How Sales and Marketing Teams Can Benefit from Big Data
For those working in sales and marketing, it’s vitally important to have a deep understanding of the needs of customers. Without understanding customer demographics and behavior, it’s impossible to create marketing campaigns for a specific audience. A lack of knowledge about customer needs can also make it impossible to effectively use data.
Leading business app marketplace, GetApp, recently surveyed nearly 500 small and midsize business leaders to find out how they use data to make decisions within their business.
Data Analysis Shows Promise in Marketing
When it comes to data analysis, there are promising signs for marketing and sales teams. The research found that 65% of marketers and 55% of sales leaders currently use Google Analytics in order to analyze data. Use of this tool means that sales and marketing leaders have access to conversion analytics, anomaly detection, and proactive alerts, and therefore can gain much more accurate insights from data.
Despite the widespread use of these tools, there is still a need for support when it comes to making decisions based on data analysis. Of the industries surveyed, those working in marketing are most likely to say they have the right data and insights to make decisions. The story was not the same for those in sales, where there are still some challenges to overcome.
59% of sales leaders said they need some sort of data visualization to help them with insights, and 42% didn’t feel confident in their processes for ensuring data quality and integrity. This can be linked to the fact that sales teams were also the least likely to have data scientists, showing that companies with data scientists are more confident in their decision-making abilities. All of this supports the theory that sales and marketing teams could strongly benefit from increased collaboration.
How to Boost Data Collaboration
The key takeaway from the research was that those working in sales and marketing would benefit from collaborating on data analysis. By making just a few simple adjustments, this type of data collaboration can be made possible.
Find the Right CRM Vendor
Real-time data is key to good data analysis, therefore finding a customer relationship management (CRM) vendor with real-time data capabilities allows sales and marketing teams to react without having to wait for reporting. Many advanced CRM tools use artificial intelligence to analyze details much faster than a human can.
Many businesses already use a CRM; if your business is one of them, it can be important to ensure you’re making the most of its business intelligence features.
Share Data Via CRM Software
The next step is simple, sales and marketing teams should share and use the same CRM data. Sales and marketing teams tend to use large amounts of data, this can mean teams are working from different reference points and lead to miscommunication.
Using a single CRM system will help teams reference the same dataset where possible and help pull together their common goals. For example, a marketing team can trace sales back to specific ads, helping them analyze their success.
This software should also allow sales and marketing teams to upload their own internal data, provided it is of the quality needed to add value.
Train Your Own Analysts
The need for real-time decision making based on data means that there is increased pressure on those working in sales and marketing to inform stakeholders how to work with data analysis and make decisions based on it. This data is useless without using it to gain insights.
A solution is to train stakeholders to perform their own individual analysis. Those working within sales and marketing can benefit from training certain stakeholders to use the dataset within their CRM and glean their own insights.
Leaders within sales and marketing simply need to identify the stakeholders whose input they need, before sharing benchmark data with them. This way the pressure can be taken off them and real-time decision-making can be facilitated.
While many businesses may practice data analysis, utilizing it to its full potential is a different matter. As shown by the research, both sales and marketing display great potential for the effective use of insights from data analysis, using the right tools and collaborating effectively on this could hold the key to success.