08 Mar The Three Keys to Sales Success: Data, Analytics and Content

In order to keep up pace in today’s ever changing digital landscape and ensure your business is targeting prospects effectively, you need to employ a multi-faceted strategy that offers a more tailored approach to sales and marketing, and makes the sales journey much more efficient.

There are three main assets to take into consideration for these purposes; predictive analytics, data-driven marketing and interesting, relevant content. When you combine these three things, you’ll be well on your way to increasing sales and getting an edge over your competitors. Here are our tips for using the three elements successfully.

Challenges for Digital Marketing Today

With the ever-changing world of technology having such a big impact on digital sales and marketing operations today, there are numerous challenges facing businesses today. These include reaching prospects across multiple channels, engaging prospects who are performing their own independent research, reaching the right decision makers in an organisation, and getting content seen in a seriously crowded digital world.

In the face of these issues, businesses must adapt their strategies to ensure they’re using data to full effect, along with well-crafted content that engages your prospects. The answer to employing these in your strategy effectively is to make use of account-based data, predictive analytics, and careful content marketing.  This powerful combination will speed up the sales process by giving you the opportunity to identify quality leads quicker and provide a better, more efficient customer experience.

The combination of these three elements is known as engagement science, and it’s gaining traction in the world of sales and marketing thanks to the increased opportunities it provides. Let’s take a look at what you need to implement it into your strategy in more depth.

1. Account-Based Data

Data-driven marketing is essential for making more informed and better decisions for your strategy. The wide range of market intelligence and business databases for sale, means that is it easier than ever to learn more about your prospects and the market as a whole. This data includes things like contact data, firmographics, financial records and in some cases credit scores.

This third-party data used alongside your own internally-generated data from things like sales transactions and social media engagement. Wherever the data is sourced from, it needs to be accurate and regularly-updated.

Without first ensuring that this is the case, you risk entering bad data onto your system, which can easily lead to false insights and lead you to make incorrect decisions. What’s more, the cost of correcting issues from having ‘dirty’ data in your records can become huge, so it’s always worth remembering that prevention is better than cure; use reputable sources and check for accuracy before adding data to your CRM or other database.

2. Predictive Analytics

Once you’ve gathered sufficient clean and quality data, you can put it to use through predictive analysis. This will provide you with extremely useful insights such as how likely a prospect is to convert, how long the sales cycle is likely to be, technology in use, total budget and budget for specific elements such as marketing or technology.

This allows you to easily qualify leads and adapt your approach according to each account or segment. Detailed analytics allow you to determine which are the right accounts for you to target, as well as who you need to be reaching out to within those companies.

Using a predictive model makes it much easier to find leads in your niche thanks to the range of B2B intelligence platforms on offer. For example, if you determine from the insights your model has generated that amongst your very best customers are French SMEs, you can then use a France business directory to shorten the lead identification process by simply filtering your search based on firmographic data such as number of employees or technologies used. You’ll then have an efficient list of pre-qualified ready to go leads, allowing you to move onto the next step in a much shorter time frame.

3. Using Content to Engage

When you have a clear picture of who your customers are, you can create relevant content that is tailored to their needs and interests. This is more important today than ever before; not only are you competing to get your content seen amidst an extremely crowded digital market, but the simple fact is that customers are becoming more expectant that companies will provide a personalised experience for them.

Keep it Relevant

Providing your prospects with interesting and engaging content that suits their needs and preferences is essential. Ultimately, your goal where content is concerned should be to position your brand as an expert in your field, and prospects will not only see you as trustworthy but also keep coming back to your website or social media channels for more intriguing insights and news in their sector.

If you’re using account-based techniques to target specific companies, you’ll want to become a trusted resource providing your prospect with useful research and other content that is directly related to their pain points or goals. This should be done in a more personal manner, e.g. sending a friendly note alongside it to tell the contact that you came across the whitepaper etc and felt they might like to see it.

Types of Content

There is a wide variety of different types of content you could offer your target audience. From whitepapers and infographics to blog posts and videos, using multiple different types will keep things interesting, and you’ll also be able to use your analytics to determine which are performing best overall.

Bear in mind that the content you share doesn’t always have to be internally-created stuff; in fact, your prospects are more likely to trust third-party content, whether it’s new research or industry news from a leading influencer.

Making use of quality data, predictive analytics and relevant, carefully-distributed content is an excellent combination to speed up your sales process and ultimately increase your revenue along with your overall ROI. With so much data readily available, as well as affordable analytics tools launching every day, there has never been a better time to get in on this technique and avoid losing out to your rivals.