Southco Distributing Company is one of the largest convenience store distributors in the US, but they’re never resting on their past success. They recently built on the positive impact real-time dashboards delivered for their picking and stocking operations–adding BI for sales insights. This, driven by a two-prong approach to aggressively land new accounts while minimizing sub-par/unprofitable accounts has yielded dramatic gains.
Southco Key Account Manager John Garver said, “There’s an unwritten rule in business that you never want to lose an account. But that’s just not what the data said. If it costs you more to service a client than you make in profit–why are you doing business with them?”
BI for Sales Insights: Revenue isn’t Profitability
What John keenly honed in on was that per-account revenue doesn’t really show the health of the account–or the business. Every order contributes to profitability or takes away from it. By seeing the impacts of each order, and looking at order trends over time, the team was able to address accounts falling below desired profitability levels. This focused the sales teams efforts in exactly the most impactful areas.
For a low-margin business, like distribution, eliminating unprofitable accounts has significant impacts.
In Southco’s case, per-store profitability increased 10% while reducing underperforming accounts by 50%.
And the best part of the solution is no spreadsheets, no combing through reports. Simple, easy-to-understand dashboards with daily emails to account managers giving them account health, outlier orders, and a clear way to focus their efforts. It’s a win for the sales team and the leadership team.
Sonny Wooten, Southco President, drives the point home: “With management and the account managers accessing the same data, it gives clarity to the conversations we have regarding performance of the account and actions needed to be taken.”
Learn more about how Southco leveraged Nowsight BI for sales insights in this hot-off-the-press case study. We’re also offering a quick and free data analysis of your business because you’re likely sitting on business-impacting insights trapped across multiple data sources and we can show you what’s possible. Improved profitability, reduced low-performing accounts and better attainment of promotional benchmarks can be yours!