Sales has gone digital: 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur on digital channels in the coming years, according to Gartner.
In this new normal, practically every sales team has an array of digital tools at their disposal, each designed to enable smarter, faster and more personalized customer connections. But it’s not all positive news. With more engagements happening digitally, salespeople face a massive influx of information. It can feel impossible for sales teams to keep up now that enterprise data more than doubles every two years.
Without well-integrated systems and a cohesive sales strategy, data sprawl holds back sales teams. Instead of hot leads and signed deals, salespeople encounter negative customer experiences, missed opportunities and incomplete, inaccurate reporting. In today’s sales world, data can be both the tool that wins big and a salesperson’s undoing.
The question is: Does your data support your sales team or is it a hindrance?
Data’s Role in Your Current Sales Pipeline
A smooth, engaging digital customer experience is now your best sales tool – and data plays a critical role in that endeavor, offering deep insight into customer preferences, habits and business needs. Companies that excel at data management not only achieve greater customer satisfaction, but also generate 69% more revenue.
It’s easy to see how we can land at an opposite outcome though. Today, more than 80% of companies point to data sprawl as one of their most critical challenges. When sales data runs out of control, can’t be accessed across your entire organization or is inconsistent across teams, that information becomes a roadblock to performance and revenue. For your sales team, poor data integration leads to generic, disjoined customer interactions and missed business opportunities — hot leads grow cold, fast.
Errors occur at the enterprise-level, too. Across your organization, siloed sales information results in incomplete reporting, inaccurate forecasts and miscommunications between departments. Take sales forecasting, for example. If your company relies on sales projections to drive real-time decisions and investments, leaders from marketing, finance, accounting and HR will find themselves led astray when they’re funneled incorrect forecasts based on disconnected data sources. Is your business included among the many organizations currently using reports that are less than 75% accurate?
That’s where sales operations helps, optimizing disparate insights to better align workflows and teams. This integration improves the sales cycle and empowers your business to analyze data across hundreds of different applications, systems and databases – providing a single source of truth for your entire organization.
Once connected, each department is free to do its best work. Marketing can incorporate customer metrics from your CRM to tailor product messaging, develop resonant case studies and focus on effective advertising channels. Accounting can engineer a smooth transition process for selling, billing and processing a new sale. HR can hire with confidence and your bottom line in mind.
And, of course, sales can lean on marketing automation data to assess and engage highly qualified leads — and then strategically follow-up with the prospects most intent on purchasing. When leads are more quickly captured and converted, bottlenecks are eliminated and no potential revenue is left on the table.
Supercharge Your Data Operations
Integrated data across your organization transforms your sales department into a digital juggernaut – one that’s capable of outsmarting and outperforming competitors.
As you look to supercharge your sales operations program with data and achieve integration at scale, keep in mind these three best practices:
Connection goes beyond the CRM. It’s no longer enough to have a single CRM tasked with performing all sales functions. Rather, sales departments are using more apps and a broader array of platforms than ever before. Whether it’s HubSpot, Zendesk, Salesforce, HotJar or ZoomInfo, each tool comes with unique APIs and connection requirements.
Establish universal data connections to ensure your teams can transfer information from one platform to another – and then access that information with ease no matter the touchpoint used. With more connectivity solutions available on the market, look for software that offers a seamless and straightforward connection with not only your CRM, but all of your digital platforms.
Automation frees up your sales team. Time is money in the world of sales – and manual data processes drain precious resources better spent uncovering new markets, building connections and landing deals. Automation ensures data ends up where it needs to go, making it easier to build healthy data pipelines between sales, marketing and other departments.
Automation tools also allow your teams to leverage customer and prospect data on the tools and platforms that work best for them, without manual input or overreliance on IT support. Look to automation solutions that are easy to use and accessible to various teams within your organization (even across locations, time zones and languages).
Unifying your data analytics unifies your organization. It doesn’t matter whether data is generated in Google Analytics, your email marketing platform or elsewhere – all data should be unified and available when and where you need it.
When data is stored in disparate sources your teams inevitably face challenges like generating accurate reporting. Unifying your data analytics processes allows your entire organization to gain access to accurate, comprehensive sales forecasts and customer information that can be collected once, trusted always and shared with all departments.
Data should empower your teams, not hold them back – and there’s more valuable customer data than ever at your fingertips.
With a robust, integrated data operation, your company can manage data sprawl, optimize its sales pipeline and take full advantage of today’s digital marketplace. So maybe your next hottest lead isn’t a customer at all – but rather an integrated data tool that helps you more confidently connect with your next prospect. And then the next customer, and the one after that.
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