Business Tip 6
Define Roles and Responsibilities for Data Analysis and Presentation Development

To produce insightful presentations often requires the contributions of many people of diverse talents.

The First Step to a Successful Analysis and Presentation Workflow

Creating insightful sales analyses and presentations requires the expertise and coordination of many people in an organization from data analysts to business managers to sales reps. Organizations acknowledge this, but many fail to define specific roles and responsibilities (workflow) and to select tools that adequately address the complexity of the sales analysis process. This leads to:

Data Redundancy

• Data Analysts pull the same data and recalculate the same subtotals, wasting time and money with duplicate efforts

• Data analysts use different tools, increasing infrastructure and training costs for multiple tools that do the same thing

Presentation Redundancy

• Different category or marketing managers develop presentations in different formats causing inconsistent, incompatible, or inefficient presentations

• Lack of methodology and standards means that the message communicated is often inconsistent between locations

Limited Insights

• Due to the disconnect between data providers, manufacturers struggle with sales analysis of departments, fine lines, and product

• Sales personnel don’t customize for markets or accounts because it’s too difficult or time-consuming

A successful analysis and presentation work stream is needed to eliminate these and other problems…and defining roles and responsibilities is the first step in the process.

One possible workflow might look like this:

	Role: Data Analyst Responsibility: Manage Data Let people with data expertise manage data by creating and maintaining systems to pull, define, clean, integrate, and aggregate data into a format that business personnel can use.
	Role: Category Manager Responsibility: Develop Insights Business personnel such as Category and Marketing Managers are best qualified to assess trends, draw conclusions, make recommendations, and to put insights into a format that sales personnel and customers understand.
	Role: Field Sales Responsibility: Deliver Insights Sales representatives need customer presentations that are ready to go but that can also be easily customized for their own accounts or markets. Let sales people do what they do best – sell!

The data, products and accounts depicted in this example are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual data, products or accounts is purely coincidental.