If you’ve been told to sell a commodity, what will you do?
Will you prefer door-to-door selling?
Would you like to do more of a desk job and practice cold calling?
Or will you stand in the market and try to sell it, out loud?
If I am in your place, I won’t mind trying all three ideas. For all I know, I will be having a single-point agenda of sales. However, what can be an appropriate solution to it –
Would you go on selling your product door to door in a random residential area? If you choose cold-calling, who will you call? How many people do you think you’ll attract by standing in the middle of a street and selling your product out loud?
The problem is not the method of selling but the zero outcomes of it.
This is where data comes to your rescue.
When you have processed data you will be able to target people; you’ll be able to reach out to better prospects, you’ll be able to cater to those potential customers who are in dire need of your product.
You will understand what the product is and who are those people who are really interested in buying it. From geographical differences to age & gender variations, processed data can tell you a lot of aspects you may build your sales strategy on.
Technically speaking everything runs or depends on some form of data, we don’t observe it, but it’s still there.
Dynamicity
Data is dynamic & provides a high conversion rate to the sales process. Data not only comes with a list of contacts or prospects, but it also helps you define your target audience, customer persona, decision making, future predictions. Data has been a boon in the field of sales & marketing, data helps you craft the right sales process and you learn to avoid mistakes that can incur a loss to your company.
No data is perfect and no data is accurately reliable. A new set of data is always required for companies and their queries and requirements change with new projects and campaigns. Data keeps on changing every day, every week, every month. It is not a one-time process and to append it, cleanse it, and cross-check it is the primary objective of a data-mining firm.
It is imperative to understand that it is not your salesforce work to append & update your data. It is a waste of time for them. They should be more concerned & focused on identifying potential customers and closing the deal as fast as it can be done not wasting their time over pointless data and not interested customers, If they are not provided with a good set of data to work on, you possibly can’t expect good results from them.
An old set of data has a lot of information missing which not only makes it hard for your sales team to prepare a strategy and sales pitch to them but it basically has a lot of old prospects who shouldn’t be on that list and hence time is wasted in identifying them.
The more the data will be precise & accurate, the more it will be easy for your sales team to perform and showcase better results.
Data Mining
Data mining turns raw data into useful information, this is a quintessential process that needs to be repeated in regular intervals of time. The more your data is accurate & reliable there are more chances to get better sales results from it.
Data mining companies work hard to get accuracy with it and are often measured on the basis of the reliability percentage of the data provided, mined, or appended by them.
To put it simply, data serves as an implementation plan or a blueprint aiding not only the sales process but overall administration & policy-making as well.
There are basically two types of data mining processes that go into effect –
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Automated data mining
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Manual data mining
I believe you to be smart enough to comprehend what these two processes mean. However, I will strongly advise you to opt for manual data mining as it works on more critical thinking, human intervention, and a logical approach to identify patterns and repeated behaviors that may get omitted in the automated mining process as it works on a determined algorithm.
So an automated data mining process will do what it is asked to do, neither less nor more.
End to End Solution
Now let’s paint the whole picture once again only this time with data. When you have data, you can share it with your sales force, and you’ll be pleased to see how better the results are.
Data is becoming oxygen to companies and industries deeply involved in sales & marketing. With data, new strategies have come into the light, for example, account-based marketing, which refines the data to such an extent that it serves each account individually and shortlisting the data to such a deep level where the potential customers are those who are bound to buy your product and hence enhancing the sales.
From data appending to skip tracing, Companies are offering end-to-end data solutions, you name it and they have it, providing tons of data to organizations and are present to service them by any means necessary. One such company I came across in my research for B2B services is Bizprospex, the best part about Bizprospex is not only do they have a variety of services to provide, but they also offer manual data mining services which set them apart from their competition. Because simply, what a human mind can configure, an automated software working on a fixed algorithm won’t. Also, they have services like skip tracing to help companies redeem their assets.
A good example – When the United Nations decided to issue a Visa credit card to all those people who traveled overseas frequently. The agency marketers segmented their database into wealthy travelers – 30,000 people in high-income households. They used direct mail for their appeals and generated a 3% response. it may look small to you, but typically they only witness 0.5% response rates. This is a good example of targeted customers being catered from a well-defined database.
Backbone to sales
Data serves as a backbone to the sales process. Without a good database, sales would become unbearable & exhausting. A useful and precise data has so much to offer if used in the right way. It has n number of uses not only in the sales process but in the overall development of marketing strategies, understanding customers, decision making, future predictions, targeting audiences, customer feedback, need and demand of the customers, and other aspects which make data inevitable.
I won’t be wrong to make a clear statement as there are a vast and enormous number of companies looking for new, customized, and meaningful data to help them in dealing with the end-to-end sales process, and thus the need for data mining, email appending grows parallel to it.
The best part of sales is, that it can go as deep as you may like it and can represent every single piece of critical and more insightful information that will certainly make a difference.
It can not only process basic data of a school but boy-girl ratio, attendance, percentage, grades, performance, faculty, and everything. This is why data is necessary and can’t be denied its place in bringing useful insights into sales.