Using data to boost sales in your glass business

Whatever phase of the market you are experiencing – completely rushed off your feet or working through a dip in demand – focusing on sales and customer insight is key to safeguarding your cashflow and boosting profitability.

Nurture existing customers

Although it’s tempting to focus on finding new customers, glass companies thrive on repeat business. So, for most of us, understanding and cultivating existing customers is where the smart money is.

For those customers who you quote to order, there is a lot of potential for driving additional business. But to make your salespeople effective at this, they need data. Analyse your sales history and you are likely to see trends in who orders what and when. Although there are no certainties in life, these small nuggets are enough reason for a tenacious salesperson to pick up the phone and start a conversation.

Repeat orders are easy to take for granted, but it’s essential that you keep track of regular orders and make sure they aren’t dropping off. If any of your customers are ordering less often, or with reduced quantities, make sure that one of your salespeople gets on the case to find out what’s happening, then work to win them back.

Fix problems before they kill the relationship

Even for those customers who are continuing to order regularly, you need to know if there is anything you’re getting wrong, so you can sort it before a competitor wins them away with a better offer.

Try grouping your data by customer, so you can see all their rejects and incomplete or late deliveries together. Are there any customers who are getting a raw deal, who you need your production people to pay better attention to?

Equally, it’s worth understanding how competitive your prices are. You may not be able to see what your competitors are charging, but it’s easy to see which of your customers are getting decent discounts and which might be susceptible to an approach from a lower cost competitor. You don’t want to automatically hand out discounts, but you do need to make sure that premium customers get premium service.

Focus on your best customers

In some respects, your best customers are easy to identify, especially those who place large orders, predictably often. But of-course your profitability is built on a lot more than just volume.

There is a metric that we particularly like: For each of your customers, what is the average selling price per square metre of glass? Although this is simplistic and a little crude, it can be a real eye opener for your salespeople.

Another, more subtle bit of customer value analysis comes from reviewing rejects, and in particular subjective rejects. So long as you are logging all your returns with a reason code you can work out, for example, which customers have particularly high standards when it comes to visual defects, or who has more of an issue with scratches. Again, valuable insights for salespeople, particularly when deciding whether or not to offer discounts.

Beware uneconomic orders

Every business has a sweet spot: orders which are perfectly aligned with your skills and equipment, that can be cut from glass which you keep in stock, fit on your furnace alongside other work and generally speed through all your processes. Then there is the other type of order: The one that has an unusual combination of materials and treatments; that is prone to breakage; that will hold up other work while your people think about how to process it.

Make sure your salespeople understand what kind of orders you don’t want and where you certainly won’t offer any discounts. And if you’re going to be really smart about it, do some more detailed analysis of back orders and see if any of your customers are only giving you the tricky jobs (then maybe ask them what it would take to give you their other, more profitable work).

It’s all in the data

Modern businesses are far more efficient than their counterparts from 50 years ago, and that’s because we now have so much more data to help us understand where to focus and what to change.

The computer system which you use to manage your glass businesses needs to collect meaningful data at every opportunity in your sales, operations and customer service. And it needs to provide flexible reporting tools so you can ask the questions that your competitors haven’t yet thought of and gain the insights that will give you an edge, not just in your processes but in your customer service and sales.

Next steps

If you are already using Gtrak we would be happy to help you make the most of its powerful reporting capabilities to gain new sales insights; please get in touch. Or if you are considering switching to a new system for managing your glass business then please take a look at our software or talk to us about how we could help.