How to Take a More Scientific Approach to Sales

Staff WritersPredictive MarketingSales & MarketingSales Engagement

By STS Staff Writer On Jul 1, 2022

Has it ever happened to you that you followed a marketing or sales approach and it failed? Later you found out someone else used the same approach and achieved success. How did that happen?

Did the other marketer or salesperson use some magic elixir that worked for then and not you? Let us see the possibilities here.

The difference is:

You blindfolded yourself and implemented a marketing or sales tactic that you read about and you stuck to them without enough customization
You blindly tried something like Instagram marketing as it is one of the latest trends
You started blog posting because every other brand is doing it

It is time to stop the pray and spray approach in marketing and sales and deep dive into methods that are backed with accurate calculations.

It is time that you have a focused marketing and sales framework to predict which tactics will work for your business and individual situation. That doesn’t mean you stop reading about the latest marketing and sales trends, you must use those insights to dovetail future plans at your level. It is important to devise a systematic and scientific approach for your digital marketing and sales strategy.

1. Prioritize your marketing-sales strategies

Out of the thousands of online marketing and sales strategies for you to try, you need a way to focus only on the best ones for your business.

2. Run 80/20 experiments

Similar to your science class, you need to run experiments to verify your hypothesis in marketing and sales as well. Following a scientific approach will help you run quick tests much before you add them to your marketing budget.

3. Know what to tweak

Every business is different, regardless of your knowledge as a marketer, you cannot simply copy-paste your competitor’s strategy to yours. It is important to make unique improvements for your business.

4. Scale your marketing

Once you are through an effective marketing strategy after all the tests and tweaks, you can scale your marketing and sales tactics to get into the big league

Having a scientific approach usually means:

1. Data-driven approach

Every marketer or salesperson today needs to think like a scientist and to make their hypothesis right, they need data. Data remains at the core of the marketing or sales-as-a-science movement.

While marketing as an art in the past was purely based on the gut and intuitions of a marketer, modern scientific marketing and selling is purely based on accurate data collected from various consumer touchpoints.

The digital environment gives us access to a generous amount of data, technologies help us analyze and leverage such data. Finally, this approach improves practicality across a wide range of marketing or sales decisions.

2. Empirical pattern recognition & model building

The second principle of marketing or sales-as-a-science builds upon data-driven decision-making. It also aims to use data to organize activities and customer information in a more quantitative and automated fashion. Marketing or sales-as-a-science has:

Orders identify, classify, and clarify prospects, customers, and influencers.
It goes beyond the handful and bulky consumer segmentation.
It drills deeply to point to more specific personas and micro-segments with a granularity, which is feasible only through technology.

Marketers as scientists take a deeper view of the marketplace, investigate it along with all the deep-down species of customers. Modern marketers and sales people are building models such as mental models, data models, and software models to seek patterns of consumer behavior and empirically validate them.

3. Controlled experimentation

No doubt, the real work of a scientist is to run experiments; controlled experiments. The steps are:

Creating a hypothesis
Test the hypothesis
Accept or reject (refine) the hypothesis.

Marketers can run tests without hypothesis similar to Google’s infamous 41 shades of blue experiment. However, having meaningful hypothesis helps to channel experiments towards useful business goals and to build validated learning; a hypothesis can come from anywhere, but largely, they come from the data collected. It is this smart hypothesis helping data-driven decision-making and validating the kind of marketing or sales models.

4. Cross-pollinating ideas

The fourth principle of marketing/sales science is embracing ideas from other scientific disciplines useful in marketing and selling like sociology, biology, psychology, economics, neuroscience, and more.

Scientific marketers or salespeople are mainly interested in science; they are always open to learning. As they come across new learnings and findings, they try to find how these new disciplines apply to their marketing plan.

Final Word

For a successful marketing or sales as-a-science experiment, it is important to:

Be transparent with your data
Save dashboards for future reference
Know that it is difficult to measure and evaluate everything.