Data is, without a doubt, a gold mine for sales and marketing. B2B buyers now conduct most of the purchasing process on their own online. That’s good, because it lets us collect more and more information about their activity. This data allows us to get inside the heads of prospects, see exactly what they are doing and when, and make detailed assumptions about their intent and likely next moves. It can tell us which lead is ready to buy, which customer is ready to defect, or which sales rep is ready for an uncomfortable conversation with their manager.
Where data can get us into trouble is when we blindly trust it, when we treat sales and marketing — and business in general — as a pure science instead of an artful, or even gut-driven process. In the age of big data, marketing from the gut is considered an obstacle to success. Big data has been held up as the potential savior of all business ills — but how far from the truth that is.
Data is a resource that can drive our business, to be sure, but it’s up to us to make the decisions. Data always tells us something, but it never tells us what to do. That’s where we humans come in, to discern the insights hidden in the data.
Data is the currency of growth
When we say data, we recognize that it is so much more than contacts and company sizes, and can come from many different sources.
Think of it this way: Data is the currency that B2B companies use to buy growth. We’d like to take credit for that idea, but it’s from an April 2016 Forrester Research report, “A Customer-Obsessed Operating Model Demands A Close Partnership With Your CIO.” In it, they state, “Data is the currency of the digital age. With the right data — potentially combining your data with data from other personal value ecosystem players — you can create new sources of customer value.”
If you want to maximize the value of your data, sales and marketing have to treat data as a common language that we both agree upon and share. It’s constantly changing, so maintaining one common, shared system makes both our jobs easier.
Determining data’s value
Not all data is useful. In fact, some data is noise — or it’s flat-out wrong. As you evaluate all of your tools, look at every accompanying dataset from these four perspectives:
- Is the data accurate? According to SiriusDecisions, the average B2B database is 25 percent inaccurate at any given time. Accuracy is more than just correctness. Accuracy also conveys completeness. Be sure you have all of the data you need about a contact and their company to help sales and marketing be effective.
- Is the data current? The data you have right now is just a snapshot in time. It’s up to you to determine how current your data has to be for your unique business. We’ve found that, regardless of your business or industry, a major goal to strive for is having data that is current to at least the most recent quarter.
- In what context is the data useful? Context generally has to be interpreted. For example, knowing that a lead downloaded your product data sheet today is marginally useful. But also knowing that, within the past week, they looked at your services web page and visited your blog post on your company’s financing options likely signals that they are close to a buying decision.
- Is the data actionable? Good data gives you a better ability to separate the signals from the noise. Noise delays your actions while true signals prompt you to take an action. In the context of sales and marketing alignment, an action is, at a fundamental level, the steps you take toward closing or disqualifying a lead.
Data lets you get away from opinions and feelings to focus on facts. When sales and marketing are in alignment, when your data is in alignment, there
is a single source of truth on which both teams can agree. Using data as the common language fosters collaboration and improves communication.
In the end, it all comes back to growth. Good data helps both sales and marketing better target, engage, close and grow customers, and that leads to growth.
Tracy Eiler is chief marketing officer and Andrea Austin is the vice president of enterprise sales at InsideView, a software as a service company that gleans insights and relationships from business information.. This article is excerpted from their book “Aligned to Achieve: How to Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams into a Single Force for Growth,” published in 2016 by Wiley.
