Are you staying up-to-date on the latest trends in the B2B world? If so, you’ve most likely heard the buzz about how you can increase revenue by becoming a data-driven organization. Becoming a data-driven organization is trending around the B2B industry – and for a good reason! Statistics show that data-driven B2B businesses are 19 times more likely to be profitable than businesses that rely on instincts.
Being data-driven is important when you are making sales-related decisions. Sales data analysis is crucial in order for organizations to maximize their sales capacity and meet customer needs in a competitive industry. As an increasing number of organizations become more familiar with making data-driven sales management decisions, their margin of error is becoming smaller. If you rely solely on instinct, it leaves you vulnerable to being disrupted by competitors who are more data-savvy, no matter what industry you’re in.
A well-designed sales analytics program can help you to increase your revenue and profit margins by equipping your B2B business to make better decisions. We have compiled a list of ways that demonstrate how sales data analysis can help your organization turn intelligence into revenue by becoming data-driven.
Improve your value propositions
Taking a data-driven sales approach will ensure that you are always saying the right thing at the right time to the right customer.
A value proposition is defined as the feature(s) that makes your brand and the products or services you offer attractive. Many businesses find developing effective value propositions that convince each segment of customers that they target to invest in their marketing and sales activities to be challenging. There is a difference between a company that is data-driven and a company that isn’t. Companies that are not data-driven typically take a one-size-fits-all sales approach. Data-driven companies test many different value propositions on different customer segmentation to identify which value proposition is the most effective.
Collecting and cross-referencing data points allows B2B businesses to build value propositions that are personalized and tailored to the needs of their customer segments.
Refine your product list
Are there any products that you offer that do not perform well or don’t bring much revenue to your business? By analyzing your sales data, you can gain insight into how you can cut costs and improve the products you offer.
Once you identify products that are underperforming, you can investigate why they are under-performing. Ask your customers for feedback, and use that feedback to refine your product list so it can better suit their needs.
You might even find that some products are better off being removed from your list of offers if they are no longer worth producing or supporting. Removing underperforming products can help your business to decrease costs and focus more on the products that increase revenue and profits.
Be able to quickly adapt to changes
If you want to remain competitive in your industry, you must be willing to quickly adapt to any changes in the marketing conditions, trends, and your customers’ demands. The B2B industry is a fast-moving business environment. A thoroughly designed data analytics program could well become what sets you apart from your competitors. How? By allowing you to quickly identify your customers’ needs and deliver personalized solutions to their problems faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost than your competitors.
Predict future sales accurately
Among its other benefits, sales data analysis can help you to accurately predict your future sales based on historical data. Historical data gives you a precise picture of how much your team should be earning within a certain time frame. Leaders that use historical data to forecast what their revenue will be can then use that knowledge to administer resources and manage more efficiently. Additionally, historical sales data allows you to compare how your organization is performing with industry averages to measure if you’re on the right track.
Assess your performance
Let’s look at how data can help you assess workforce performance. Sales managers can create a sales forecast for each sales representative using reliable data and compare their current performances to how they’ve performed in the past. If a manager finds that a sales representative has abnormally low performance, they can shift their focus into coaching and training that sales rep on how to do better. If a sales rep has a performance that is unexpectedly high, sales managers can reward that representative’s hard work and ask them to relay to the rest of the team their methods and strategies.
Data from your CRM (customer relationship management) allows you to see how your sales reps spend their time, and which activities have the most impact when it comes to closing deals and generating revenue. Collecting and analyzing sales data grants managers access to being more efficient at correcting any performance issues, recognizing their team’s work, motivating their team, and setting realistic sales goals.
Target your most profitable customers
Did you know data can help to improve your targeting when it comes to advertising? With data, you can effectively duplicate your most profitable customers, and in turn avoid wasting your money on targeting customers that would not be a good fit for your business. Using the data that you have found for your most profitable customers, you can target and win customers with similar behaviors, characteristics, and spend patterns, ultimately maximizing your ROI.
Gradually, you can gather data on which types of marketing collateral are the most effective at converting specific types of customers. Some customers may prefer short and concise sales presentations, while others may prefer in-depth demonstrations of your products or services.
All of this data can be used to improve your targeted marketing and sales efforts, cut down the sales cycle, and significantly increase your return on investment.
Making the switch from instinct-lead to being a data-driven business is ascending in priority in the B2B industry. Being data-driven, especially for sales management, gives organizations the benefit of maximizing their sales capacity and meeting customer needs in a competitive industry, while maintaining a smaller margin of error. Are you looking for a well-designed sales analytics program? Let us help you get started! Contact our team today!
