QlikView In Action:

Turning Sales Staff into Their Own Analysts

CITO ResearchTell Us a Question.

OCTOBER 2010

Sponsored by QlikView

Contents

Introduction 1

TheData-drivenSalesProcess 1

TheDifficultieswithBI 2

EndUserDataAnalysiswithQlikView 3

QlikView’sImpact&Benefits 7

1QlikView in Action:Turning Sales Staff into Their Own Analysts

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IntroductionThe life of a sales professional is a never-ending exercise in time management. Using time efficiently and knowing where to spend time is key to success. Every day is a sequence of meetings. To maintain a competitive edge, it is vital to know as much about each client as possible.

In this brief paper, CITO Research identifies a transition taking place in sales organi-zations that is helping sales staff arrive at meetings with a superior level of knowl-edge about each customer. Using the pharmaceutical industry’s sales process as an example, this paper examines the transformation of business intelligence and how sales professionals are empowered to explore data and ask and answer their own questions.

TheData-drivenSalesProcessCompanies in the pharmaceutical industry use a variety of business models. Some do their own research and development while others prefer to license promising new treatments from other firms and shepherd them through approvals by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to bring them to market under their own brands.

But one thing the pharmaceutical industry as a whole has in common is that data from the channel is unavailable. Who bought your products? How much did they buy? This data cannot be acquired directly because of the way the industry works.

Instead, the sales model is indirect. Sales reps are constantly in the field visiting hos-pitals, educating doctors, and distributing samples. Doctors then write prescriptions, but the orders are fulfilled by pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens and those trans-actions are hidden from the pharmaceutical companies. To compensate for the lack of a purchase order, companies buy prescription sales data from third-party vendors. The information then becomes the basis for all of a pharmaceutical company’s sales and marketing efforts: what is the market potential of a new drug? What niche does it fill? How much is it worth? What should the sales approach be?

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TheDifficultieswithBIWhile the way that data about sales to specific customers is acquired varies by industry, such data always plays a central role in the sales process. But as this story from the pharmaceutical industry shows, the path that data takes from the source to the sales staff is not a smooth one.

Several years ago, one mid-sized pharmaceutical company migrated its business in-telligence environment to SAP Business Intelligence (BI) to better manage the billions of sales records provided weekly by third parties. While SAP BI was up to the challenge of sifting through very robust data in its data warehouse, its analysis and presentation capabilities fell short. The same problems are also found in BI systems from Oracle, IBM, and other vendors who focus on creating mega-data warehouses.

Asking simple questions required constructing elaborate queries beyond the ken of the average salesperson, who often resorted to cutting and pasting spreadsheet cells by hand. SAP did its best to address this with the introduction of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator—a tool that loads data into memory for deeper anal-ysis—but the company still found it too slow, too cumbersome, too inflexible, and too in need of heavy-duty maintenance to be useful. It failed to meet the company’s most pressing need: to put business intelligence insights into the hands of its sales force.

At this point, the company searched for a lightweight analytical tool for its sales reps, who already carried tablets with them in the field. They needed an application that could quickly and easily navigate through sales activity and a doctor’s or hospital’s profile in the moments before each of the many daily sales calls. The application had to be distributable across potentially thousands of devices and work just as well offline as on. The BI systems mentioned earlier wouldn’t do. It was then that the com-pany—after a bakeoff involving a dozen such tools—discovered QlikView, which is now being used by more than 3,000 employees. No longer passive consumers of data in the form of spreadsheets and reports, “the tool converts a salesperson into an analyst because it’s so easy to navigate,” in the words of the company’s director of business intelligence.

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Figure 1: QlikView Provides Sales Representatives with Information for Each Meeting

EndUserDataAnalysiswithQlikViewQlikView has since been deployed across the tablets and laptops of some 3,000 employees, including the entire sales force. As shown in Figure 1, information is not locked in a central data warehouse that must be accessed to answer questions. Relevant segments of the data warehouse and its billions of records are regularly synchronized with the central server and accessed offline as necessary. Sales reps use “tools”—custom QlikView applications—with seven or eight tabbed interfaces, each tab describing a specific analytical approach or data set.

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Figure 2. Sales Reps Become Their Own Analysts Using QlikView

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One tab contains an overview of all the rep’s activities in his territory, including the results of his sales calls, along with the products he sells and his customers—all at a high-level view comparable to traditional key performance indicators and dash-boards. The second tab contains a detailed analysis of the same data, while the next includes an analysis of the company’s products against the competition. A fourth analyzes it by doctors and their specialties, and so on.

