Successful sales teams consider data as an indispensable element of their strategy. Data plays a critical part in streamlining the sales process, understanding what’s working in sales, and improving prospect targeting. A data-driven sales approach can set your team up to reach your goals for every stage of the sales process, be it prospecting, nurturing, or closing.
It’s not enough to have the data you need to increase sales. You also need to know how to use and analyze it. Modern sales teams use prospect or customer data collected from various sources such as their CRM, website, apps, social media, email marketing database, and call logs to power their campaigns. For example, they could use website visitor intelligence data to know who is visiting their business website and which company they work at.
There are more ways in which sales teams can leverage data to make the most of their sales efforts. Let’s look at some of the best ones discussed below.
4 Strategies to Use Data for Stronger Sales Growth
1. Don’t underestimate the power of data to build domain expertise
Using domain expertise may be an old-school sales practice, but it adds great value to your sales process. Ignoring domain expertise can prove costly to your organization, especially when you’re selling to a particular industry or your product is highly specialized and tailored to a specific market.
Domain experts are the best people on your sales team who can:
- Sell to prospects in their own industry language
- Better understand their unique needs and challenges
- Become their trusted advisors and predict their future goals
- Easily fill in customer success roles of your organization
A sales head needs to provide the resources and training required to increase domain expertise in your team. Help your sales reps to know the ins and outs of your and your competitor’s products. Deeply research your prospects, their industry, the inner workings of their business, and the solutions they’re considering.
All of these activities require data and the knowledge to effectively use it. Not to forget, leveraging data or employing a data-driven approach is key to building domain expertise. It helps increase domain expertise and strengthens your sales team’s reputation by adding relevancy to their prospecting efforts.
2. Be sure to use the secret weapon ‘data science’ to increase sales success
Data science makes selling easy by helping you pick out actionable insights from your prospect or customer data. Use it to your sales team’s advantage by enabling them to take intelligent, data-backed sales decisions. You can also use it to scale up your sales operations, clarify your sales data, engage prospects faster, and close more deals.
You can train your sales reps to become data scientists. Or, you can use data consulting services, like Data Sales Science, to understand how to use the datat you already have effectively and better understand what data you need to succeed. These services can also help you with data-driven advice, data analysis reports, statistical analysis, and clearly defined benchmarks and metrics to improve sales success.
Data science can make your sales approach strategic by helping you interpret your data, create sales messages tailored to target accounts, identify key market segments, select the right prices, and predict sales opportunities. It’s worth investing in educating your sales reps on data science to take your sales to the next level.
3. Catch intent signals or analyze the online behavior of prospects to boost sales
When you know which prospects are ready to buy or actively conducting online research on a specific topic, it becomes easy to reach them early in their buyer’s journey and direct the conversation. With buyer intent data, you can:
- Accurately score leads
- Create targeted sales messages
- Personalize sales outreach
- Shorten sales cycles
- Reduce churn and focus on active buyers
Intent data can deliver up to 4X pipeline expansion. Use it to pursue the right accounts at the right time and increase win rates. Furthermore, you can prioritize leads, identify key decision-makers, and support your account-based marketing campaign using surge intent data. Intent data is best used along with technographic and firmographic data to effectively engage with best-fit accounts using the right context and talking points.
4. Gather data using sales intelligence tools to reduce prospecting time
LinkedIn is one of the top sources of sales leads. For example, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid tool that helps extend your reach outside your direct network, gives you useful sales insights, and suggests relevant leads. LinkedIn InMail is another sales tool that helps start a warm conversation with prospects and improve response rates.
To make prospecting on LinkedIn faster and cost-effective, you can use free tools like RevDriver. The free Chrome extension allows you to access 95% accurate, human-verified B2B contact and company data of prospects even if they’re not in your connections list. It can also be used to collect data for prospects from their other social profiles and company website. No more waiting on someone to accept your connection request. You can send them an email directly.
Final Advice
With these four ways to effectively use data, you’re set to advance your sales growth. When using data to increase sales, make sure you maintain top-notch data quality and hygiene. Using data that’s inaccurate, out of date, or irrelevant will put your sales growth at risk and hurt your bottom line.
Before you start your sales campaigns, check if your database is clean and updated. If you need high-quality data cleaning service or want to know how to cleanse your data, then schedule a meeting with us to dive into your use case.
