The sales process continues to shift in accommodation of a new buyer decision journey that seemingly starts later and complicates efforts to establish relationships and add tailored value to each individual buyer.
While digital content marketing works to address these challenges, the increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data stemming from these operations tend to be poorly utilized for business outcomes.
Today we explore the many ways that predictive data analytics in digital content management enhance and even evolve sales process activities.
In our last article we explained the current environment and challenges in data analytics and predictive data usage. This is a continuation of that article.
Predictive Analytics Optimize the Marketing Process
Buyers are taking charge of their own decision journey and contacting sales reps further downstream in the sales process.
81% of B2B purchase cycles start with a web search, and 90% of buyers say they’ll find you when they’re ready to buy (Source: Marketstrong, 2015).
This is literally a situation of “don’t call us, we’ll call you’.
As 80% of businesses are accepting that buyers want to educate themselves about the products and services they want to buy, most are saying that marketing is responsible for accommodating these new challenges:
- 80% of businesses agree that it is increasingly necessary for marketing to generate qualified leads for sales (as opposed to sales reps qualifying leads);
- 78% agree that marketing is now responsible for sales acceleration, not only lead generation;
- 75% agree that marketers will shift strategies to better accelerate deals (Source: Forrester, 2016).
Greater Marketing Responsibility Further Downstream
Marketing teams with predictive analytics are looking further downstream in the sales funnel and plan integrated marketing communications from end-to-end (prospect to loyal customer).
(Image Source: Forrester, 2016)
More Holistic Targeting & Segmenting
As data analytics continue to grow and greater insight from end-of-funnel digital sales metrics influence marketing operations, decision journey targeting will evolve into account based marketing (ABM). Marketers with predictive analytics and end-of-funnel insights are up to twice as likely to use these advanced marketing strategies.
(Image Source: Forrester, 2016)
Blurred Lines Across Sales and Marketing
As explained in Chapter 3 of our Sales Enablement Success series, shared analytics and full forward-reverse visibility into all customer facing operations greatly increases sales and marketing alignment.
Imagine for a second that you had perfect sales and marketing alignment. The department division would be blurred as sales assume a role of micro-marketer, and marketers assume greater responsibility further downstream with account based marketing.
This is exactly what we’re seeing with adoption of predictive analytics.
Download our FREE ebook below for a comprehensive analysis of what is means to achieve sales and marketing alignment, and how to get there.
Predictive Analytics Optimize Digital Content Investments
In our previous article we saw that most businesses are using digital content marketing, yet only a minority are able to maximize digital content usage, and few sales reps find marketing content valuable.
The problem with digital content isn’t your marketing team, it’s the data that they have at their disposal.
Content that is More Effective
Digital content is TWICE as effective for closing when marketing teams are able to see information such as:
- The utilization of digital content by sales reps across industries and geographies;
- Such as who used content, how often, when, where, why, to what effect.
- Complex digital sales communications such as which content was paired with other content and interaction correlations over time.
- Content life cycles and cessation of use.
- Such as the adoption rates of a new release, the rates of declining use, content that is no longer used, and content that has never been used.
Content that is more Efficient
When predictive analytics are applied, digital content generated MORE interactions (page views, etc.) with 77% less content created (Source: Convince and Convert, 2015). Tell that to the 80% of businesses planning to create more content than they did last year.
Predictive Analytics Optimize the Sales Process
Sales teams face a crisis, whether it’s a smarter buyer, increases in admin detours for CRM updating, fragmenting sales rep software options, a growing volume of digital content, more complex channel relationships, reduction of time spent selling, etc.
Once data enters the foray things get that much more complicated.
Sales reps don’t need another detour, they need the information which matters to them the moment it’s required. In the words of Albert Einstein “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” Sales reps don’t have the time to dig through numbers in hopes of finding something they’re looking for.
Increased Data Awareness and Time Spent Selling.
The right tools can automate data integration and enhance data within CRM while putting more time in the hands of sales reps and showing them the information that matters in that moment.
Improved Sales Performance Management
Sales leaders want their teams to emulate the results of their top sales teams, but team meetings without data insights won’t solve anything. Analytics can reveal behavioural data about sales reps that goes beyond what’s said during a strategy session. This is also why more sales training doesn’t improve the long term outcomes of sales reps.
Do your sales reps have their CRM automatically updated? Can they extract account specific information when its needed in the field? Do your marketers and executives know how sellers are performing in the field? Can you pinpoint digital content effectiveness down to a geographic region or industry? Holes in your data are costing you more than you think. Request a demo and let us show you how easy it is to leverage comprehensive data analytics.
How do we unlock this Data?
The power of data is clear, but how do we unlock these metrics for business applications, and how do we get data into the hands of those who need it most, when they need it most. In our next article we'll explain the need-to-know strategies for unlocking the data that matters most.
