Availing Advantages of Sales Data to Redefine Business Prospects

Big Data has transformed a number of industries. The rise in data has surged the business of many organizations. Moreover, it has helped many B2B businesses increase sales. A data-driven sales organization can create value for nearly every business function, from marketing and customer support to product and corporate strategy. Leaders need to recognize this trove of untapped insights — and take steps to put sales data and analytics into action across the organization.

According to Harvard Business Review, here is how sales data can create value for non-sales teams across an organization.

Close the Data Gap Between Marketing and Sales

Aligning Marketing and Sales is notoriously challenging precisely because of the data. The first challenge is to get the right data sets: four in five salespeople identify a significant gap between the data used by Marketing and Sales. What's more, data quickly becomes stale as stakeholders move companies and roles, which one in five decision-makers do during the buying process.

However, feedback from Sales on behavior throughout the buying process can help Marketing to more effectively qualify and target leads. Additionally, accurate and up-to-date CRM data can help Marketing teams refine their buyer personas by painting a higher-fidelity picture of the buying committee.

Gain First-Hand Insight from Buyers

Across several organizations, sales representatives tend to share deep relationships with their customers and their interactions can be a great source of insight into the product – learning about the gaps in the product, acceptance of pricing structure, and significant others. Leveraging innovative machine learning and speech analytics tools, organizations can analyze large volumes of calls and extract useful feedback for the product. These metrics can help the company maintain good ROI from the product using self-service analytics and reporting capabilities into our product.

Segment and Prioritize Accounts Based on Customer Metrics

According to HBR, Sales, Customer Support, Marketing, and Product teams can all benefit from insight into which accounts are poised for growth, which are ready for cross-selling, and which are likely to churn. For instance, churn metrics, support ticket themes, and product usage patterns can shine a light on product-fit issues and renewal risks. This insight can drive marketing campaigns or commercial offers that compel customers to stay or engage differently with the product.

Metrics such as retention rate and customer lifetime value (LTV) is also helpful in informing how Marketing invests in acquisitions, upselling, or cross-selling. An organization could segment its customers and invest in marketing additional product offerings to existing healthy customers. It could also learn from what types of customers tend to have a higher or lower LTV, and adjust acquisition efforts accordingly.

Identify Growth Opportunities Through Momentum Signals

At a macro level, insights gleaned from sales data can help businesses shape their growth strategies, focusing on entirely new segments of a market or moving away from unprofitable areas. Within specific accounts, business momentum signals — like hiring, raising capital, or opening new offices — can shed light on an increase in the total addressable market (TAM). Today, most organizations look at customer relationship management (CRM) data, such as contract size, to identify potential account growth. But, current spending may only give a limited view; a company that just closed a big fundraising round, for instance, may have a larger TAM than its current contract suggests. Looking at data from a different angle can help to spot momentum signals as they happen.