Customer data includes all personal, behavioral, and demographic information that is collected from a customer base. To clarify, customer data includes email addresses, information the customer gives within a survey, geographic location, and more. What better way to target your ideal customer than by understanding who they are?
Knowing the customer data enables sales teams to more adequately sell the right products and services to the right leads. Overall, customer data equips sales teams to gain a deeper understanding of their prospects. This enables sales reps to perform more effective sales interactions across the board. Continue reading as we deepen our understanding of customer data and how it can help your sales tracking efforts.
What is sales tracking?
Basically, the purpose of sales tracking, as defined by G2, is to measure the success of current selling efforts. Additionally, sales tracking enables sales teams to find certain materials or moments in the sales cycle that can be improved. Sales tracking can be accomplished with the help of customer data.
Customer data helps sales reps pinpoint exactly where in the sales process the buyer is engaging with the sales materials. With the right sales enablement technology, salespeople have access to real-time data like which sales materials the prospect is interacting with most. For example, the right sales enablement platform can provide timestamp information regarding how long a prospect viewed a certain slide in a presentation. If many prospects are engaging with the material, odds are, your sales collateral is working well! However, if a majority of the prospects are disengaged with a piece of content, there’s a good chance it needs improving. Thus, customer data plays a critical role in measuring the success of the sales cycle.
Using sales enablement technology to gain & track
real-time insights on customer data
In order to track sales, you need the right sales enablement platform. The best platforms allow sales reps to gain insights into a prospect’s interaction with the sales materials. This information then becomes behavioral customer data and enables salespeople to more accurately address the prospect’s needs. How? Let’s play out a scenario:
Let’s say you’re a salesperson and you’ve just finished a virtual sales meeting with a prospect. Now, you want to send the prospect all the relevant slides from the presentation so you quickly send them via email. Boom. Done. But now what? Do you wait blindly for the prospect to get back to you? Do you follow up with them too soon, not knowing if they even had a chance to open your email yet? No to all of the above!
With a sales enablement platform, you’re able to see the prospect’s interaction with the sales presentation in real-time. Through the platform’s analytics, you’re able to gather customer data that enables you to be more proactive in lead nurturing and problem-solving. For example, if you notice your prospect is spending the most time on materials regarding life insurance, you may want to focus your next interaction around the benefits of life insurance.
Similarly, maybe you notice your prospect isn’t engaging with the sales content at all. Based on the collected behavioral data, you can retarget the prospect with another piece of content that they might like better. Ultimately, all of this can be done with the proper sales enablement tool.Remember those days of long and boring sales training sessions? Okay, now forget them because sales enablement technology has innovated a new form of training: on-demand learning. Help texts and popups with productinformation, help onboard new sales reps faster and keep all your sales reps updated at all times. Storing this in the sales enablement platform enables salespeople to learn at their own pace.
Certainly, long-duration seminars eat into an employee’s productivity. With on-demand learning, sales reps can space training out over time versus learning for 8 hours straight. This method relates to modern work-life balance and incorporates training into a natural part of the everyday workflow. Moreover, studies indicate that the short-term memory is limited to only three or four items at a time. So, bombarding your employees with too much information at once will waste time and yield insufficient results. Instead of spending an entire day on sales training, sales reps are now able to learn a little each day. This gives them back the time to spend in client-facing tasks while also ensuring they’re learning on a daily basis.
With sales enablement technology, you can see in real-time:
- Which parts of the presentation a customer is engaging with
- What numbers/information they’re adding into value calculators
- How long the prospect is viewing/interacting with a presentation
- How many times the prospect clicked on any given link
- And more!
Sales tracking with customer data unlocks a great customer experience
By tracking where in the sales cycle you lose a lead or close a deal based on customer data, the sales team learns what to offer on-the-fence customers to help close deals. Here’s another scenario. While reviewing the recent customer data you’ve gathered you notice something remarkable. For all the deals closed in the last month, the last piece of content shown to the prospect was a new case study. On the other hand, the last piece of content shown to prospects with deals that fell through was an outdated product comparison guide.
When a piece of content is performing well in sales meetings, it’s important to ask:
- What is it about this material that resonates with customers?
- Why is it beneficial to show this content at this certain stage?
- How can we improve less-performing content to be more effective like this one?
With this information, brought forth by the customer data, sales leaders are enabled to understand which pieces of content in the decision stage help prospects make the decision to purchase. The same goes for all three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. Presenting prospects with the right content at the right time elicits a positive customer experience.
Why does the customer experience matter?
A totally satisfied customer contributes 2.6 times as much revenue as a somewhat satisfied customer, and 14 times as much revenue as a somewhat dissatisfied customer. Having access to all possible forms of customer data enables sales teams to better serve their current and future customers. By deeply understanding your ideal customer, you’re better able to provide them with the most relevant content to guide them in the decision-making process.
Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts Using customer data to more effectively improve upon your sales materials is a great sales enablement strategy. Customer data serves a greater purpose than to just be able to contact your prospects via email. Real-time customer data enables sales representatives to gain insight into which pieces of sales content are working well. Likewise, sales reps can use customer data to understand which materials do not resonate with prospects and therefore should be improved.
Improve your sales strategy using customer data with the right sales enablement platform. What are you waiting for? Transform your sales now!
