Data analytics are essential for effective digital content marketing, yet while most acknowledge that predictive analytics and closed loop marketing are essential for future success and optimization over time, most are failing to make effective use of the data inherently available with digital content sales and marketing operations.
Today we explore the top strategies you can employ for effective data analytics along your entire marketing and sales process.
This article continues our discussion about data analytics.
Click Here to learn more about the data and analytics challenges in digital content marketing.
Click Here to learn about the 3 ways predictive analytics optimize digital sales and marketing.
Unlocking the power of data across your sales process requires these key enablers:
Sales and Marketing Alignment
A key buzzword over the past few years, sales and marketing alignment is among the best organizational strategies you can employ for an improved sales cycle, more effective digital content creation, and most importantly, greater use of content marketing by the sales team.
(Image Source: Oracle, 2014)
Unfortunately 92% of businesses agree they don’t have good alignment and 87% of sales and marketing teams hold negative views of each other (Source: Oracle, 2014).
In Chapter 3 of our Sales Enablement Success series we found that shared data between both teams was the best enabler of sales and marketing alignment. Further once teams were better aligned, they collaborated more on content and enhanced the quality of the data that they focused on over time.
A 2013 study revealed that only 14% of marketing teams include sales in the creation of customer facing content (Source: Brainshark, 2013), and our joint Demand Metric study into the state of sales enablement late last year revealed that only 12% to 20% of businesses (depending on the industry) align their sales and marketing operations (Source: Demand Metric, 2015).
Alignment remains low, and as a result of this poor data-sharing, managers and sales teams have these common concerns:
- Sales presentations are not aligned with marketing messages;
- We cannot measure the impact on revenue/ ROI of marketing campaigns;
- It’s hard to understand why some leads were sent to me, or which leads are hot; and
- There are not enough high quality leads (Source: Oracle, 2014).
[RELATED CONTENT] Keen on learning more about sales and marketing alignment? Download a FREE copy of our eBook below to learn about the 9 tactics you can employ today.
A Complete Sales Stack
The sales stack is a hot issue for 2016. The sales support technology industry has been ballooning in recent years as dozens of point solutions strive to solve a variety of business challenges.
Unfortunately these point solutions haven’t been a saving grace for business. Many businesses are experiencing a phenomenon known as “tool exhaustion” which is a key inhibitor to sales success (Source: Forrester, 2016).
The right sales stack mix includes a sales analytics software component that facilitates closed loop marketing and pushes data from the sales presentation to the marketing team and CRM. Without a complete sales stack, achieving sales and marketing alignment through data would be impossible.
Effective CRM Implementation
It’s one thing to have a CRM system in place, it’s another to have measurable business success from your CRM. Most organizations large or small use or plan to use a CRM. While many appreciate the benefits, the objectives are often misaligned from what CRM realistically delivers leading many to choose the wrong platform for their needs, with most experiencing adoption challenges that erode ROI from the investment and cause friction in the sales process.
At the same time however, CRM is the #1 sales stack component in the top 5 identified. The problem is not CRM, it’s how CRM is implemented and used. In order to maximize CRM effectiveness you need to automate the entire process of updating and extracting data from CRM.
If updating CRM requires an admin detour for sales reps, your best sellers will avoid it like the plague. This will result in poorer CRM data quality and added friction for all those who do depend on the platform.
For CRM to be effective your sales analytics software must update CRM in real time and provide sales reps with contextually relevant information about their current buyer through impulse-ready methods, not hours of searching through data which could be out of date or inaccurate.
Struggling with data analytics across your sales cycle? Request a demo and let us show you a solution that completes your sales stack, automates CRM interactions, provides sales reps with the data they need in the field, and aligns sales and marketing.
How to Make the Most from your Data
You’re investing in sales and marketing alignment initiatives, moving towards a holistic sales stack with fewer point solutions, and rethinking your CRM strategy; now that you have the tools to unlock your data, how do you make the most of the data being generated?
In our next post we’ll detail the tactics you need to make the most of your data the moment it’s being generated. A link will be posted HERE once released. Subscribe to our mailing list for an instant notification on release.
