Data The Growth Driver

Gone are the days when companies could live boasting the size of data available to them. They realize that if anything unstructured or unvalidated data can only make them data rich, but they remain information poor. To use a cliche, water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.

Today data is the lifeblood of decision-making and without high-quality data providing the right information growth becomes impossible. Thus database management and more importantly relevance of your database becomes critical for success. All your marketing & sales efforts start from here. Information on market segment, geography, customer, decision makers within the target audience is the starting point for any business growth. In B2B scenario, it’s very important that you connect to the right target audience.

Very few companies we have seen doing this database management effectively. When we work with these businesses we realise that, even if they have systems like CRM or SQL, the structure and relevance remains a big concern to almost all of them.

This brings us to the important point of sustained enrichment of the database and quality of it. Quality data will help your marketing team to design the right strategy and sales team to reach out to decision makers / influencers efficiently, who make decisions for your product or service.

One way to reach out to the right audience is account based marketing. This requires all the relevant information on the targeted accounts i.e. number of sites, no. of employees on the sites, contact details of the people. Once you have all this information, there is clear visibility on the account.

There are companies who have built expertise over the years and work with businesses in various domains within the data. Be it access to the new and right data point or improving existing databases by flushing out of irrelevant, bad and stale data to keep it effective. This refreshed database will enable almost everything, be it marketing programs like email campaigns, pre-sales lead generation process, customer loyalty programs or a customer survey.

Given the huge role that data has to play in the success of business, every company must have a plan around data and work on the same .

A success story

In a classic example, in 2018 we got to work with a large company, where a typical ticket size was  Rs 10 lacs+ . They had set sales targets across various parameters, region, quarter, sales person. Now, in quarter one itself they started having a lag and that is when we were brought in.

When we ran a diagnostic one of the key reasons for failure was the inordinate time of the sales team on prospecting. Almost 60% of their effort was going in identifying the key account, right decision maker / influencer, getting the right contact and only 40% in real sales effort. 

Once the problem was identified, the company focussed on sourcing data so that sales could focus on what they are best at i.e. selling. Quality data helped over the next two quarters in having almost 100% increase in the sales funnel and 25% increase in sales. This also helped them in reducing the sales team by 30%. All this because access to better data helped them sell a lot easily.

So in Nutshell, we would suggest you invest in databases, invest in right marketing tools and growth will follow given limitations of only sales team driven growth.