The “Right” Count and Master Data Management

As the economic situation remains uncertain, many organizations have begun to downsize their staff or are thinking about downsizing their staff. 

In many organizations, sales expenses can be the most costly part of an organization making it a tempting area to cut. Still, at the same time, the lifeblood of any organization is its sales.  How does an organization reduce its sales expenses without actually hurting the organization more by not having the appropriate staff to find and follow up on the opportunities?

The key to making any decision regarding the number of sales employees is having a clear understanding of the market opportunity.  Now, more than ever, Master Data Management, also referred to as MDM, is needed in order to make these critical executive decisions.

Master Data Management can help you match and link the multiple representations of the same organization, same contact, and related organizations and contacts that are located within each separate data silo and across disparate data systems.  Once matched and linked, you can see how many customers and prospects that you have within your database systems.  You can further analyze this information by geography, product line, or other criteria or combinations of meaningful criteria to further define the market opportunity. 

To gain even further insight into the market opportunity, you can use your MDM solution to match and link external marketing files against your internal databases so that you can identify locations and contacts that match your customers and prospects that you do not already have within your database.  External files can also provide organizations and contacts that fit the profile of your best customers even if you do not have matching records in your data silos.

Once you understand the market opportunity, you can start to plan for the “right” count of employees based on the market opportunity and not some random reduction of head count which may hurt sales.  Since your best customer is your current customer, a master data management application can also help organize your databases based on corporate hierarchies so that your sales and marketing staff can work the family tree where your organization is already a trusted source.  

While for many large enterprises implementing a master data management solution may take some time to implement, many smaller and medium size organizations can implement a MDM system in a reasonable amount of time and gain more immediate insight in order to determine the “right” count of sales employees sooner rather than later.

Comments

[Kingsley Idehen]

Now that I am coming to terms with the label: MDM, I would encourage you to look at some of my commentary about RDF based Linked Data. In a nutshell, we are using RDF based Linked Data to lay the foundation for Open MDM. By this I am referring to MDM in which the Entities are no longer confined to a specific MDM application instance, operating systems, network etc.. A generation of MDM in which Entity Properties (Attributes and Relationships) are de-referencable via HTTP based Entity IDs (URIs) resulting in Entity-Entity networks connected via Hyperdata Links in the same manner we connect Documents via Hypertext links today.

Anyway, see the Linked Data presentation link below:

1. http://tinyurl.com/568y9g
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperdata
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

Kingsley

[Steve Kahn]

Kingsley, thanks for the information. I'll take a look.

Steve

[Steve Kahn]

Kingsley, thanks for the information. I'll take a look.

Steve

[Wholesale]

Excellent blog full of good info, thanks