What Does It Take to Build and Optimize A Data-Driven Sales Strategy
To drive success in any business area, a data driven process is necessary to fuel the right efforts and to help prioritize next steps and future plans. When it comes to sales and marketing, seasoned leaders don’t just swear by data, they eat, live, breathe it!
A data-driven sales model is one where data is collected using a customized framework to understand more about every sales interaction. The idea or goal is to help personalize sales messaging and future campaigns and to have a team better understand and anticipate the needs of their prospects and customers.
Creating a data-driven sales model is usually the responsibility of the marketing and sales leaders of an organization. This is because, both teams need to prioritize what type of data matters while using centralized campaign information, analytics and automation tools to collect, store and breakdown the most relevant insights. This is the basis of also building better sales-marketing alignment.
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Here’s what B2B leaders should keep in mind to drive a more result oriented approach:
1. Get the right team members and company stakeholders on board
No business strategy, be it ABM, ABX, or GTM can work well unless the right team members and leaders are aligned. To build out a comprehensive data driven sales process, it is important for marketing, sales, revenue and even ops teams to come together, with key stakeholders overseeing all of it.
This step should typically also include other key business functional heads like finance and IT heads to help adopt the right tools, integrate it and create a more customized data sharing and reporting model in which it is easier to understand elements like, performance of marketing initiatives, what marketing initiatives led to lead handovers to sales teams, the status of sales campaigns (broken down by sales rep and region), how marketing supported the nurture of ‘’warm prospects’’, and other such relevant information.
2. Prioritize what type of data matters to you
Every business and every team functions using their own internal processes and framework. Data points that matter to Company A may not be the same priority areas for Company B.
This is why stakeholders and business heads (refer point 1 above) need to cohesively decide on what data points matter most to them.
For Company A, it is possible that email marketing and sales cold outreach metrics are crucial, for Company B that uses direct mail for instance as part of their framework, metrics on which prospects were successfully warmed up further or inspired to engage more with the brand because of the direct mail will matter.
Business leaders across functions and departments need to accordingly dive into their centralized processes and martech-salestech ecosystem to identify what data points matter and then create custom reports through those tools to gather the right insights to fuel future goals and next steps.
3. Assign team members to help collect data and insights from different data points
The team needs to be aligned on tools, processes and strategies to achieve a unified goal.
But, every team member cannot be given the responsibility of collecting the data and creating reports. Having a dedicated resource with strong analytical skills is useful in smoothening this step.
To ensure better transparency and to avoid silos, dedicated members need to be picked department-wise.
4. Weekly team scrubs
Stand ups were a common team collaboration model in agile software development and has slowly gained prominence in B2B marketing and sales too. In this step, team members have daily or weekly scrubs or stand ups to share the relevant data updates and insights and to create a sense of transparency within the organization. Typically this is a process where marketers will share with sales more information on the campaigns, their performance, how many leads they warmed up for sales while sales members will use this opportunity to talk about their challenges, what support they need from marketing, which prospects are warming up and which ones are still not engaged enough.
Deeper, longer monthly meetings can be set up to revisit core strategy and processes and to brainstorm about new methods and ideas while daily or weekly scrubs are used to share the right information with each other at the right time. (Remember, time is money in business!).
Data is the foundation for growth today. But not every marketing and sales team knows how to use the right data at the right time. The secret lies in knowing what to track and what insights to extract at the opportune moment. A well-oiled data strategy will allow a team to offer a more valuable and unified customer and brand journey.
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