Understanding revenue centers, margins and expenses are key to understanding the profitability of your business. The ability to access, retrieve, analyze and report the key findings of this information requires the collaborative efforts of many individuals and departments within the organization. Today, most direct mail firms spend hours manually retrieving and comparing information that may or may not be the complete sum of all efforts.

Streamline Solutions has made this manual collation and tabulation process more efficient by providing the Sales Analysis Module. The Sales Analysis Module can access, retrieve, analyze and report on information from disparate sources around the organization. Sales Analysis combines all the tools to accomplish these tasks quickly and effectively, and provides links with third-party tools for graphical viewing, presenting and production purposes.

Sales Analysis can be a valuable asset in understanding your most profitable accounts, most productive sales individuals, the biggest area for growth, and perhaps most importantly, the areas of the organization that require changes in order to increase productivity.

Leveraging the Value of Legacy Data

To accomplish this important task, Sales Analysis was designed to maximize the types and the way in which historical data is stored for optimal retrieval. For example, Sales Analysis history files include sales amounts, freight tax, postage, value-added, discounts and premiums, hourly rate on equipment, direct labor, machine contribution etc. The files can be categorized by salesperson, project manager, client, product, sub-product, date, SIC code, new and/or repeat business and other user defined classifications.

Once historical information is part of the system-whether imported or added directly-it can then be mapped to current data, such as daily activity reports. Sales Analysis includes a unique 'daily activity' feature that enables users to show critical items such as bookings, billings, shipping and backlogs. Reports show similar statistics for given period of times such as a month, as compared with budget, which, when compared with bookings, backlogs and billings, can illustrate expected surges or drop offs in workflow. For executive and sales management purposes, sales analysis has graphical indicators that quickly illustrate trends during the month and year to date both company wide and by salesperson.

Product Analysis Reports

Activity reports are one aspect of sales analysis, but another, and perhaps more critical, is understanding the correlation between the estimates given and the resulting business. Sales Analysis allows you to pull information by estimate amount, number of estimates, the average value (as well as high and low figures), the value-added percentage and the discount or premium given. It then compares these figures with actual jobs that were produced for the same product category. These reports are a powerful tool for analyzing product volumes for estimates and the resulting jobs created. The comparison also illustrates any trends between given areas, for example, value added, discount estimated and the actual outcome of the job.

Client Activity

Since most direct mail companies have clients that operate on a project-to-project basis, it is sometimes hard to understand when a client's inactivity is simply an issue of no project, or if it's an issue of a competitive nature. In order to give your organization a competitive edge, Sales Analysis provides client inactivity reports for viewing one, or all clients, globally or by salesperson that have not been active for a give period of time. This ensures that opportunities are identified and exploited, preventing a long-term customer from choosing another direct mail vendor. Over time, client activity reports can also be analyzed to show areas of heavy and light activity, enabling the sales team to anticipate future jobs and proactively market and close business.

Graphical Illustrators of Performance

Nothing gets the point across faster and clearer than a graphical illustration of the performance (or non-performance) of an organization. For this reason, Sales Analysis data can be move directly into other standard third-party providers of data manipulation tools and graphical toolkits, such as Microsoft Excel and Access. User-defined macros can be created for common reporting tasks reducing the time spent creating and re-creating the same report in a different format.

Features include: