Whether you have a small, medium-sized, or larger business, you can turbocharge your sales growth with data-driven insights. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. But without data to analyze, you’re missing out on a crucial survival strategy!
Unlocking targeted strategies is the secret to re-tuning your sales engine to compete confidently in the current marketplace with any service or product you provide.
So – in this article, we’ll look at how data-driven insights can transform your approach and eliminate guesswork.
Think of sales analytics like your third mind, providing that extra intelligence necessary to make sense of your data so you can stay ahead of the sales curve and consistently grow your sales.
Let’s dive in to some specifics. We’ll take them in order of effectiveness in utilizing data-driven insights to improve your sales.
Personalize Sales Approaches with Data-Driven Insights
Personalization is often the most effective way to utilize data-driven insights for sales growth. Your customers do not want to feel sold to. They want to know you’re thinking about them, their almost unspoken needs, and their preferences. So – when you personalize your sales approaches, you increase customer engagement and conversion.
But it’s the data-driven insights that provide your ability to personalize. Without them you cannot tailor your sales messages and make your prospect feel valued and understood.
Predictive personalization takes this a step further, allowing you to anticipate customer interests and provide timely recommendations.
Netflix’s recommendations based on what you watch are the obvious example. But what about suggesting a newer version of a project management tool your customer bought from you, or a useful API or bolt-on to an existing software suite your customer uses?
This level of personalization fosters customer engagement, loyalty, and ultimately leads to higher conversion rates and new customers. You’ll feel how smoothly your sales engine runs!
Use Data-Driven Insights to Optimize Sales Strategies
Optimizing sales strategies is the next most important aspect of using data-driven insights.
Analyzing data from successful sales interactions allows you to identify patterns and best practices that lead to success.
Example 1
Let’s imagine you sell clothing and accessories online and your data analytics identify that offering personalized product recommendations based on a customer’s previous purchases significantly increases the likelihood of upselling and cross-selling. We mentioned this above.
But – you can optimize this sales strategy by integrating a recommendation engine across your entire website, emails, and mobile app. It results in increased average order value and overall sales.
This kind of scaling of data-driven insights across your organization through machine learning and data analysis enhances not only performance and efficiency but also ROI.
Example 2
You can assist your sales reps to make informed decisions.
Machine learning helps you analyze data from successful sales – sales rep interactions, what was said, how the lead was acquired, how long it took to close the deal, etc. It finds patterns and generates data-driven insights for you. You can then leverage this valuable information and scale it company-wide to assist sales reps and teams to improve sales.
Why not save your sales reps the stress of pursuing bad-fit customers? While not as personalized as the first topic, optimizing sales strategies by avoiding those misfits has a substantial impact on the overall tuned-up performance of your sales engine.
Identify Opportunities with Insights from Data
Identifying sales opportunities is still valuable, but it ranks third in this context. That’s because identifying opportunities is more reactive in nature, whereas personalization and optimization involve proactive measures that can drive sales growth in a more significant way.
You may decide you need a thorough sales assessment. But either way, your sales will grow when you use data-driven insights to recognize prospects with a higher likelihood of making a purchase.
For example, suppose you’re a software company. You collect data on website visitor behavior and see that some prospects have spent a significant amount of time
- engaging with specific product pages,
- watching demo videos, and
- reading customer reviews.
This is gold dust! They are far more likely to make a purchase. And identifying such prospects from data is a key part of keeping your sales funnel in shape!
This kind of data-driven insight means you can prioritize these engaged prospects and target them with personalized follow-up emails or prompt phone calls to convert them into customers successfully.
In addition to recognizing good prospects, leveraging sales analytics can assist you to reconnect with lost sales opportunities through retargeting. It also creates new opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.
Where to Find This Data to Analyze!
If you want to unlock sales growth and fine-tune your sales engine, you need to gather data. You cannot get data-driven insights from data you don’t have! Try looking here:
1 Website: Data on inbound visitors is there for the taking. Learn more about them: where they go, how long they stay on a particular area or page, what are the most popular landing pages, etc. Identify subsets of your target market – those most likely to convert. This data can also provide insight into how best to optimize your website pages and sales strategies.
2 Social Media: What are people saying about your business? Social listening and brand monitoring helps you identify sales opportunities and come up with improved sales strategies. Data from your social media pages provides insight into your customer’s interests, preferences, and language. This will ensure your campaigns are more targeted and that you spend efficiently on customer acquisition.
3 CRM: Your CRM is your treasure trove of both qualified and unqualified leads. Take time to analyze its data and gain from the insights available.
The above is all about internal data there for the picking.
But the role of external market research is also important here. Are you aware of what’s going on in your market, your industry, and the factors currently influencing customer choices? Frequently and actively gathering such data from the wider world will help inform your choice of data analysis – whether it should be descriptive or predictive to best serve your sales growth.
Data Privacy and Ethical Data Usage in Sales Practices
Finally, pay adequate attention to data privacy and the ethical usage of data in sales. Ignoring these can have unfortunate and possibly expensive consequences.
So – don’t forget to create the necessary security processes and access rules in order to
- comply with GDPR and HIPPA regulations, for example, and
- maintain the level of data protection your customers require of you.
360 Consulting Can Help with Data Insight and Deployment
If you’re ready to harness the power of data-driven insights to rev up your sales engine and unlock a new level of sales growth, we can help! At 360 Consulting, we’re committed to helping you leverage data analytics to best advantage. Call us today and let’s talk.