This post is a guest contribution from Lewis Robinson, freelance business consultant and marketing writer.
In today’s technology and business world, sales and marketing departments are experiencing massive technology-driven transformation. Big data is impacting sales and marketing like never before, allowing professionals to more clearly see the effectiveness of their programs. Thanks to expanded data visualization, sales and marketing pros can use data to analyze and interpret customer behavior.
But, there is often a downside. For every marketing application that goes live, there’s the potential for the creation of a new data silo. The outcome is low-quality, disconnected marketing data that has a negative impact on lead-to-revenue processes. To keep this from happening, it’s important to have control over your data. In this blog, you’ll learn more about how to gain control and use big data to your advantage for sales and marketing.
Understand the impact of quality sales and marketing data
Every day, sales and marketing professionals encounter a dizzying amount of data from various external and internal sources. That data comes from CRMs, third-party websites, social media sites, and several other places. It’s not just the amount of data that is increasing; the nature of incoming data is changing, too. Data can have unprecedented effects on how sales and marketing teams conduct business processes, convert new and incoming leads, and perform regular customer outreach, but the data needs to be of good quality in order to be used effectively.
By analyzing quality sales and marketing data, domestic and international businesses can use their data insights to add value to products and services. This, in turn, leads to an increase in the number of loyal customers. Eventually, loyalty leads to more sales, which means higher profit levels.
Use advanced analytics for simplicity and speed
Access to data is growing at an extremely fast rate, which can pose challenges for sales and marketing teams at all levels as they work to stay organized and efficient. However, there are technological solutions that allow for the creation of better, more relevant interactions with customers. Businesses can achieve better responses by employing machine learning, natural language mining, and predictive analytics to process large amounts of data.
Investing in business intelligence tools can help organizations achieve better interactions with customers. Employing advanced analytics protects employees from analytical complexity and speeds sales and marketing efforts.
Use data to identify new customers and retain existing ones
Businesses can use insights from a vast array of technology, devices, and channels as data sources to understand key steps in the customer journey. Using data collected from these sources can help businesses better understand their ideal customer’s consideration and buying process while identifying and converting new leads. Organizations can also use data to understand and retain their existing customers.
For example, a B2B company may decide to invest time and money into social media to spot new sales opportunities. Businesses also may decide to use SEO technology and data to capture new customers and understand their buying processes.
Identify valuable opportunities
You need a lot of data to identify new business opportunities. However, data is not going to be of much help on its own. In order to get the maximum benefit from the data you collect, you need to make sure your data is of good quality, and it needs to be accompanied by good analytics. By collecting relevant data and employing good strategies for analyzing that data, you’ll be able to more clearly see the valuable opportunities that lie ahead.
Choose a powerful data collection platform
A powerful data collection platform like FormAssembly can help business leaders, especially those in sales and marketing, drive better decisions and collect more accurate data. Be sure to check out the eBook, Web Forms for Sales and Marketing Teams, to learn more about revamping your big data processes.
Guest Contribution By: Lewis Robinson is a business consultant specializing in CRM and sales. He has founded multiple corporations and currently freelances as a writer and personal consultant.
