How CRM Can Help You Turn Data into Key Information
You can collect all the data possible for your business, but if you don’t know how to transform this data into key information you’re not alone. In a 2015 survey conducted by CSO Insights, less than 16% of sales organizations reported they are actively leveraging their data to unearth insights on their sales effectiveness.
What’s the fallout from not uncovering these insights? According to Data—the CRM Gold Mine We Continue to Ignore (CRM Magazine, March 2016) these are the three biggest missed opportunities:
- Not capitalizing on market segmentation. If you were to mine data on past wins, losses, and no-decisions, you would start to surface specific attributes of the prospects that are most likely to buy from you. It may be that you are more successful at selling into certain industry segments, or you more effectively engage certain stakeholders, or your solution may be more highly valued for solving certain problems than others. If you have those insights, you can more effectively target accounts where your odds of winning a deal are higher than normal before you even make your first sales call.
- Not leveraging your sales process. If you were to dig deeper into what you are actually doing during the sales process, you would also start to understand which sales tactics really help advance the deal and which do not. If you found that doing a custom demo generated a higher close rate than a canned demo, you’d find ways to make that a part of every sales process. Conversely, if you found that shipping demo equipment to prospects had no impact on win rates and actually lengthened the sales cycle, you would stop doing it.
- Not minimizing customer churn. Insights can be mined not only from sales data but also from other internal systems and from a myriad of external data sources. Look for factors that impact customer churn. If you started to see early warning signs of changes in customer ordering patterns, for instance, you could take proactive action versus doing unnatural acts (like discounting) to minimize reduced order sizes or outright customer defections after a major shift in the sales ecosystem has already occurred.
In today’s world, businesses have more data than ever before, but few are turning that data into actionable information. Jill Gibson and the business consulting team at Softech Solutions can help you understand what your data is telling you by designing reports and data analysis options that will set your business apart from the competition.
To learn more about what Softech Solutions can do for your company, contact Jill at 612-309-5709 or jill@softechsolutionsllc.com.