How To Use Your Business Data To Increase Sales And Customer Satisfaction

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‘Big Data’ remains a major topic of discussion but, beyond the hype, do you really know what it can do for your business?

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Introduction

For smart businesses, ‘Big Data’ is more than just a buzz phrase. Using data to create business value and forge ahead of your competitors is crucial for business survival. Big Data is largely a product of the digital age and the amount of information generated is growing faster than ever. According to global accountancy firm EY, more data is generated today in 10 minutes than created by all of humanity through to 2003¹.

Data’s hidden value is unleashed when the information is used to engage customers on a multitude of levels. It has the power to help that you understand your customers needs, circumstances and pain-points. It also allows you to identify profitable customers, to better allocate resources in a way that offers the greatest returns and select new target markets.

Businesses should be extensively using their data to extract the most value from it. All data derived from any business needs to be analyzed in a timely and appropriate manner in order to optimize key processes, better target buyers, deliver customer satisfaction and win new business.

The more data collected from your customers, the more value you can deliver to them; and as you continue delivering higher levels of value, your business will in turn be generating higher revenue². Of course, collecting customer data for analysis requires software for storing, managing and accessing it, and keeping it up-to-date: a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution is essential for this.

The aim of this guide is to outline how to use your data to arm you with the business intelligence needed to better target buyers, improve customer satisfaction, close new business and ultimately boost profits.

The outcome for big and small businesses alike, is a key competitive advantage in their marketplace.

Understanding the value of your data

Big Data refers to the dynamic, large and disparate volumes of data generated from all people, tools and technology involved in business today³, its use is now a daily reality for a major proportion of businesses. Indeed, a survey by global consulting firm Cap Gemini shows 61% of senior executives “acknowledge that Big Data is now a driver of revenues in its own right and is becoming as valuable to their businesses as their existing products and services⁴.”

In order to manage and garner insights from all this information, it is essential to have innovative and scalable technology to collect, sort and analyze it. It must be collated from all available sources: website visits, online forms, transactions, meetings, phone calls, emails, social media and mobile interactions with smartphones and tablets. This necessitates the continual logging of structured and unstructured data within a CRM database.

To benefit from their data, organizations need to incorporate the management and use of the information into the routines and daily operations of all those involved⁵. Yet far too few are successfully doing so: according to a Bain and Company survey, a mere 4% of companies said they have the right tools to draw meaningful insights from their data and are able to act accordingly⁶.

If companies are not using or understanding the value of their data, they will find themselves falling behind competitors. Indeed, in today’s intensely competitive business environment, in which having more customer intelligence can be the difference between success and failure, it is imperative for organizations that want to win, to rethink their internal structures and harness insights. For many companies, this is really a matter of finding a way to leverage information they already have.

Using your organization’s data eliminates the guesswork and ensures all business decisions are based on facts rather than unproven assumptions. Cap Gemini reports that 65% of businesses admit they risk becoming irrelevant if they do not understand the value of Big Data and embrace what it now brings to the table⁷. Today, it is critical to assimilate all the pertinent information available on the customer relationship, while ignoring that which is irrelevant, to act more effectively.

How measuring and analyzing data gives you a competitive edge and grows your business

Big Data has actually taken business relationships back to the days of the local green grocer and banker, when the enterprises you dealt with knew about you and your situation. Even though proprietors are not chatting directly with you today, there is a renewed sense of personalized and tailored service; whether that comes across online, in phone conversations or in exchanges at a shop till. Nonetheless, businesses need to be on board with Big Data to know exactly how to better serve customers. That needs to start at the top.

However, not enough Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) actually recognize the overall importance of Big Data. According to recent research from data and marketing analytics firm Teradata, CEOs are wearing rose tinted glasses when examining the overall effectiveness that Big Data has on their initiatives. The study shows only about a third of CEOs say their company is trying to make use of their data – while just a quarter of their employees say they are actually doing so⁸.

That means the vast majority of companies are missing out on insight that can shed light on how to strengthen bonds with customers, time your marketing and sales communications, understand their needs, determine how valuable and loyal they are, sell them new products and services, provide them with a better overall experience, and find profitable new target markets. This is vital information which, when used correctly, will make your business more competitive and profitable.

As a business you need a plan that is ingrained in your everyday processes, enabling you to collect, organize and act on useful data. This plan should be in line with your business strategy and demonstrate to both top management and employees how the organization can and will use this data to create and add value⁹.

Here are some of the best ways your company can use Big Data to provide your customers with unique, personalized experiences¹⁰:

1) Know what customers want, before they ask for it
Predicting what your customers want before they have even thought about requesting it is an easy route to winning their loyalty. Insight into customers’ online purchasing history will provide you with the information needed to predict what they will purchase next. A company that has mastered this concept is Amazon; who provides a recommendation on products to purchase based on a customer’s buying history.

