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Business-to-Business organizations should be heavily engaged in sales decision-making processes. To do so, they must first understand how to effectively exploit sales data. For several years, sales and data have been inextricably linked. You simply cannot succeed in sales until you’ve got data, and you cannot have precise, significant information unless you make effective sales!
What you’ll learn in this article:
In short, sales data is any information that can be collected from sales operations and it can be used to make more effective choices. Sales data can offer meaningful insights regarding the efficacy of a sales force, assist in the development of better tactics, and enhance organizational decision-making. The data can be divided into two categories:
External data: This includes any information collected about prospects, such as demographics, interests, behavior, engagement, and activity as they move through the sales funnel.
Internal sales data: This includes deal attributes like product type, pricing, and sales rep performance metrics.
Together, external and internal data inform deal actions, gauge progress toward sales targets or other key performance indicators (KPIs), and provide insights to improve your business's sales operations.
Sales data allows you to measure all activities related to your sales efforts. This helps you determine performance and set targets to guide the sales team toward growth. It also reveals risks in your pipeline, allowing you to address them before they escalate, and helps identify opportunities to maximize.
Putting in real life examples, with sales data you can:
Sales data can be categorized into data on individual customers and companies (like demographic and buying behaviors) and internal sales performance data (collected during the sales process). Here's a closer look:
Demographic data: The fundamentals attributes of your customers, such as name, age, gender, role, location, and contact information. This information is the foundation of the buyer persona, which can be used to help target your prospecting and marketing.
Firmographic data: Is the company version of customer demographic data like name, location, size, industry, and revenue and it also allows you to target your prospecting and marketing efforts.
Technographic data: All of the technologies and tools that target buyers utilize in their operations, daily work, or personal lives. This data helps you identify any functionality gaps or challenges so you can offer solutions that align with their needs.
Chronographic data: This dataset typically includes the number of new hires in a given period, funding rounds, and acquisitions. By keeping an eye on these changes, you’ll be better positioned to spot opportunities to prospect.
Intent and behavior data: This is the goldmine of prospecting. It spotlights the kinds of content your target buyers consume, how/where they consume it, and what products they’ve expressed interest in. Using this data, you can create a clear picture of potential customer needs.
Deal data: Information about a sale that emerges during the sales process, like desired product or service, pricing structure, and customer feedback on feature gaps.
Sales data helps you sell better, but how exactly do you find and collect this information?
The key is to invest in a CRM that serves as your single source of truth, tracking all customer engagement and automating data collection to keep your information up to date. Understand better:
Invest in a CRM with analytics: With data centralized, you can create interactive dashboards, enabling real-time views of customer behavior and rep performance for informed and rapid decision-making.
Automate data collection in your CRM: Set up automation within your CRM that captures data from customer interactions and inputs it into deal records in real time. This eliminates a ton of manual work for reps and ensures that every piece of information is up-to-date.
Integrate other tool data into your CRM: Pull in data from the rest of your tech stack using software integrations provided by your CRM, individual tools, or your own technical team.
Once you’ve collected your data, it’s time to interpret and take action on that. First, define your specific business goals or targets. Then, identify KPIs that will help you achieve those goals. Last, map your sales data to those KPIs within your CRM, so you can track progress toward your goals.
Define measurable business goals: Set business goals that balance your team with growth (a stretch goal to increase company profits).
Identify the KPIs for your sales team: Identify the KPIs that you can use to gauge progress toward your overarching goals.
Map your sales data to KPIs: In this case, you would combine each rep’s total sales of the new product, in addition to the opportunity type (new business vs. add-on), to reveal progress toward your monthly sales KPI.
Visualize your data to make it easy to interpret: Utilize visualization tools like sales dashboards updated in real time to make it easy to track progress toward goals at a glance. Are sales reps successful in selling the new product to their existing customer base or new customers? By tracking this in real-time, you can adjust your sales strategy quickly to meet your goal.
Sales data does more than provide information you can turn into trackable metrics. it lights the path toward action. A data-driven sales staff could save your business time, money, and effort – assets that you don’t want to waste. Data in sales can additionally be used to coordinate the sales force and improve the process of selling, maximizing income and impact on the business.
Product Owner - Sales Journey
