In years past, sales teams relied on skill, luck, and sheer will to find and convert leads. But now, thanks to data, a more intentional approach is possible. Leveraging data throughout the sales cycle is crucial to help close deals and generate revenue. Instead of guessing what leads need, sales and marketing strategies can lean on various types of data, allowing for more informed decision-making and more effective selling. As experts in B2B data, the Predictiv team has pulled together our top tips for how you can implement data-driven sales tactics at each stage of your pipeline to capture more leads and improve conversion rates.
What Kind of Data Should Sales Teams Use?
Sales teams can benefit from a variety of data types to enhance their strategies. On any given day, people make choices (especially online) that generate data points, painting a picture of their needs, preferences, and behaviors. By tapping this intelligence, your team can better understand what makes a quality lead and focus efforts on more promising prospects.
A data-driven sales strategy usually incorporates:
- Demographic data provides essential information about prospects, including their age, location, job title, and company size. This information helps tailor outreach efforts to specific audience segments.
- Behavioral data offers insights into how prospects interact with your website, content, and marketing materials, allowing sales teams to understand their interests and needs better.
- Technographic data reveals the technologies and tools prospects currently use, enabling sales to position their solutions more effectively.
- Firmographic data gives an overview of a company’s industry, revenue, and growth trajectory, which can be instrumental in identifying high-potential leads.
- Win/loss data allows you to tap into historical information from previous sales conversations so you can reference what resonated with customers in the past and what didn’t work as well.
- Finally, buyer intent data serves as a signal indicating a prospect’s likelihood to make a purchase, helping sales teams prioritize their efforts.
How to Use Data throughout Your Sales Cycle
A data-driven sales approach requires leaning on the insights you’ve gleaned at each stage of your pipeline. From the leads you pursue to the deals you close, data can play a massive role in empowering your sales reps to succeed.
Find Prospects
Data-driven prospecting allows sales teams to identify potential customers who are most likely to benefit from their solutions. By utilizing firmographic and technographic data, teams can target companies that fit their criteria. Then, to find the right contact within an organization, buyer intent data can reveal who is actively researching an offering like yours, ensuring you connect with the person responsible for vetting potential solutions.
Even though market data doesn’t offer the same level of personalized insights, it can still be hugely helpful in narrowing down your search for prospects. Consider exploring industry trends and emerging conversations that may be relevant when crafting your sales strategy — you may unearth a new niche to focus on.
Connect with Leads
Once potential prospects are identified, data can be leveraged to personalize outreach efforts. This is the perfect time for sales and marketing teams to collaborate. Personalized marketing campaigns can play an invaluable role in your lead acquisition strategy so you always have promising accounts in your pipeline. Your joint teams can reference relevant content interactions through platforms like Google Analytics to create a more engaging narrative and retarget leads based on their preferences.
As a lead moves from an MQL to SQL, timing messaging is paramount. Utilizing buyer intent signals can help determine the optimal moments for outreach, increasing the likelihood of a positive response. Once you determine a lead is ready for outreach, tailoring messages based on demographic and firmographic data ensures your communication resonates with the target audience.
Qualify Leads
Now that you’ve found and started conversations with leads, it’s time for your sales organization to focus on the accounts with the highest projected ROI. Data is invaluable in the lead qualification process, enabling sales teams to prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert. Developing a lead scoring model that incorporates demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data based on your existing customers allows teams to focus on high-potential prospects. Analyzing past closed-won deals can also provide insights into the common characteristics of successful customers, guiding the qualification process.
Related Reading: Best Practices for Creating a Data-Backed Lead Scoring Strategy
Present Your Solution
Your in-market buyers are constantly bombarded with pleas to consider competitor solutions. If you want to stand out, utilizing sales data can help you time your messages correctly and offer the most compelling proof points. Data-driven insights can also significantly enhance the effectiveness of pitches and demos when presenting solutions to prospects.
Lean on data to address specific pain points you’ve identified. From there, you can present your offering as a clear solution to address their unique needs. Pulling in relevant case studies and testimonials from similar companies within the same industry can help build credibility and trust. Similarly, curated use cases can paint a picture of tangible ways your solution could be implemented at their organization.
Nurture Promising Accounts
For leads that seem interested but aren’t quite ready to buy, data can guide your nurturing efforts. Addressing lead concerns is crucial, and with reliable sales data, you don’t even need to wait for prospects to voice those concerns. By analyzing common objections recorded in CRM data, you can create targeted content that addresses these issues directly. Thoughtful follow-ups can be crafted using behavioral data to determine which sales messaging resonates best with each lead, ensuring that communication remains relevant and engaging. And if you find lead interest drops off for a bit, you may want to pause and wait instead of pushing when it’s not the right time — buyer intent data is particularly valuable at this stage, as it allows teams to reconnect with leads when they show renewed interest in the solution.
Close Deals
As a lead approaches making a final decision, account intelligence can help increase the chances of closing deals. Buyer intent data can help identify the best timing for follow-ups and closing conversations, maximizing the chances of securing a deal without turning off the prospect. Analyzing win/loss data provides insights into the factors that contribute to successful deals, allowing you to add finishing touches to proposals. For example, looking at pricing details from similar closed-won opportunities can help ensure your best offer is competitive and appealing.
Capture Referrals
If you land a customer in part thanks to these data-driven tactics, congratulations! But the work doesn’t stop there. Even after closing a deal, data can be instrumental in generating additional business through referrals. Analyzing customer satisfaction data helps identify the most satisfied customers who are likely to become advocates for the brand. Tracking usage data allows sales teams to identify power users within existing accounts, who may provide strong referrals based on their positive experiences. All of these insights can go into your bank of existing data for you to use in the future when the cycle starts over again.
Fine-Tune Customer Retention
Data isn’t just the key to landing new customers — it’s often critical if you want to improve client retention. While this isn’t technically part of the sales cycle, holding on to your loyal customers is just as important as landing new ones. When you send out communication to existing customers, tailor your messages based on what they were most interested in throughout the sales process. Through regular surveys, you may also gain valuable information about new features to roll out, furthering your market reach while enhancing customer satisfaction.
Leverage Data at Every Part of the Sales Cycle with Predictiv
Implementing a data-driven sales strategy can significantly improve team performance and drive revenue growth. That said, collecting, analyzing, and acting on this data can be challenging without the right tools and expertise. That’s where we come in. Predictiv offers a buyer intent data platform and buyer activation services that empower sales teams to make informed decisions at every stage of the sales cycle. By providing actionable insights and personalized recommendations, Predictiv helps teams engage leads more effectively, prioritize their efforts, and close more deals.
Ready to supercharge your sales pipeline with data-driven tactics? Explore how Predictiv can transform your sales process and drive better results for your team.