How Sales and Marketing Teams Can Benefit from Big Data

If you’re working in the marketing and sales business, it’s critically important to gain a deep understanding of your target users. If you fail to acknowledge and assess the customer behavior and demographics, your marketing campaigns will be inaccurate, expensive, and often ineffective.

Nevertheless, one of the primary motives for understanding your customer base concerns big data. Without understanding who your prospective customers may be, leveraging big data will be impossible.

GetApp has recently surveyed over 500 small businesses and digital enterprises to figure out how sales and marketing professionals leverage data to improve the performance of their businesses. Here are some interesting results:

• 55% of sales representatives and 65% of marketing experts are currently leveraging Google Analytics to analyze and interpret data. 
• The majority of surveyed businesses suggest that they’re gathering proper insights and data before making important decisions.
• 59% of sales leaders suggested that they’re using data visualization in order to clarify and validate insights
• 42% of sales leaders are not truly confident with the way they collect and interpret data

The conclusion of the survey?

As John Boris, CEO of Assignment Help, suggests, “Big data represents the key to better marketing and sales performance, and almost everyone’s worrying about it.” 

Whether you’re aiming to optimize your performance, improve customer engagement and loyalty, or make smart pricing decisions, big data is an indispensable resource that should be taken into serious consideration.

How Big Data is Changing the Face of Marketing and Sales

In the present moment, big data involves researching, gathering, analyzing, and leveraging massive amounts of details (digital information) in order to improve business performance and operations. 

Here are the most important benefits of big data in marketing and sales environments:

• KYC (know your customer). Thanks to big data and cloud computing, not only the largest corporations and banks can gather important insights concerning their customer’s behavior and demographics. If you’re running a small business, you can use big data to know more about your visitomers.
• User experience. Using big data, you can track and measure the way your users interact with your website and sales page. By gaining important insights, you can optimize the experience of your future users and witness improved conversion rates.
• Brand awareness. Studies show that data-driven businesses are able to improve their brand awareness by 2.7 times when compared to all others who are neglecting it.
• Improved conversion rates. One of the biggest perks of big data in marketing and sales is that it helps businesses close more sales. A survey shows that brands who are intensively using customer analytics are 23 times more likely to perform better than their competitors when it comes to customer acquisition.
• Time and cost savings. The business intelligence that is being gathered through big data analytics is helping businesses skyrocket their marketing performance by quickly eliminating bad ideas and decisions. Therefore, time and costs will be reduced.
• Real-time data in cloud computing environments. Brands that leverage big data to collect, analyze, and process real-time data are able to take immediate decisions. When it comes to analyzing data from sensors, GPS, IoT sensors, or clicks on a webpage, there’s nothing that can be more valuable than that.

3 Main Types of Big Data for Sales Representatives and Marketers

There are three main types of data that you can gather in order to improve your business operations: operational, financial, and customer. Each type of data is gathered from different sources, processed in different ways, and stored in different locations.

1. Operational data

Operational data is related to your most important business processes. It may be related to customer interaction management systems, logistics and shipping, or real-time feedback from sensors. By analyzing this type of data, you can reduce business costs and improve your overall performance.

2. Financial data

Financial data gathering allows businesses to track and measure their financial performance. This includes your organization’s costs, financial statistics, and margins. Moreover, you can also include your competitor’s prices, discounts, and offers in this category.

3. Customer data

Customer data is probably the most relevant and commonly collected type of data. This type of data helps sales representatives and marketers acknowledge and know users' behavior, mindset, problems, and so on. 

This data is comprised of names, phone numbers, email addresses, web searches, purchase history, and so on. You can gather this type of data by directly surveying your customers, by analyzing their social media engagement and behavior, and by carefully analyzing online communities.

For example, dissertation services comprised of freelancers may be gathering important insights from their clients through direct feedback. On the other hand, a company that offers marketing consultancy to B2B businesses can gather relevant customer data through LinkedIn ads. 

Each business should collect customer data from the most relevant channels and use the most suitable strategies based on the circumstances under which it operates.

Tips and Tricks on How to Leverage Big Data

Now that we’ve covered the basics let’s dive into some of good ways to leverage big data to improve the performance of your business.

• Choose the right CRM software for your business. A proper customer relationship management system should have real-time data gathering capabilities that allow the marketing and sales team to react immediately. A quick tip: choose a CRM software that leverages AI to run its operations.
• Use the same CRM software to share data between the marketing and sales departments. In order to improve your business operations, you should create communication protocols that your marketers and salespeople should follow. For example, the marketing department should be able to track the history of sales in order to make correlations with the ads they’ve previously used. 
• Make big data analytics a priority. What this means is that you shouldn’t count on an intern to take care of your data analytics. You’ll want to find an employee who is skilled, experienced, and even talented when it comes to interpreting data. If you cannot find an employee right away, try to outsource the services of a professional freelancer.

Takeaways

Big data analytics is not a bonus, but rather a huge must for every contemporary business. The sales and marketing operations can be improved if relevant data is being leveraged. 

While many brands and businesses are leveraging big data right now, very few are using it to its full potential. If you’re a business owner, marketer, or salesman, make the right choice and prioritize big data as soon as possible!