2) Get customers excited about just how awesome Big Data is
Data is now a major part of people’s everyday lives. This can be seen in fitness technology such as FitBit, which people use to monitor their fitness level, how many steps they have taken in a day, how many calories they have consumed, etc. Therefore, getting your customers excited about the product or service you are offering by getting them involved with the use of data will ultimately increase Return on Investment (ROI) – if they are excited about the data points you’re sharing, they will continue logging on with a vested interest.

3) Improve customer service interactions
Businesses can reap the rewards of Big Data by using it to enhance their customer service. Having your customers’ data at hand ensures, that when they reach out for help, your customer service representatives are able to efficiently deal with their request, without needing to ask time-consuming and often repetitive questions regarding the client’s circumstances and history. It is important to ensure that your customer service representatives are well versed on how to use this data appropriately.

4) Identify customer pain-points and suggest solutions
Being able to delve in to the data available to you in order to solve your customers’ painpoints ensures that you will be continuously improving their customer experience. The key is in using Big Data to predict the challenges and stumbling blocks your customers are trying to overcome, and use this information to proactively recommend a solution to the customer. Doing this will put you way ahead in a competitive marketplace.

How to use CRM and Dashboard functionality to put this information at your fingertips

Gathering, assimilating and analyzing data is key to the competitiveness of any business today. The majority of companies are, in fact, still looking for a platform that allows them to tap into Big Data. According to Bain and Company, 56% of companies still don’t have the right systems to capture the data they need or are just not collecting useful data – and 66% lack the right technology to store and access their data¹¹.

A tool such as CRM is precisely what is needed to decipher your company’s data. Having a CRM solution with the right features and functions, along with an effectively configured dashboard, makes analyzing your company’s operations pain-free, and will ultimately position you to reap the rewards of Big Data.

What members of the management team should be measuring

Measuring and analyzing Big Data should not be left up to one individual in a company. Rather, it should be implemented as best practice for all departments, with all the relevant players given equal access to the resulting insights. Here are a few things that managing directors, marketing managers and sales managers need to watch out for:

Chief Executive Officers/ Managing Directors

CEOs and Managing Directors should have a firm grip on what the data is showing. However, there are particular aspects that they should be focusing on, including: productivity, staff performance, product preferences, sales cycles, revenues and key customers. Using your data to find out who your most profitable customers are and identify who is losing you money, is a crucial task for any MD. You might think that you have a strong hold on who your most profitable customers are, but instinct alone is not enough.

Customer retention should not be underestimated, in fact, it’s fundamental for profitability. Numerous studies show that it costs 5 – 7 times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones¹². Using the data readily available to you puts you in a position to identify your most profitable customers. You can develop profiles based on the traits which your most profitable customers share, and then focus your activities on these individuals and shift resources away from those that the data shows are not contributing to your bottom line.You can also use the same information to find and target prospects that match the profiles of your best customers.

The most effective management teams look for relevant and comprehensive data to guide their decision making, so that the company sees an increased efficiency and better financial performance. CRM can be an invaluable tool for this, as it puts all the relevant information at the management team’s fingertips, enabling quicker decisions while ensuring the resulting actions are based on up-to-date factual assessments of the business. It also makes realistic forecasting easier.

A well-configured CRM solution provides a foundation for measuring performance across the business, ensuring that all the necessary data is accessible and analyzable for everyone who needs it. The reports generated from a CRM solution can highlight performance hotspots; flagging up where processes and actions should be emulated and where adjustments need to be made. It also enables the collection and analysis of information streams from different parts of the business, thus ensuring the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing.

Sales Managers

Sales managers need to have a strong handle on how their sales team are performing and know how to replicate best practice throughout the sales team to ensure they hit all targets and generate the necessary revenues. Sales managers have masses of data available to them and need to find a way to consistently monitor it to effectively run their sales team and stay on track financially.

As a sales manager, the most important data to look at includes:
• Number of leads received
• Number of leads converted to opportunities
• The number of leads that progress through each stage of the sales cycle
• The average length of the sales cycle
• The number of sales won
• Revenue per sale and per rep
• Sales pipeline value and growth.

Using a CRM solution is crucial to monitoring key sales metrics, so you know exactly how your team is performing. A good CRM dashboard also allows you to drill down to more detailed data, so that you can understand exactly what is going right, and what needs to be fixed.