Each tool has a complete set of analytical capabilities tailored to a salesperson, marketer, or manager, cross-referenced with their exact role and their respective territory. With QlikView, business intelligence has evolved from a stack of reports and spreadsheets to a tool allowing anyone to ask questions about relevant information; in the context they need right now. Following the pattern shown in Figure 2, sales reps have become their own analysts.

What questions do sales reps ask? “What drug is selling most in this region?” or “How are the buying patterns of the doctor I am about to meet different from his peers?” The data is shown by product, by share of the market, and by individual doctor, ren-dered quickly in graph form. It used to take a sales rep 15 minutes to figure this out by comparing reports; by checking boxes in QlikView, it takes less than one minute. Sales reps can then ask “I know our marketing approach is working with most products at a specific hospital, but why isn’t the approach working with the low performers?” From there they can drill down on a product-by-product basis in their territory. Or they can pull back and ask questions such as “My territory is successful overall, but why am I doing poorly in this region?” Or “which doctors, arranged by specialty, am I selling well to? Who are my highest producing doctors, and am I paying them enough atten-tion? What is the cause-and-effect of my sales calls and the resulting sales? If I call on them five times, what’s the result? Ten times?” Using QlikView, sales reps ask and an-swer many questions like these before visiting a customer. Figure 3 shows the kind of questions that may result from a pre-sales call analysis.

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Figure 3. Questions Sales Reps Ask Before a Sales Call

Training the sales reps to ask questions of the data was easier than expected. Instead of relying on professional trainers, the business intelligence team began by training a select group of sales managers, who in turn trained their own teams using their own data. Rather than teach sales reps how to use the software, their managers taught them how to think with it—how to unlock the insights hiding in the data. The ease-of-use, the instant understanding of how to get answers, ask more questions, and get more answers meant that adoption was pulled by the desire of the sales staff to get better information, not pushed by corporate policy.

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QlikView’sImpact&BenefitsThis story of transformation is being told in many other industries and job special-ties. After initial uptake by the sales force proved successful, the company distributed QlikView to 3,000 users in marketing and supply and distribution, each receiving his or her own segmented slice of data. Marketers are using it to tailor their tactics for a specific product or audience—a set of managed care organizations, for instance. They can analyze billions of records before making those decisions, thus easing their search for new opportunities. This was never possible with Big BI—which is too inflexible to be distributed so freely—or with Excel, which possesses similar capabilities (if you know how to tap them) but isn’t intuitive enough for most users.

But as a result of using QlikView, the company has seen a dramatic uptake in data consumption by the sales force. Whereas before many sales reps wouldn’t download the latest BI reports because of the time and effort, QlikView’s ease-of-use encour-aged them to incorporate more data into their sales calls and decision-making. “We converted nonbelievers into believers almost instantly with this tool,” says the director of BI.

Another benefit is the hunt for opportunities. Sales reps who once claimed with the utmost confidence “I know my customer” began asking themselves, “Do I know my customer, or am I making assumptions because I think I do?” The sudden availability and ease of access to data has led them to question their tactics and assumptions, spurring them to look for efficiencies and opportunities they would otherwise have missed.

A third benefit is time saved. In pharmaceutical sales, more visits invariably add up to more sales. The less time sales reps spend preparing for a sales call by reading reports and analyzing data by hand, the more time they have for meeting new customers or cultivating existing customers.

And that’s just in sales. “Everywhere else, it’s an eye-opener because the graphics, numbers, drilling down, and analysis show us pieces of information that weren’t known before,” says the director of BI. “Sometimes you can look at numbers for hours and not see something obvious. With QlikView, the answer becomes obvious.”

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This paper was sponsored by QlikView and created by CITO Research

A CITO Research Case StudyThis document is a CITO Research Case Study, a form of content intended to explain a topic that is of potential importance to CIO, CTOs, and business professionals. This case study was sponsored by QlikView to illustrate how QlikView brings value to users.

CITO Research is a source of news, analysis, research, and knowledge for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT and business professionals. CITO Research engages in a dialogue with its audience to capture technology trends that are harvested, analyzed, and communicated in a sophisticated way to help practitioners solve difficult business problems.