Strategic use of data has delivered powerful solutions and competitive advantages to for individuals, organizations, and industries for years.
While data can be valuable to a company, many are unclear on the type of data to collect or how it can help them answer questions, make informed decisions, or achieve goals.
Throughout January, tED magazine is sharing the inspiring stories of companies that solved a unique problem through the intelligent use of gathering and analyzing data.
Data-Driven Solutions: Relocating Unproductive Inventory
Earlier this month, tED magazine provided a solution from an NAED distributor who was able to move unproductive inventory more efficiently to capitalize on investment dollars. Read more
Data-Driven Solutions: Automating Calculations of Market Share
And, we showed you a solution for speeding up and creating a more accurate report on its market share to uncover valuable information. Read more
Company Problem: The company’s lack of strong and enforced pricing management strategies led to pricing that was far too competitive.
Data Driven Solution: Implementation of new pricing management guidelines and dedicated profit software helped standardize the company’s pricing strategies and drive a significant growth in profits.
According to a third-party survey of its customers that one distributor commissioned annually
for over a decade, their company ranked very high relative to its competitors on inventory levels, people, deliveries, and customer service. At the same time, however, it also scored high in the area of “competitive pricing,” which the company didn’t see as a plus.
“Being too competitive on pricing while providing all of the services we offered was hurting our profitability,” the company’s data specialist confirmed. But after securing buy-in from the company’s C-suite and implementing pricing management guidelines, strategic price increases, and dedicated profit software that identifies low-profitability products/customers and unauthorized price changes internally, “our profits experienced exponential growth, we reduced the number of internal price overrides by our salespeople, and subsequent surveys saw our customer rating on competitive pricing go down, which was exactly where we wanted to be.”
Ultimately, “data helps you fix problems, but it’s often the things you’re not even looking for in the data that we’ve found can really move the needle, such as productivity costs, pricing consistency, and more, ”the data specialist said. “Data is a wealth of knowledge and if you’re not using it, you’re missing the boat.”
You can learn about more Data-Driven Solutions, or NAED member companies can download the full report for free on NAED’s “Making Strides With Data Insights” page at https://www.naed.org/making-strides-with-data-insights
Tagged with best practices, data, NAED