Still Letting Sales Reps Create Outlet Records?
Almost every liquor supplier invests in CRM. But have you considered the quality of the data going into it?
Let us paint you a picture: A sales rep visits a new venue, can’t find it in the system, and simply types it in. Months later, another rep creates the same venue but spells it differently.
Someone else abbreviates the name.
Another includes the trading name instead of the legal business name.
It seems harmless enough, but before long, one customer exists five different ways, and over time the impact is significant.
Duplicate outlet records make it harder to understand customer performance, inflate outlet counts, fragment sales history and undermine reporting. Territory planning becomes less accurate. Customer insights are questionable because no one can be certain they’re looking at the complete picture.
The irony is that businesses often spend thousands of dollars trying to improve reporting and business intelligence, when the real problem began much earlier.
It started when someone typed a venue name into a CRM.
Clean Data Starts at the Source
The challenge isn’t that suppliers lack access to information. In fact, most businesses are receiving more sales data than ever before. The real challenge is turning that (often disparate) data into something meaningful quickly enough for commercial teams to act on it.
That’s where we see many businesses unintentionally create friction.
Sales data arrives in different formats from different customers. Promotions are managed across multiple systems. Reporting requirements vary between retailers. Before anyone can start analysing performance, somebody first needs to collect, clean and validate the information. Multiply that process across every customer, every promotion and every reporting period, and it’s easy to see how large amounts of time disappear into administrative work.
Better Decisions Depend on Better Data
Business intelligence is only as good as the data behind it.
By standardising outlet selection at the point of entry, suppliers create cleaner customer data from day one, improving everything from sales reporting and account planning to forecasting and commercial decision-making.
Because the best reporting doesn’t begin in Excel, Power BI or your CRM dashboard.
It begins with choosing the right outlet in the first place and we can help with that.
