Why Data-Driven Sales Teams Are So Advantageous

Modern business is a numbers game where sales managers carefully monitor activities and analyze the behavior of their prospects. According to the report, as much as 90% of companies already use two or more lead enrichment tools to learn more about prospects.

If you still haven’t adopted the state of the art sales platforms, you need to ask yourself one question: Why data-driven teams are so advantageous and prosperous?

There is obviously something very important about data analytics tools that help agile businesses thrive, so you should learn more about it and figure out how to take new technologies to your advantage.

Our goal is to prove the value of a data-driven sales strategy by showing you its seven major benefits. Let’s check it out!

1. Data Analytics Improves Sales Planning

If you are generating sales plans based on sheer intuition and guesswork, rest assured you are making a mistake. A survey reveals that high-performing sales teams are 1.5 times more likely to base forecasts on data-driven insights.

What does it mean in practice?

The main idea of data-focused sales forecasts is to set objectives that are realistic and challenging at the same time. Data analytics tools can help you to come up with ambitious key performance indicators (KPIs) suitable for every sales agent individually.

It’s not a generic approach, but rather an in-depth planning strategy that takes into account numerous sales metrics and parameters. As such, data analytics guarantees to maximize efficiency without overloading your sales reps.

2. It’s Easier to Analyze and Rank Prospects

Do you know that at least 50% of the prospects chased by salespeople are not a good fit? The worst thing you can do in sales business is to go for unverified leads who are highly unlikely to end up completing the purchase, but it turns out that many sales agents actually do it on a regular basis.

This is where data-driven companies drastically outperform traditional sales teams because they can analyze and rank prospects much better and more accurately. They do it based on numerous criteria such as:

• The history of purchases
• Previous interactions of sales agents with a given prospect
• Prospects’ positions within the sales funnel

These and many other parameters can tell you a lot about any given consumer, but you can hardly detect it without the use of data management platforms.

3. Sales Pitches Are Getting Personalized

Modern buyers don’t want to be treated as members of the herd, but rather as unique individuals with highly specific traits and characteristics. If you do not pay attention to their personal interests, you are not going to achieve the results you are hoping for. 

Jake Gardner, a sales analyst at the law essay writing service, claims that personalization plays a crucial role in contemporary sales-oriented companies:

“Instead of sending generic promo messages, you have to tailor a sales pitch so as to indulge every prospect individually.”

What does it really mean?

The answer lies in data analytics as you need to adjust sales strategies according to prospects’ purchasing habits, income levels, interests, locations, and other factors that influence their purchasing decisions.

4. Customized Marketing Boosts Upselling Achievements

Personalization goes a long way, which means that it extends beyond sales activities and enters the marketing realm, too. And as you all know already, sales and marketing are meant to support and augment each other.

It’s an extremely important trend because nearly 80% of consumers say they are only likely to engage with an offer if it has been personalized to reflect previous interactions the consumer has had with the brand. Proactive companies understand it very well and so they tailor marketing campaigns to cross-sell and upsell products or services.

You can notice personalized marketing in action every time you visit a website and see ads promoting products similar to the one you’ve bought recently. Such a high level of customization would be impossible without real-time data insights coming from advanced analytics platforms.

5. Internal Sales Analysis

Another thing you can do with data management tools is to conduct internal sales analyses and pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your team.

The platform gives you countless opportunities to explore the operating efficiency of your sales unit and also to perfectly understand each segment of your business strategy.

Here’s one way to divide your internal sales analysis:

• Analyze sales results by products: This is the best way to analyze the entire portfolio and identify top-performers and underachievers in your SKU base.
• Analyze sales results by agents: Of course, almost every manager will seize the chance to analyze the results of individual sales agents. Although you don’t want to put too much pressure on your staff, it is always good to know the most and least productive people on your team.
• Analyze sales results by branches: In case you are managing a bigger team with multiple units, you might as well focus on specific branches during data research.

Here’s a dashboard example that analyzes car sales data by Region, Sales Rep and Segment:

6. Spot New Trends with Data Analytics

If you focus on present-day activities too much, you can hardly keep pace with proactive competitors in the long run. This is why we suggest using data analytics to figure out customers’ needs and predict future trends.

Data management platforms are able to accumulate huge volumes of data and you should definitely use it for trend detection. For instance, users’ social media comments, online reviews, email complaints, and many other sources of information can serve as a valuable indicator of things to come.

That way, you can prepare your sales team on time and be ready to answer customers’ requests as soon as the new trend starts dominating the market.

7. Management by Exception

Micro-management is not welcome in sales teams because all sales reps should be given the chance to act independently. However, sometimes a manager needs to step up and take over when results fail to match the company’s expectations.

This is called Management by Exception (MBE), a style of business management that focuses on identifying and handling cases that deviate from the norm, recommended as best practice by the project management method. As it turns out, data analytics tools have the greatest power to identify deviations and highlight the need for MBE.

The Bottom Line

How do you distinguish between promising and irrelevant prospects? Can you recognize new sales opportunities in a timely manner? Is there enough potential to grow your customer base?

The answers to these and many other questions make the difference between good and bad sales teams, but it turns out that companies with advanced data analytics almost always perform better than their more traditional competitors.

If you want to give your sales strategy a big boost, you better adopt a data-driven approach to the business. It will give open up fresh perspectives and help you win over more clients sooner than you think!

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About the Author

Justin is a marketing specialist and blogger from Leicester, UK. When not working and rooting for Leicester FC, he likes to discuss new trends in digital marketing and share his own ideas with readers on different blogs and forums. Currently, he is working as a content marketer at law essay writing service and write my essay.