Whether you’re trying to sell more during the holidays or just generally hoping to improve your sales performance, maybe now’s the time to have a good hard look at your data.
In this fast-paced world, you can’t simply rely on stock knowledge and instinct to create compelling sales strategies.
Everything must be grounded on data. With the information and insight data gives us, we have the power to make smarter, better decisions.
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But what is the data-driven sales approach, and how do you implement it? Let’s take a deep dive into the concept below!
Defining a Data-Driven Sales Strategy
You may have heard of net promoter score, market penetration, year-over-year growth, and other metrics used to measure sales performance.
Data-driven sales strategies take all of these into account. However, you’re doing more than just collecting and keeping track of the data.
Instead, you will leverage this data and take it elsewhere. It’s basically putting the insights you’ve gained into action.
The emails you’ve sent, the times you’ve made phone calls, the pieces of content you’ve linked to, and the targeted advertising you’ve run—all of this information can help you improve your communication with your prospects and partners.
With the insights, you’ve gathered from assessing which templates generated the most responses, what time of day your sales reps complete the most transactions, what area of the sales funnel requires improvement, and so on, you can expedite your team’s effort and construct a more efficient and effective sales process.
Benefits Of A Data-Driven Sales Strategy
Here’s why a data-driven sales approach is a must for your business:
1) Improved Targeting
The more data you have on your prospects, the more precise your targeting strategy will be. Once you take a deeper look into your ideal customer profile and their age, location, and interests, you can forget about relying on the spray-and-pray method and wasting thousands of dollars on ineffective ads.
2) More Customized Outreach
Data-driven sales can help you better understand your audience, including their pain points. With this, your team can create a more targeted outreach strategy by knowing your audience’s needs from the get-go instead of manually researching information.
3) Higher Sales Team Productivity
Sure, you’ve already built an excellent sales team. However, you can boost their productivity even further with a data-driven sales strategy!
With big data and analytics, you can automate some aspects of your sales representative’s workflow for more effective results.
Building A Data-Driven Sales Strategy
So you want to provide better services to your prospects and maximize your profit with a data-driven sales strategy.
You have to keep in mind, though, that every business must develop its own data-driven sales strategy based on its resources and long-term objectives.
That said, we have listed below five tips you can take to ensure a smooth transfer from your typical sales routine workflow to a data-driven procedure.
1) Ensure That Everyone Is On The Same Page
Getting everyone on board the data train is critical to successfully executing a data-driven sales approach. It’s easier said than done, though. To begin, look within the sales department and do the following:
- Set goals with your team to ensure that everyone is as dedicated to data-driven success as you are.
- Set quantifiable KPIs for your team to track and monitor your progress and results.
- After identifying your objectives, you can start looking for the data you’ll need to achieve them.
Once your sales team is on board, it’s time to persuade the rest of the company, particularly management, to adopt the new strategy.
Getting the executives’ and other departments’ buy-in is integral. It all boils down to conveying the new approach’s core aims and objectives to the rest of the company.
2) Decide Who Will Gather The Data And How They Will Do It
When it comes to data collecting, you must avoid errors as much as possible. Therefore, you should allocate this task to someone in particular. In most companies, the IT department is in charge of data collection, recording, presentation, and storage.
However, you can assign this work to any department if they have the necessary resources. Another option is to create a new role inside a team dedicated to processing sales data.
At this point, the most important thing is to make sure that whoever is in charge of this crucial assignment has all of the necessary tools and expertise to perform it.
When delegating data management to an internal team, keeping data quality in mind is essential. Unfortunately, low-quality sales data has a significant influence.
You’ll risk squandering your team’s time for no reason, spending a lot of money on bad decisions, and even damaging your company’s brand by calling out the wrong individuals.
3) Make The Transition Smoothly and Gradually
Shifting from one strategy to another will take time. Developing a data-driven sales plan means that you will not just devise the ideal strategy on paper but also put it into action.
This might include reorganizing your whole sales department, teaching your employees new technologies from the ground up, measuring their progress, and identifying a weak area in your sales cycle to address.
You’re not going to be able to do all of this overnight. When it comes to data-driven strategies, it’s all about continuous improvement and the search for new solutions.
The more effort you and your team devote to adopting a data-driven sales mindset, the better the results will be. So, don’t rush! Instead, encourage your team to approach data-driven sales one step at a time.
4) Examine and Scale The Data Collected By Your Team
If your company uses customer relationship management (CRM) software, you’ve already begun the data-gathering process.
All of your phone messages, follow-ups, meetings, and leads you’ve converted can simply be combined into a massive dataset to help you get started with a data-driven sales strategy.
The more thoroughly you monitor all of your previous sales contacts, the easier it will be to retrieve high-quality data.
5) Track Your Progress And Keep Going!
The process of collecting sales data never stops. You have to keep searching for more insightful information to enhance your team’s operations.
With what you find, you will be able to define the optimal time and day of the week to send sales emails, the number of contacts required to schedule a discovery call, which particular individuals buy which products, and which sales activities produce the most outstanding results.
To guarantee that your data-driven approach produces results, track your progress using KPIs like conversion rates, client acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, return on investment, etc.
In addition, you can include any additional metrics that are important to your company to verify that all sales operations are progressing well.
Embracing Data To Strengthen Your Sales Strategy
Now more than ever, it has never been simpler to shift to a data-driven sales approach with all of the information and data readily available to you.
With data, you’ll have a much easier time increasing sales productivity, driving higher conversions, optimizing your sales team’s operations, and opening new doors to many business opportunities.
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Author’s Bio: Myrtle Bautista is a journalism major, and a social media marketer and is now exploring freelance writing. She’s fond of anything related to health and wellness, and when she’s not writing, you’ll find her doing long-distance cycling, ultramarathons, hiking, or in a local cafe enjoying a good cold brew.
Featured Image by Mikael Blomkvist on pexels.com