Today, marketing is more complicated and diverse than it’s ever been. Getting people to come to your website or check out your business is a challenge. When a customer has found their way through your content and into a position where they could convert, that’s where the most difficult task begins. Your sales teams must come forward to encourage and nurture these leads, and turn them into paying and profitable customers.

Many businesses that receive plenty of website traffic may still complain about lack of sales. That being said, data-driven sales teams are thriving. So what’s the difference? Why are these teams more successful? And what can you do to implement their strategies into your business?

Creating Personalized Sales Campaigns

The first advantage that data-driven sales teams have is fairly obvious: Since you have data from your customers, you’ll be able to customize your sales tactics and campaigns to match customer needs.

For example, if your website is being visited predominately by 50-year-old males, you can then set about changing, editing and creating content that caters to them. Some of the factors you may want to consider are the tone of voice that you’re using, the style, the language and the overall structure of your content.

When you’re writing your content, you’ll want to make sure that it’s 100% original and not plagiarized. Otherwise, search engines will miss your content and not display it properly on results pages. You can check this accuracy by using tools like Copyscape, Stateofwriting or Academized.

Prioritize Your Sales Efforts

One of the most common traps that sales reps fall into is treating every single lead equally. In reality, this isn’t productive.

“Whether your leads are coming in through your website or from your email campaigns, whether they are requesting callbacks or calling you up themselves – the data you’ve collected means you can evaluate the value that the lead will bring to your business,” says Nelson Taylor, a data-specialist working for Paper Fellows.

Evaluate and Improve Your Services

Typically, a sales manager will benchmark a sales rep’s performance using certain figures, such as the performance of the rest of the sales team. However, while this may seem to give reps a competitive edge, in some cases, this can prove to be counterproductive.

Instead, companies should be using data to evaluate their entire sales team as a whole, using industry standards and similar figures from other companies. This will give you the unique opportunity to bring your team in to work together, helping you to generate more sales and a higher conversion rate.

Creating Upselling Opportunities

If the 80/20 rule is anything to go by, the majority of businesses will receive 80% of their income and revenue from only 20% of their customers. However, in many cases, this causes an over-reliance on these clients. If they choose to take their business elsewhere for whatever reason, or simply stop purchasing, this can cause huge problems for your business.

Instead, as a business, you need to think about diversifying your client base so you can avoid the risks of this scenario.

When you’re using data, you can see what your smaller customers are purchasing and what their requirements are, giving you the opportunity to upsell your products to generate more sales from these parties and sources.

Ted Barrymore, a sales manager for Australian Help, explains his experiences by saying, “We mainly produced and sold content and offered our services to businesses and organizations around the world. However, when we finally invested in big data, we found that a larger portion of our sales was coming from students. With a tweak to our services, our sales teams were able to tap into this client base, and now we’re making more sales than ever before.”

Making Critical Decisions

It’s common knowledge that you don’t want to be making decisions with huge risk factors for your business. However, without the right data in place, you could be making these big decisions without even realizing it.

When you come up against a big business decision, such as what direction your business is going to take, or what products and services you’re going to offer your customers, be sure to check out what data is available to help you make the most informed decision possible.

By branching out and implementing data into your sales process, you’ll be actively maximizing your opportunities – allowing your business to not only survive, but to thrive.

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