Marketing & Sales

Marketing and Sales is one of the most important corporate departments within an organization because it most directly drives company revenue and profitability. Facing high levels of uncertainty, Marketing and Sales departments must answer difficult questions such as:

• What will global demand be next quarter?
• Will a marketing campaign be successful?
• How will a new product launch affect the existing demand mix?
• How can we improve customer retention?
• How can we better help customers choose the right products?

Bringing Together People, Analytics, and Systems

The Vanguard System™ helps Marketing and Sales departments answer these questions and more. Vanguard is a comprehensive business solution for improving the quality, reliability, and speed of management decisions. It does this by helping you Collaborate with colleagues on important plans, Analyze alternatives using state-of-the-art modeling and simulation techniques, Automate routine decisions using Expert System technology, and Improve overall management effectiveness by adding structure to a normally chaotic process.

Business improvement is all about working smarter. Vanguard brings together the people, analytics, and systems required to help your business operate intelligently.

Powerful Forecasting Analytics

Whether you have data warehouses full of historical data or only your best management estimates, Vanguard helps you produce the highest quality forecasts possible using Wizard-style guides and easy-to-assemble models.

Unlike most forecasting tools on the market, Vanguard combines all three proven forecasting methods into a single solution, including Time-series forecasting, Monte Carlo simulation, and Statistical Regression. This gives you the power to forecast anything you need - from traditional product demand to finding the likelihood that a marketing campaign will increase customer leads by 25%.

Vanguard lets you drill into your forecasts for greater detail and understanding. And, you can review forecasts at any roll-up level such as consolidating across:

• Regions for global views of demand;
• Product lines for raw material forecasts;
• People for team summaries;
• And much more.

Real-time Collaboration

You can produce exceptionally accurate forecasts using Vanguard by leveraging the collective intelligence of your entire Marketing and Sales team. Vanguard enables you to capture the team's knowledge and opinions about risks, opportunities, events, and uncertainties. All the intricate complexities of aggregating the forecasts when they are built by people in different countries using different currencies, different time scales, different update schedules, etc., are handled automatically by Vanguard.

The knowledge you need in order to forecast effectively is divided between many individuals who are spread throughout your organization. Vanguard enables you to capture the knowledge, or know-how, these key individuals possess that is specific to their business activities.This allows for a collaborative planning process that spans the entire enterprise.

When such activities are performed in isolation, company performance can suffer. To generate the most cost-effective and accurate business plans, real-time collaboration with other areas of the enterprise must occur. Collaborative planning can impact every aspect of an enterprise such as:

• Marketing plans that detail how to target customers;
• Sales plans that forecast customer demand and revenues;
• Financial plans that project Profit & Loss (P&L) and Balance Sheet performance;
• Operational plans that schedule when and what to produce; and
• R&D plans that map out next-generation products and services.

Without real-time collaboration, information quickly becomes static, detail gets lost in translation from group to group, and stakeholders lose confidence in the analysis. The result is increased enterprise risk, business inefficiency, and uninformed decision-making.

Optimal Mix / Portfolio Analysis

Using a combination of intuitive modeling and simulation methods, Vanguard helps optimize product and service portfolios by fully quantifying their financial and operational impacts at all levels of the enterprise. Vanguard simulates thousands of real-world scenarios at the same time and identifies your most important portfolio risks and opportunities. You learn exactly where to focus your attention, how to balance good risk with unavoidable risk, and how to configure your best portfolio.

Efficient Market and Customer Research

You must know your market in order to gain traction. You must understand your customers in order to satisfy them. Vanguard Vista™ allows you to create, post, track, and analyze surveys online for in-depth yet cost-effective market and customer research. Vista's results analysis is unmatched by any online survey tool. From confidence intervals to an exhaustive correlation analysis, Vista handles the statistics for you automatically and presents them in print-ready summary reports.

Salesforce Automation

Using knowledge automation techniques, Vanguard improves sales productivity while reducing administrative costs:

• Expertly guide users or customers through complex sales decisions by reducing the process to intuitive question-and-answer sessions;
• Maximize sales conversions with Vanguard's online product selectors by quickly directing customers to the best-fitting products; or,
• Turn every sales agent into an expert with Vanguard's Web-based scripts that efficiently help close even the most complicated of sales.