Recently XchangeIT gave us some excel sheets on the data that our clients have been sending. By a lucky accident they included a few accounts that were from several competitors. So giving us a chance to compare what we were sending in comparison to what they were sending.
The percentage of our clients sending is still low about 70% of our competitors. The good news is when we rolled the sites back to see how we had been going before the campaign we could see that our current campaign has clearly worked. Considering that we only started to push sales data in the last few months this is an better then expected score. Clearly here we have more work to do.
However the reality is that it is not just sending it, the problem is that if the data does not arrive daily it is often useless. That is why the old Dartboard made such a big deal about when the data was being sent.
So we decided to compare figures for accuracy by using how often the data was sent as a guide. It did confirm what we have been told a few times by the magazine company analysist the data coming though with us is the best. This confirmation made me feel good!
Having said all of this, the best sales data unless it is available is useless. Currently the magazine producers don’t get any sales figures till too late. If you produced a magazine in late May, you released it in late June and you got no sales figures till late September. That is four issues later. Now try doing your subagents not knowing the last four sales figures and see how accurate you are. Is it any wonder that they overproduce? A big problem is to get the distributors to issue estimated sales data to the magazine producers daily. This is what the newsagents are giving the data to do. I was annoyed in my last discussion with them they refused with a comment that they were impressed with my analysis which you can read here.
http://shurl.net/ci7
