How You Can Use Sales Data to Boost Your Business

Sales data can be a powerful tool to help businesses boost their bottom line. By understanding and utilizing sales data, businesses can make informed decisions that increase profits. This post will explore ways businesses can use sales data to improve their sales processes.

Data-Driven Sales Strategy

Businesses today need to make decisions that are backed by data. By analyzing market data, competitors, and customers, companies can determine the best ways to increase sales and grow their business.

Sales teams should track a variety of data points to be successful. This data can include everything from customer contact information to sales numbers and goals. Sales data analysis helps sales teams to better understand their customers and determine which strategies are working best. Additionally, data can help sales teams identify areas where they need to improve.

Your sales representatives can increase their productivity by using data. It can also help them save time and energy by not pursuing customers who are not a good fit or uninterested. Your business can be up to 6% more profitable if you use data-driven sales methods.

Let’s look at how a data-driven approach to sales looks in action.

How to Approach Sales Data

Before diving into the data, first, define your business objectives.

So, figure out what you want your salespeople to do.

We want to reduce our average time to close deals in the second quarter.

Now, write down any questions that come to mind from your stated objectives.

What is the average length of our typical sale? What factors contribute to this?

How long should our phone call be? How much money can we potentially save on it?

How can we shorten the sales process?

Finally you’ll need to identify which sales metrics you need.

Now your salespeople should know how to leverage the sales metrics they need to meet their objectives. As time goes on, and your business objectives shift, your team may need to adjust which key performance indicators they focus on.

Building a Successful Data-Driven Sales Team

A sales team that relies heavily on data follows a few different practices. These are some of the best practices that a sales team can adopt.

1. Aligning your goals and mission statements.

A data-driven sales team aligns on everything, from big to daily goals. Sales managers are responsible for communicating and executing this alignment. It is good to share your goals and objectives with your entire sales team.

This process mirrors the questions I asked above about choosing sales data to use. These questions help you determine your sales team’s goals, what data can help them achieve them, and what each team member needs to do to keep your pursuit on track.

2. Building and following a specific sales process

A data-driven sales team follows a specific sales process. This is a repeatable sequence of actions your team takes to close a new client. You can see which parts of your sales strategy are working and which are not. You can track and incorporate new KPIs by repeating the same actions with your team.

Slowly and one at a time, make changes to your sales process. This allows your team to get used to the change and allows you to see how it affects your overall sales process.

3. Use existing data as a basis for their strategy

Data-driven sales teams don’t just use new data. They also use data they have already collected, even if it has never been used. You can find a wealth of insights and ideas in existing data. Just look at Harley Davidson’s use of old data to increase sales by almost 3,000%.

Before you dive into a new tool, make sure to do sales data analysis, such as past buyers and prospects. Get together your sales team to discuss what data you have and how it can be used to inform new strategies or decisions.

4. Use a CRM to make data available

A data-driven sales team works closely alongside a customer relationship management tool (CRM), such as HubSpot’s free CRM. A CRM database is extremely valuable. It replaces disjointed spreadsheets and cluttering tools and generates sales reports (also found in HubSpot’s SalesHub).

CRMs can keep track of all customer activity and automate tedious tasks such as email follow-ups and contact updates. It keeps your sales team aligned and easily makes all your sales data accessible.

5. They only work with prospects and leads that meet certain criteria

Data-driven sales teams only pursue leads and prospects that are good-fit customers. This is what useful data can tell them. Sales data can save your sales team valuable time and energy and help you make your company more profitable.

Your team must make the most of the data it has collected. Your team must know the data they can use to determine whether they should engage a prospect once you have identified good-fit leads. You might have defined a good-fit lead as having a certain amount of monthly revenue and a minimum number of marketing team members. Encourage your team members to concentrate their energy on prospects who fall within this category.

Conclusion

Sales data can be a powerful tool to help businesses boost their bottom line. By understanding and utilizing sales data, businesses can make informed decisions that increase profits.

Need Help Automating Your Sales Prospecting Process?

LeadFuze gives you all the data you need to find ideal leads, including full contact information.

Go through a variety of filters to zero in on the leads you want to reach. This is crazy specific, but you could find all the people that match the following: 

• A company in the Financial Services or Banking industry
• Who have more than 10 employees
• That spend money on Adwords
• Who use Hubspot
• Who currently have job openings for marketing help
• With the role of HR Manager
• That has only been in this role for less than 1 year