Actionable and accurate data

For many businesses, actionable and accurate commercial data is the sword in the stone – all powerful but inaccessible. Its potential to add value to pipelines, customer experience and business growth is rivalled only by its potential to cause a headache.

The issue isn’t that data is hard to come by. It’s that it is everywhere, generated daily in huge swathes from customer interaction, suppliers, market trends and much more. Many businesses, including those in the channel, know that data is fuel for growth but not how to collect, analyse or synthesise it, pushing it out to the right departments with advice on how to use it.

This means that many take a half-hearted approach with limited results, using unclean, out-of-date data and assuming it simply doesn’t work. Data becomes a challenge rather than an asset. So, how can data deliver meaningful benefits?

Strategic efforts

It is a lot easier to sell when the prospect wants to buy. Accurate data can put your sales teams in front of the right decision maker, with the right amount of budget looking for the product or solution you can deliver.

This seriously limits the time wasted chasing businesses which are never going to purchase anything and lands your sales team exactly where it needs to be every time – optimising business development.

In addition to enabling sales, data focuses marketing in exactly the right areas. Its gaze is narrowed to your real addressable market and all messaging, platforms and campaigns are pointed towards creating awareness and promoting deals in the correct way to engage and satisfy your ideal prospects. Effort and budget are used strategically to great effect and no time is wasted.

Accurate data and insight can also inform your business on what customers value and require. This can include their preferred method of communication, their perception of your brand, what they are looking for from your product and solution roadmap, seasonal trends in purchasing and triggers for churn.

In turn, you can use this data and insight to define a customer journey which meets their expectations and circumvents any issues which could impact retention.

Sound business intelligence

Detailed and accurate intelligence regarding which solutions your customers have and haven’t already purchased from you provides the white space analysis to up-sell and cross-sell further into a warm base already familiar with your brand.

Recent intelligence shows that businesses are eager to streamline their supply-chains, so it makes commercial sense to optimise the volume of effective solutions you are selling to your base.

With easy access to data, insight and intelligence, businesses can also act decisively to circumvent threats and leverage opportunities. Validating additions to portfolios and forecasts, entering new markets or adding new solutions becomes a strategic decision instead of an optimistic shot in the dark.

Whilst being agile, flexible and innovative can appear synonymous with businesses which act on gut and instinct, truly agile businesses are successful because they are able to pivot based on sound business intelligence.

Accessing value

There are complexities of accessing the value which data can offer. The volume, accuracy, duplication levels and lack of structure around how we see businesses collecting data makes developing a strategy to harness its power quite daunting for them.

Our intelligence shows us that innovators, early adopters and even the late majority should now be able to see the profound effect data could have on agility, competitiveness, and efficiency if well managed. Defining ‘what’ should be stored and analysed. ‘Why’ and ‘where’, however, is not so simple.

Often, just developing a plan to clean up the sales data being used is for many businesses an insurmountable task which could take many months and a huge budget if left to human effort.

Data as a differentiator

If you’re in the early stages of developing a strategy or refining the one you have in place, the first questions we recommend you ask include: what data do we have coming into the business?, what are our key business objectives?, and where is this data stored?

Too often, businesses fail to capitalise on their data because they view it as one singular project which requires too much resource. If that sounds familiar, we recommend that any data projects are driven by business objectives rather than the data itself.

Segmenting, cleansing and analysing the data required for your prioritised objectives allows you to tackle your data projects in bite-sized chunks and measure the value it delivers to each business goal. We guarantee if it’s actioned correctly, data will be a key differentiator for business growth.