quality sales reports, sales managers and their teams need to look towards reporters to understand the process of collecting and transcribing data – especially the collecting part. Data is vital to a company, especially today in the world of constant information streams. As per Inc, data helps you target your customers better and discover your true audience.
For sales teams, there is no better way to gather data than through field data collection software – but finding the right field data collection provider requires knowing what you’re supposed to be looking for.
How Field Data Collection Works
Field data collection may sound like a very technical term, but taken apart, it’s a very simple technology: through a mobile data collection app, companies like 360 Field Reporting provide sales teams with the means to record, collect, and analyze sales-specific data, such as customer behavior, stock and inventory levels, demographics, worker efficiency and more. In a way, today’s businesses need to be familiar with big data. Big data, as per SAS, is the act of gathering and storing terabytes and terabytes of information for all sorts of purposes, and it’s especially important in multi-national companies.
This allows retailers and businesses alike to create a more efficient environment to help facilitate sales.
It’s also invaluable in the testing of new advertising techniques, by basically allowing companies to check whether the hard data shows proof of an increase in sales or store traffic as a result of a new poster or interior change.
Mobile data collection software exists all throughout the Internet, but quality providers are able to back up their product with explicit explanations and tutorials on data collection, a vast reputation, customer testimonials and a dedication towards quality in their services and products. Remember, reputation online is everything – as Kissmetrics put it, an important key to good reputation is online interaction, so see how transparent and communicative a potential company is.
Typically, a field reporting application will allow businesses to self-audit through pictures, documents, and generated statistics, thereby creating a suite of information to refer to when making decisions for the future of the business.
Most businesses need a quality mobile field data solution when working on-the-ground – while Internet-based businesses have countless ways to measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns and decisions, sales teams on the ground need to resort to quality reporting applications to achieve the same measure of efficiency and clear-cut data quality.
Whatever data collection software you decide to choose, however, will be your decision – in the end, it’s how you use it and act on available data that matters most.