What Is Data-Driven Sales
Data-driven sales involves using data to improve the performance of a sales team. By utilizing data, data-driven sales provides valuable insights that can help business leaders make better decisions and understand what strategies have the greatest potential for success when maximizing revenue. To fully leverage a data-driven sales strategy, businesses collect data from multiple sources, such as customer feedback and reports from sales representatives. This data is then used to identify significant trends, adjust marketing decisions and optimize resources so businesses can operate most efficiently. With data-driven sales, companies can save time and money, measure success accurately, stay competitive in the market, and keep track of their customer’s behaviors more effectively. Ultimately, data-driven sales are essential for businesses looking to increase revenue.
What Is a Data-Driven Sales Strategy
A data-driven sales strategy is exactly what it sounds like: using data to inform all your sales practices and decision-making processes. It can be a simple concept but it’s often more challenging in practice. Being data-driven – rather than just having data – means analyzing the available data and turning the insights into action.
How to Drive Sales With Intent Data
With data-driven sales becoming more important for businesses, intent data is a powerful tool to stay ahead of the curve. Intent data can help inform decision-making and enable marketing and sales teams to act on real-time insights and build strategies that drive nearly double the leads compared to traditional methods. From understanding buying intent across all digital channels and predicting future requests, intent data allows marketers and sellers to tailor their approach to target customers’ unique needs. With access to this data, sales professionals can better identify trends in their target industry and have more meaningful conversations with prospects. Those who leverage data-driven strategies have seen shifts in lead conversions, higher ROI for campaigns, increased customer engagement, and happier customers overall. Utilizing the data available through intent data can be an invaluable asset for any business looking to grow its sales potential.
Collecting intent data is done through a sales engagement platform that connects with your inbox, website, online forms, and in some, also your online content. Because these platforms are connected and programmed to share the data in a summarized way, it’s usually easy to leverage intent data.
How to Use and Implement Data-Driven Sales
So we already talked about how intent data can be helpful for your business; however, what other data is valuable? What we emphasize at Leadinfo is your pipeline data, team performance data, cadence efficiency, sales content insights, and website insights. All the steps that form your sales funnel and the ability to dissect which part of the funnel does not work will also give you great insight into what has to improve.
Implementing this data does not have to be complicated; most sales engagement platforms will help you set up your whole funnel so that everything is set to go when you start using it. For us sales platforms, it’s imperative to get you to value for your money as quickly as possible so that using the sales platform is always a win-win scenario.
Of course, you can always take a free trial to try and figure out how it works on your own; in that case, you’ll need to have some programming knowledge and set up marketing email campaigns if your company will be working with cadences. All data accumulated in the platform, such as team performance and pipeline data, will be available once you start working with the platform.
Managing Your Sales Data
While before, data and tasks were managed in excel sheets and documents, and nowadays, it’s all accumulated in one platform. There are fewer and fewer administrative tasks for SDRs and sales managers. However, sales success is often directly linked to the data your team collects and the key performance indicators they track. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your sales efforts, it’s crucial to have a reliable platform that can store, manage, and analyze your data so you can efficiently set KPIs and follow up with customers on time. Sales teams that focus their energy on managing their sales data, developing KPIs, and following up on time are much more likely to meet their desired outcomes for each customer interaction. Ultimately, this leads to increased sales and improved relationships with customers.
Shifting to Advanced Sales Analytics
With the emergence of advanced sales analytics, businesses can now access a tremendous amount of data to work with to improve their processes. By analyzing pipeline data and team performance in conjunction with efficiency in handling cadences, as well as insights into how effective sales content is together with website engagement, companies can make better decisions that result in a more robust bottom line. All these pieces of the puzzle allow you to optimize and improve generally good sales strategies.
We don’t want to make it sound easy because, eventually, the sales profession has become more analytical than ever, and it’s important to make certain connections between data and the tasks or work environment. Specific conclusions are easily made; for example, if you look at a PDFs heatmap and see nobody scroll down to the second paragraph, your content needs to be more interesting to capture people’s attention. The action; somebody in your team needs to improve it.
How Data Affects Sales Coaching
Managers have gone from an observational position to making more conclusions, not excluding the other. As technology has advanced, so has the way sales and sales management are conducted. Now that digital platforms and services can easily track customer sales information, sales data is easier to capture. These advances have enabled sales managers to gain better insight into the figures they need to follow to identify successes and failures in their teams’ strategies. Sales coaching tools have also benefited from these changes as sales managers can utilize this data to inform more effective training strategies to identify and address improvement areas for their team members. This shift towards more data-driven application of sales tactics has improved efficiency in developing on-the-ground performance and analytical capabilities when evaluating overall market trends. This move towards data-led sales knowledge has ushered in an exciting new era that promises plentiful rewards for savvy business operators.
Wrapping Up
Data-driven sales is revolutionizing how sales teams operate and manage their data. With predictive analytics, advanced sales intelligence, and targeted account-based marketing, businesses now have the tools and insights they need to succeed in a highly competitive market. However, data-driven sales also has its challenges. Managing large amounts of data can be difficult, and shifting to an analytics-based approach can be daunting for some sales teams. But with the right tools and partners, data-driven sales can help your team close more deals and increase efficiency. Are you using data to drive your sales?