In today’s ever-evolving landscape of B2B sales, data analytics isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a game-changer.
Picture this: a world where your sales teams are armed with insights that transcend intuition and go far beyond gut feeling. Imagine having the power to answer pivotal questions like, “Is your business truly resonating with your target market?” and “How are you standing out from the competition?” While the idea that more data leads to more sales and revenue may be intuitive, the premise is grounded in research. A McKinsey study shows that those businesses that invest and commit to data insights in sales and marketing are 1.5 times more likely to reach above-average growth rates than competitors.
In this article, we’ll dive deep into the pivotal role that data analytics plays in B2B sales and explore how harnessing the power of technology and insights can transform your sales organization. Let’s dive in.
Why Data Analytics Matter to B2B Sales
The advantages are undeniable when considering data analytics for your B2B company. Here are some of the core benefits.
Finding the Ideal Customer
The ideal customer is the person most likely to buy your products or services. Finding the ideal customer without data, however, can be elusive.
Building a profile of your ideal customer identifies the targets to go after that have the right purchasing power, interest, need, and willingness to purchase.
Creating an ideal customer’s profile requires insights that are derived from large datasets. The ideal company’s size, mission, markets, customers, industry, location, and other characteristics can be gleaned from data on your past customers, their purchases, buying patterns and total spent.
Understanding Customer Behaviors
At each stage in the buying process, you are looking for indications, patterns, triggers, and key interactions that signal intent and proclivity. Data analytics helps you better understand customer behaviors during each interaction, each phase and each turning point in the sales process.
Data analytics helps you better understand preferences and pain points, needs and opportunities. Data from the target customers and your current and past customers helps build better products and services and address needs early on.
Identifying Leads
Gathering information from reliable sources allows teams to use sales authentication tools to gain better insights into purchase intentions. They can assist in scoring leads and giving sales associates the best possible leads to pursue.
By distinguishing leads with high and low purchase intent, you can optimize the sales team’s time and resources on the best prospects.
Gaining Competitive Advantage
Data insights cannot just help analyze and optimize your leads. It can also be used to gain a deeper understanding of your competitors. By identifying your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, recent wins, markets, and customers, you can position your own company better. Differentiation, based on data, can help close business when you have insights into your competition.
Optimizing Sales Processes
The support, management, and tracking of sales operations is a critical, and often undersung, part of the sales process. Sales databases that track information about the team, performance, timetables, close rates, and other data can help sales managers support and grow their sales personnel.
With actionable insights, support teams can better act on information and scenarios, becoming more effective in their work. With dynamic, real-time reporting driven by internal data, managers can see what is happening, address minor issues early, and help improve performance for the entire team.
Improving Communications and Marketing
Data insights allow you to parse your customers and prospects in finer detail and with more granularity. You can use data analytics to improve your marketing campaigns.
From the types of messages you send to the cadence in which you pace your campaign, your communication will vastly improve. You can align typical marketing metrics – open rates, responses, click-throughs – with data on customers and prospects for better results.
You can also provide more personalization and customization, especially to existing customers. Communications strategies that align to past behavior can open the door for your sales teams to make additional sales and retain existing customers more fully.
Better Data Analytics Starts with Commitment to Technology
What does your company need to do to create a data-driven sales organization? It begins and ends with an embrace of technology.
New advances in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and other technologies are driving a brand-new data operation.
Machine learning, which allows computers to learn, adapt, and analyze data without extensive programming, empowers your organization to harness massive amounts of data.
Predictive analytics is another critical component. Predictive analytics allow computers to analyze historical data using machine learning and algorithms. These programs look for patterns that would be otherwise difficult to find to identify sales trends, shared characteristics, customer behaviors, and strategy recommendations.
The power of advanced computing can only be harnessed when organizations embrace the role of data. That means committing to collecting information, ensuring its accuracy, and integrating systems and data stored in disparate parts of the organization. By integrating data and collecting the right data, the impact multiplies.
How to Build a Data-Driven Sales Process
Here are some of the key steps organizations should take to maximize the potential of data analytics.
- Understand Your Goals. Knowing what you’re trying to achieve is essential, allowing you to then gather the data you need to achieve those goals.
- Agree on Data Sources. What analytics do you want to pursue? That depends on the data you collect and how it’s achieved. Companies can waste resources without alignment on sources
- Assemble a Team. Using cross-functional teams to assess data tools and sources, companies can assemble the right personnel to evaluate and select solutions. There are hundreds of tools available and it’s crucial to find solutions that work for your unique business cases
- Invest in Talent. Hiring analytics talent can have immeasurable benefits to your sales team. The top data scientists and engineers are highly sought after, meaning there are resources that will need to be committed to attract, hire and retain the talent that can accelerate the impact of analytics
- Commit to Change. Change management will be critical to the success of any data initiatives. There will be changes in processes, procedures, policies, and how work is done. Take the time to introduce your sales teams to the commitment to data analytics and engage them in frequent conversations about progress. Introducing tools that front-line sales teams do not embrace or understand is a recipe for disaster
Jabio allows you to harness the crucial data embedded in your reviews so you can hone in on your customers and their needs that will drive revenue growth. You will have deeper, data-driven insights propelling your sales initiatives.
To learn more or to get started with Jabio, contact us today.
