Virginie Dupin, VP of marketing EMEA at PROS, explains how data analytics can help sales and marketing work together to make closing business faster, easier and smarter
Most businesses today are united in a common challenge: how to grow profitability and stay ahead of the competition. The way to improve sales effectiveness in pursuit of that goal is by exploring the opportunity surrounding big data. Much of the current attention around big data focuses on analytics and collecting information to glean customer insight from social media behaviour. To me, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
In B2B markets, insights on customer behaviour and buying patterns derived from big data and predictive analytics can be used right across the sales and marketing process. This includes making more robust sales decisions and enabling a scientific approach to pricing and selling, as opposed to pure gut instinct. Big data can be used to segment customers and allow you to deliver more compelling propositions. Ultimately it can help your sales teams perform better by identifying where they have the best opportunities to win and help them meet their quota. It means closing business faster, easier and smarter.
However, big data is not the answer in and of itself. Maximising its potential value requires buy-in across the whole organisation and across every discipline. An organisational meeting of the minds needs to be addressed first: the gap that often exists between sales and marketing.
Here are five practical steps that B2B marketers can take that will enable them to embrace data analytics to help them work more closely and effectively with sales:
1. Take ownership
Don’t abdicate the big data opportunity to another department. Take ownership and ensure you make the most of existing information. Make data analytics part of your responsibilities and identify a specific project where it can be applied.
2. Connect the dots
Make the link between sales and marketing knowledge to expose a huge avenue of data. For sales and marketing departments that align operations and share both knowledge and data, the rewards can be significant. Working together, the teams can combine information from multiple touch points to create a more comprehensive profile of each customer. B2B marketers can then use this data to achieve more accurate targeting for their campaigns and their sales teams.
3. Understand the customer
In a big data environment, beware of over-simplifying customer behaviour. Ensure you correctly segment customer types, which are often not the most obvious. Explore past sales data analytics to segment markets with a multitude of key characteristics. Sales and marketing teams also can collaborate to identify more effective upsell and cross-sell opportunities, targeting prospects that are likely to bring in more value and maximise the value of existing customers through smarter pricing and selling strategies.
In highly competitive market sectors with wafer-thin margins, capitalising on these insights can make a significant difference to profitability. Look at the impact of Amazon’s acclaimed: ‘Customers who bought this item also bought that item’ recommendation engine. This kind of value can also be created in B2B sales. Connecting the dots between customer buying behaviour and big data means executives can cross-sell and upsell similarly to Amazon, crafting persuasive offers to maximise the chance of securing new business.
4. Cultural change
Connecting software and analytics is only the starting point; the real opportunity is about changing mindsets across the business. It’s more than just sharing data between sales and marketing departments – cultural change is required throughout the entire organisation.
Individual departments often find hidden insights buried in their CRM or marketing automation platforms, especially when connected to data held in other internal systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications or external market data. Connecting the dots between these different applications typically reveals new selling opportunities that otherwise would remain hidden.
5. Work together
Failure in alignment doesn’t result from a failure in technology; recognise the effort needed in re-engineering organisational culture. A closely aligned working relationship allows a sales force to concentrate on the most favourable deals and pitch with a greater degree of certainty. It’s all about optimising opportunities and removing the reliance on the gut-feel proposal. This helps sales professionals conduct negotiations from a position of strength based on accurate customer data, and avoid the taboo of leaving money on the table in the negotiation process. At a grass-roots level, each individual sales executive is empowered with the prescriptive insights to be effective.
In simple terms, what is the impact of this cross-discipline thinking? I believe that through combined and focused efforts, sales and marketing can deliver a more consistent, commercially beneficial customer experience over the entire sales process while improving effectiveness. When sales and marketing teams work in partnership, the benefits from big data analytics can be fully realised. But be prepared to push for cross-departmental alignment. With sales and marketing alignment becoming the norm, not the exception, you’ll increase the chances of big data opportunities delivering a significant competitive advantage that helps you outperform in your market and your business to improve profitability.
