With the proliferation of various data-powered sales tools, leading a sales team by intuition only became less and less effective - even before the pandemic.
Today, when every company has a large remote workforce, data is nothing short of indispensable. According to McKinsey, companies that use data in their sales process are more profitable than their direct competitors.
Data can enhance virtually any aspect of sales. So much so that data driven sales has become a commonplace industry term. Let’s briefly describe what data driven sales is as well as list eight top benefits of approaching sales from the data perspective.
What Is Data Driven Sales?
Data-driven sales is the process of making sales-related decisions that are informed by relevant external and internal data.
Gathering internal data, for example, can be useful in improving training modules for sales interns, while external data can help identify cross-selling opportunities for your existing customers.
In general, data helps us personalize our messaging, anticipate new customer needs, and develop effective sales processes.
The problem is that using data to gain helpful insights and actually implement them still takes focused effort, and few organizations have invested enough into it to unlock potential returns.
Now is the time for your BDRs to get a competitive edge by leveraging a data driven sales approach. There are at least eight transformative benefits you can expect by doing so.
1. Precise Personalization
Quite often, the success of your lead generation efforts depends solely on how well you understand your potential audience — the way you approach them and the messaging you use.
For example, if you know that your lead has mostly searched for and read about a specific product category on your website, you can use that angle to introduce your solution.
2. Product Improvements
If you’re selling a true commodity (e.g. wheat or oil), your seasoned salespeople don’t need a lot of training — the product just doesn’t change very much over time.
SaaS and other technologically-driven solutions, however, change constantly, and eventually it becomes difficult to keep up. That’s where having product usage data is valuable. At a glance, your BDRs can see who is using your product, which features are more or less popular, and what’s the best messaging to use.
3. Pattern Detection
Speaking of messaging, sales teams spend years evolving their approach through general trial and error, and eventually pass the hard-earned wisdom to new team members.
Data models allow you to accelerate this process through identifying patterns in datasets of virtually any scale (millions of data points). This means you can find the best time to reach your customers, the best email subject lines, the best header image to use on a landing page, and more — all practically in real time.
4. Upselling and Cross-Selling
When you know how your product is used, you can see untapped opportunities that exist with every client. Maybe they really need an adjacent solution they didn’t know about, or maybe they could benefit from unlocking new features available on a higher tier.
Cross-selling and upselling opportunities are especially relevant when there’s a seismic shift happening in the industry — every company now needs some new technology to manage and coordinate work from home, for example.
5. Churn Reduction
Customer attrition is natural for every company due to a variety of reasons. Some are out of your control: being too small or too large for your solution, having budgets cut, changing the direction of the company, etc. Others you can certainly influence if you have the right data to work with.
For example, you might notice that customers are leaving because they don’t know that you have a certain functionality they need. You can then work with the product team to make that feature stand out more and immediately reduce your churn rate.
6. Sales Performance Evaluation
Data doesn’t even necessarily have to be about your customers. Instead, you can measure your own sales team’s process and results in an effort to improve them.
Analyze your pipeline, monitor your closing rate over time, track what your BDRs spend their time on, and more. The goal is to redesign your team’s KPIs so they become more aligned with the results you’re seeking.
7. Sales Training Adjustment
The same methodology used for analyzing the performance of all BDRs can also be directed towards accelerating your sales training for new employees, especially when they are getting up to speed in a remote setting.
With the right data tools in place, you can see their conversion rates at different stages of the sales funnel and find out whether they need help at any point, whether it’s closing deals, finding customer needs, or qualifying leads.
8. Lead Scoring Prioritization
For most sales teams, the problem of getting enough traffic to the website is not nearly as challenging as wading through that traffic to find high-quality leads that can turn into profitable customers.
Lead scoring is meant to help make it easier to target certain visitors by giving them a “quality score” based on their demographics and behavioral data. Since a lot of lead scoring has been done by looking up IP addresses of all visitors and linking them to corporate locations, the pandemic and the work-from-home movement have drastically reduced its efficacy.
Now to conduct effective lead scoring, it’s necessary to be able to identify anonymous website visitors, which can constitute up to 98% of your traffic.
Lift AI is the only buyer-intent solution to leverage a unique machine-scoring model — with over one billion data points — in determining how likely are your website visitors to purchase your product.
In the work-from-home world, Lift AI is an indispensable tool to identify anonymous website visitors, regardless of their physical location.
You don’t need to worry about tool integration or training — Lift AI works out-of-the-box with any chat platform you already use, revealing all your high-scoring visitors (around 9% of your traffic, on average) and connecting them to your sales team for maximum conversion potential. At the same time, lower-scoring visitors can be nurtured with a bot or offered a self-help chat interface to find answers to common questions.
Repeated tests show that Lift AI can help increase chat conversions anywhere from two to 10 times just in 90 days. That’s the power of being able to identify anonymous website visitors, rank them according to their buyer intent, and connect them with your BDRs.
Try Lift AI today — it’s available to you for 30 days absolutely free and integrates into any enterprise chat (e.g. Drift or LivePerson) with a single JavaScript snippet.
As you can see, all data-driven sales solutions can be helpful in decision-making and have an impact on both your internal and external processes, from sales training to new product releases. But when it comes to which website visitors you should engage with, only an advanced buyer-intent solution like Lift AI can deliver a significant spike in your conversion rates as quickly as possible.
