Organizations should hold and provide appropriate access to a minimum of three years of transaction history in a form that enables detailed analysis.

Three years typically represents two or more sales cycles, although industries such as automotive may require up to six years of data to achieve similar analysis outputs. Data should be held at the transaction level and should include a unique customer ID along with the date, product, volume, value and channel/outlet for each transaction. Ideally, it should also include the transaction margin. For analysis purposes, ZIP codes/post codes and customer segmentation related fields should also be accessible.

Overall scoring on access to transaction data is mid-range in the US sample; however, there are wide discrepancies across sectors. Financial services and telecommunications typically score well, and automotive less so. From the wider CMAT benchmark, only 28 per cent of companies have three years or more of sales purchase information.