How Can Raw Material Sales Teams Use Enquiry, Offer and Deal Data to Improve Commercial Outcomes?

Past enquiry, offer and transaction data can help sales managers identify important customer or market patterns to take action and improve commercial outcomes.

The most straightforward measure of commercial outcomes is netback. Netback is calculated by taking the price from selling a unit of raw materials, less all costs associated with getting the unit to a market, including transportation, financing, hedging and potentially repacking costs.

In metals & mining, where the mine or production output is often fixed, it is vital to take data-driven selling decisions and allocate material to highest netback deals.

However, uncovering netback transparency is not as easy as it sounds. A lot of data has to be considered and crunched to help sales managers improve commercial outcomes. Let’s dive in.

Mining corporations and producers of raw materials receive numerous sales enquiries throughout any given day. A call from a US alloy producer, an email from a European steel mill, a WhatsApp from an Indian foundry or a WeChat from a Chinese trader. Keeping track is not easy.

With Metalshub it gets easier. Our Sales Solution with its enquiry management module allows sellers to capture all enquiries no matter if on Metalshub or via any other channel.

(Stay tuned: We are also currently working on an AI solution that will automatically pull in all enquiries across channels to reduce the administrative burden for the sales teams.)

The result of digitalising the incoming enquiries will not only be a more audit-proof and reliable sales engine, but also a rich data set to analyse.

Visualising all incoming enquiries across products and customers will enable sales managers to quickly identify patterns and trends.

Figure 1: Example dashboard from Metalshub on enquiry data (dummy data)

The next step on the journey to better netbacks is to capture your offer and transaction data to derive actionable insights on your sales performance.

The ratio of enquiry-to-offer-to-deals will give you unique insights on how often you fail to offer, win or lose a deal.

Figure 3: Example dashboard from Metalshub on deals-to-offer data (dummy data)

Moreover, the data will enable sales teams to measure their performance against a market reference price to better understand the value creation of the sales team.

Figure 4: Example graph from Metalshub on price versus index performance (dummy data)

Even more tellingly, when enriched with cost data, the enquiry, offer and deal data can help companies build a netback curve to assess profitability profiles across customers, account managers or sales regions. The netback per unit may also be juxtaposed to the market reference price to better gauge the sales team’s performance versus the market.

Figure 5: Example graph from Metalshub on price per unit / netback per unit (dummy data)

The right data will not only help sales managers, but also leaders to gain an overview on current activities and performance.

Figure 6: Example Sales Solution dashboard from Metalshub (dummy data)

With full visibility of all sales activities, from enquiries to offers to transactions and performance metrics, organisations can unlock significant business value, drive operational excellence, and gain a competitive edge in the industry.

Of course, companies can take the burdensome route and manually capture all the data required for the analyses. At Metalshub, however, we believe that digitalisation with industry tailored software is the way to go. This way inefficient administrative tasks can be minimised and collected data cannot be manipulated. Already today, customers of our Sales Solution are able to ensure fully sales data visibility and take better, data-driven decisions.