Sales Teams’ Intellectual Property

Considering a sales person’s intellectual property.

Intellectual property is an companies intellectual assets. Often these intellectual assets are overlooked by management. Intellectual assets of a business should be revenue drivers. GE is recognized as a leader in capitalizing intellectual assets and intellectual property. The GE strategy has pulled these assets from the legal department and now they are leased to clients. This builds revenues and optimizes the technology created by GE employees.

What are a Sales Team’ Intellectual Property: How can this be monetized?

Much simpler than complex patents and technology drives, but a sales teams assets are still valuable to a business. Assets include contacts and accounts. The history the surrounds each contact is valuable data. The activity or the selling process which gains new business should be captured and mined to improve sales strategies across the organization. This data includes the products invested in the support issues products bubbled up, the lead generation methodologies and the details and analytics of the marketing spend which created leads.

Often sales teams do not capture sales data. The systems are disparate, spreadsheets and contact tools which reside with sales people both in-direct and direct. This data is not accessible to the organization and is not usable.

The Biggest Value of a Customer Relationship Tool is Organizing Intellectual Property

The foundation of a strategy to monetize intellectual property is logical. The logical first step is to gather and organize assets. The assets than can be mined. Mining this data crystalizes sales strategy in many ways. Here are few:

1. Marketing Campaign spend should be tied to leads generated and revenue created.
2. Partner or distributor selling efforts should be quantified and compared across the sales channel.
3. Quote Closure rates should be understood across multi channels.
4. Support Trouble tickets can be assigned to products and can build a support FAQ or knowledge base for re-use.

Get Organized and Get More Profitable

Getting sales data organized is a foundation strategy. Put key information into a database or CRM tool. Then analyze your progress with reports built with real sales data.