Profitable sales - rather more useful than the alternative
Summary
However, in all the cases where the sales guy had tried to offer something slightly off-piste, not quite the standard product – the margins dropped! The time-honoured phrase which the sales guy uses to justify why he’s done a deal with a client that sits well outside the company’s standard products and services. Not only does the great new customer rarely come on board, it’s often the case with these off-piste deals that there’s a great deal of extra administration, tweaks are required to contracts and to product / service literature and – perhaps worst of all – payment terms may be stretched. Underlying this situation, the MD had the financial information he needed both to identify and to rectify the problem. In either case, the correct sales and costs data needs to be input in the right way to ensure the business gets a useful flow of profitability information coming out.