Using CRM to analyze the data on your sales team is essential for fully understanding where you are succeeding and failing. For instance, part of the team might appear to be under performing but the CRM data might tell you that the root of the problem is actually not the sales consultants, but specific products that are not meeting customer expectations, or territories where demand or pricing might be an issue. A CRM solution provides a complete and accurate view into how the department is functioning and equips you to solve problems and repeat successes.

Marketing Managers

Effective campaign management is vitally important to marketing managers, who need a reliable and practical method of tracking and measuring marketing return on investment (ROI). This is critical to efficient lead management, which is, in turn, crucial to increasing profits. The CRM database can be central to this process, giving the marketing manager the ability to identify strengths and weaknesses in campaigns and make adjustments based on ROI-related data.

Marketing managers have many tools at their fingertips to help them assimilate and analyze the data based on their marketing efforts. Online analytics and marketing automation can be tied into CRM solutions to enable the full capture and use of data in cultivating leads.

As a marketing manager, the data you should hone in on includes:
• Number of leads by source
• Ratio of converted leads to opportunities
• ROI
• Customer acquisition costs
• Marketing percentage of customer acquisition cost
• Ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition costs
• Time to payback customer acquisition cost
• Marketing originated customer percentage
• Marketing influenced customer percentage.

Data on customer demographics, lifestyle factors, purchasing patterns, real-time behavior and other factors can also greatly inform marketing approaches and personalization. Using your CRM solution to monitor all this makes the marketing manager’s decisions easier, while ensuring that the resulting actions are based on up-to-date factual assessments of the businesses data.

How CRM helps your data get you to where you need to go

CRM provides immediate access to customer data, streamlines operations and provides a comprehensive view of the business by enabling a single information hub that all departments can easily draw on. This ensures everyone across the company has an accurate, up-to-date view of the customer that takes in all the necessary information, including ongoing service cases, previous purchases and where they are in the sales cycle.

This can have a huge impact on productivity. Not only is management kept up-to-speed, but all customer-facing staff avoid the inefficiencies caused by missing and duplicate data, inaccurate details, out-of-date information, fruitless searches and other time wasting that results from not having the right facts quickly to hand, all of which can rapidly erode customer confidence and increase employee frustration.

Indeed, a good CRM solution weeds out barriers to finding and utilizing up-to-date information, eliminates duplication of work and ultimately cuts down on the time spent doing administrative tasks. The result is a better customer experience based on a high level of prospect or buyer knowledge.

How to use Dashboard functionality to get the most from your data

Your CRM solution should not be viewed solely as a data storage facility; instead, a good CRM solution can offer you an array of quick-view reporting tools that allow your management team to easily digest the information on a variety of critical key performance indicators. CRM dashboards put all of your business’ data at your fingertips, providing you with insight into exactly what’s going on.

To get the most from your data using CRM and dashboard functionality, it is important to:
• Keep it simple, easy to read and accessible
• Keep it accurate and current
• Choose metrics that matter
• Keep it clutter free and visual
• Make it actionable
• Make your metrics mobile – by making them usable on your smartphone or tablet.

Conclusion

It is quite clear why data is so important to businesses: it is rapidly becoming the new business fuel, igniting productivity, profit and competitive advantage. For your workforce, it means that rather than working in the dark, they are always on top of what is happening with the customer and the next step they need to take. For business owners, top managers, partners and other key stakeholders, data access is essential for them to have clear visibility of how the business is performing – overall and at departmental and even individual levels – so they make the right operational and strategic decisions as well as accurate financial forecasts.

But data alone can be next to useless. You need a platform that enables you to easily capture it, manage it, update it, access it, use it and keep it together in one place. In other words, you need a CRM solution configured for your business. You also need dashboards that make it easy for users to make the most out of a CRM solution.

The more you can do with data, the bigger the edge you have in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace. Garnering insights from your business’ data – particularly your customer data – will ensure your business grows, remains competitive, becomes more productive and increases profits.

1 EY, Big Data: changing the way businesses compete and operate, April 2014
2 Kiss Metrics, 10 ways data mining can help to get a competitive edge, 2012
3 EY, Big Data: changing the way businesses compete and operate, April 2014
4 Forbes, Drilling into the value of data, by Howard Baldwin, 23 March 2015
5 ibid
6 Bain & Company, The value of Big Data: how analytics differentiates winners, 2013
7 Capgemini, Big and fast data: the rise of insight-driven business, 2015
8 Real Time Daily, CEOs not seeing big picture on Big Data, January 2015
9 Bain & Company, The value of Big Data: how analytics differentiates winners, 2013
10 Venture Beat, 5 ways companies are using Big Data, 2014
11 Bain & Company, The value of Big Data: how analytics differentiates winners, 2013
12 Forbes, Five customer retention tips for entrepreneurs, 2012