When we talk about increasing sales through the use of data, there are a few steps that need to be taken. The first of these was already covered in our last article published here on the blog, which is using data to develop strategic planning. Once the strategy has been defined, the next step is to know how to apply the data at a tactical level to achieve your goals. In the sales area, in addition to the obvious objective (selling more), another common need is to improve efficiency. And this is where market segmentation comes in, a process that helps define the target audience to be impacted in order to avoid wasting time and money.
Being able to rely on more sophisticated segmentation is a first step towards boosting sales. Who are the people or companies that would likely be interested in your products and services? People who practice physical activities, who like to consume certain products, who occupy positions X, Y and Z and who live in a certain region? Or families with 1, 2 or 3 children, with a certain monthly income and who live in apartments? Or even companies and offices in specific segments with a certain number of employees and revenue in the range between A and B? These are behavioral characteristics that, if not combined with more sophisticated sociodemographic data, will not allow the necessary segmentation.
A second optimization point is lead qualification. In many cases, the sales department's efforts are poorly directed, wasting time on customers who do not have the right profile. To avoid wasting time and money, your company can use the data to carry out an information enrichment process when someone contacts you wanting to buy your product or hire your service, identifying whether that person fits the profile that is more or less worth the company's investment in order to turn them into a customer.
How many times do we search for an apartment or car of our dreams, just out of curiosity, knowing that the realization of that dream is still a little far away, and then we are taiwan phone numbers bombarded with advertisements, emails and even phone calls from companies interested in selling? If these companies invested in qualifying their leads through data, they would not waste time directing efforts towards a purchase that will not be made.
Imagine a B2B business model that receives a request on its website from a company wanting information about its service. Identifying whether that company is within your target audience, whether in terms of size, revenue, area of operation or number of employees, will help you decide the level of effort that should be directed towards that sale. The idea is not to stop serving, but to optimize and rationalize the sales department's efforts to improve results.
The last vertical, when it comes to increasing sales, is the importance of reducing friction in the sales or service contracting process and making it as simple as possible. Asking a potential customer to send an excessive number of documents and certificates that prove, for example, their existence or revenue, can lead to the business being abandoned and the loss of the new customer. These are documents that can be legally and automatically obtained from the network and data that can be easily recovered by companies specialized in capturing and processing information. This way, your company can make decisions without bothering the customer.