One Unified Overview for Better Data-Driven Sales Management

Christian Wimmelmann, Regional Sales Manager at Rockwool TI, is responsible for Rockwool’s sales teams across the Nordic region—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. In September 2021, we had the pleasure of welcoming Christian as a guest at our first webinar, where we focused on how Business Intelligence can support the sales function, particularly in relation to creating better and more productive sales meetings, sales optimization, and improved realization of sales potential.

Based on the webinar, this case therefore summarizes how Christian explains that the Virkplan business platform has supported the sales function at Rockwool.

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Watch the webinar recording here:

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In a large organization, it can be complex to take the individual needs of each business unit into account. For this reason, Rockwool had previously invested in systems based on a “one size fits all” approach—an approach that can create challenges. Christian experienced situations where existing systems and the use of data were not sufficient to support sales management. And although it was not impossible to develop a custom solution within Rockwool, it would have been a long and resource-intensive project.

For this reason, Christian contacted Virkplan with the aim of developing a solution that could support their Pipeline Management setup and be ready within a relatively short timeframe. Once the requirements for the collaboration were defined, it took us less than a week to have the report up and running.

“When you have worked with sales management for many years, you realize that it is rarely a good idea to take a large, fully polished model and roll it out across many different countries and cultures—because needs are simply not the same.”
Christian Wimmelmann, Regional Sales Manager

The solution was designed to support the Pipeline Management setup across Rockwool’s three different business units: Americas, EU, and Exports (Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific region). The primary focus of this setup is to maintain an overview of market potential. This enables Rockwool to more easily prioritize which projects and opportunities to pursue, as well as plan and follow up on strategies to “win” these sales opportunities.

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Opportunity Management – Market Potential Through Enriched Data

The Pipeline Management report was divided into five different dashboards. The first two dashboards focus on market potential—essentially a market overview based on the SeaWeb and Industrial Info Resources databases. Rockwool TI already paid significant amounts to access these databases, which provide insight into upcoming projects and tenders, such as major construction projects, factories, or ships.

The challenge, however, was that salespeople repeatedly had to enter the databases themselves to manually calculate and assess the insulation potential of each project. To make better use of these databases, we set up one dashboard for each, giving salespeople access to relevant information and automated calculations of market potential.

As a result, salespeople no longer need to navigate the databases manually, as all insights are now consolidated into an automated overview using Business Intelligence.

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Pipeline Health – Better Use of CRM Data

The next dashboard represents the next step in the process—when a potential has been selected and moved into the CRM system. At this point, the project is part of the pipeline. However, CRM systems are limited when it comes to providing a clear overview of the status of individual opportunities in the pipeline.

Therefore, we created a BI dashboard showing Rockwool’s “Pipeline Health,” enabling more detailed tracking of individual opportunities.

How many opportunities do we have? In which month were they initiated? When are they expected to be delivered and invoiced? In addition, we created a dashboard focusing on how well Rockwool’s products are qualified in relation to the technical requirements specified in tenders.

This provides an improved overview of individual opportunities, an estimate of expected revenue based on initiated opportunities, as well as weighted revenue based on how far along each sale is and its probability of success. The dashboard also helps assess whether Rockwool has “enough” in the pipeline relative to targets and budgets—particularly important in an industry where sales pipelines often span long periods.

“All of these things about our pipeline are technically in our CRM system. We just can’t see them, and I certainly can’t sort them quickly (…) and I can’t view my pipeline over time in our CRM system—only a snapshot of the total pipeline, even though we use one of the world’s best and most expensive CRM systems.”
Christian Wimmelmann, Regional Sales Manager

Importantly, the same overview is used at all levels of the organization. While Christian uses the pipeline overview for his sales meetings and one-on-one discussions with salespeople, his manager uses the same overview to assess the entire Nordic region’s pipeline. In this way, the report is used across all organizational levels—from the individual salesperson to the overall business unit.

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Meetings Activity – Overview and Prioritization of Sales Activities

If you are not out there representing your company, you will not sell anything. For this reason, the final dashboard in Rockwool’s BI report provides an overview of sales meeting activities in relation to defined KPIs:

• Number of meetings in the calendar
• Average number of meetings and distribution by stakeholder type
• Insight into current, past, and upcoming meeting activity
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One Unified Overview – More Productive Pipeline Meetings

A unique advantage of consolidating data into a single Business Intelligence report is that everyone bases their decisions on exactly the same data and calculations. Christian points out that their monthly pipeline meetings have become much easier to structure, as everyone knows and uses the same overview that forms the basis of meeting discussions.

“It is much easier to run structured pipeline meetings when you have a tool that serves as a foundation—one that people trust because they use it every day. What is particularly smart is that Rockwool can now use the same view at all levels of the organization. This ensures accountability across the board, with no excuses. What is not in the report does not count.”
Peter Jul Jakobsen, Senior Consultant, Virkplan

The overview of market potential is exactly what you achieve by combining many different types of data into one dashboard, in one Business Intelligence solution—instead of relying on five different systems with no single place to see the full picture. That unified overview is something Rockwool now has.
_{‍Christian Wimmelmann, Regional Sales Manager}