big data for b2b sales

In the B2B space, buyers look for fast, cost-effective solutions that add value to their business. The rise of big data has been integral in allowing B2B sellers the chance to deepen relationships with buyers and shorten their sales cycles. Here are some of the main reasons why big data is central to B2B sales.

Generates leads faster

Businesses succeed when they generate meaningful leads that end in conversions. The best sales courses advise that sales efforts are more likely to yield results when they’re geared toward lead generation and conversion.

Unfortunately, salespeople often need to dig through websites, LinkedIn profiles, and other contact information to find leads. Sifting through leads takes time, plus it’s usually the root cause of salespeople feeling overwhelmed and drained.

Big data helps to generate leads faster. With big data analytics, you can gather all the information about your leads more quickly and easily. What’s more, artificial intelligence (AI) can also flip through leads and analyze all the data to give you a preview of the leads most likely to pan out.

Customer relationship management

B2B customers require a unique approach from one customer to the other. Most of the time, your sales strategy and sometimes the product or service should be tailored to match the exact wants of the buyer. This means you’ll typically have to stay in tune with the varied needs of your existing and potential customers to lift up above the competition.

With software that computes and analyzes big data, you can track customer data, allowing you to respond to the needs of your customers in real time. Plus, the speed at which you can track changes in customer data enables you to make changes to your sales and marketing strategies quickly.

When your decision-making is guided by big data analytics and facts, you increase your chances of winning more customers.

Improves automation

If you don’t review performance analytics, it’s easy to get stuck in methods that don’t give you adequate returns. That’s why salespeople find themselves evaluating large volumes of customer data to measure the success of efforts like emails or customer interactions.

These repetitive analytical tasks are demanding and take up a huge chunk of time. Plus a sizeable portion of sales courses that could have been used to teach how to talk to customers is spent on showing salespeople the ropes about analytics.

To avoid getting bogged down by repetitive analytics, big data analytical tools can step in to take over the analytics. Then, with data analytics at your fingertips, salespeople can easily view performance insights, improving the decision-making process. 

In addition, salespeople have more time on their hands to interact with customers. The more reps engage with customers, the more practice they get. So, salespeople are freed up to fine-tune their skills and increase their chances of closing more deals.

Facilitates account-based marketing

The success of B2B sales often relies on how you can customize the way you deal with buyers.  

Account-based marketing often allows B2B sellers to thrive because each account is treated differently as if it were a separate market. With account-based marketing, you can target each account with a message that best suits the audience.

To yield fruits with account-based marketing, you need to have quality data about your customers so you can target leads more effectively. If you don’t have all the information, you’ll likely struggle to come up with a fitting message. Plus, you might misfire when it comes to choosing the right channels and the content for each customer account.

Big data platforms can generate and analyze all the necessary data without breaking a sweat. Once you have the information you need, you’re set up to hit the ground running with an account-based marketing campaign.

Improves cohesion

Top sales courses often extol the virtues of sales and marketing singing from the same hymn sheet. Bringing the sales and marketing departments together involves coordinating elements like customer relations, order management, and sales tracking.

Typically, you’ll document each part of the process using a software program. For instance, customer relationship management (CRM) software can track your customer relations and interactions, and an order management system tracks and processes orders.

Could you imagine tracking all the analytics separately? Not only would manual tracking be time-consuming, but there would be a lot of room for human error in manual calculations.

Big data analytics allows you to efficiently compute and track all the statistics within the sales and marketing ecosystem. As a result, sales and marketing can improve the way they work together, heightening your chances of clinching more sales.

All in all, big data helps B2B companies strengthen their sales and marketing efforts, paving the way for improved sales.