Sales have always been considered an intuition-driven profession where sales reps intuitively approach and engage best-fit prospects. While this approach might have worked in the past, it can’t guarantee sales success in today’s hyper-competitive world.

No wonder, 61% of salespeople consider their job role more challenging than it was five years ago.

So, how can you approach the sales process to attain the best outcomes effortlessly?

Implementing a data-driven sales strategy is a sure-fire way to acquire quality leads and identify business opportunities. It can help your team make informed sales decisions as per customer preferences, competitor activity, and market changes. 

With accurate business data, your sales reps can gain actionable insights into your business and target the best-fit prospects, thereby boosting their conversions.

In this post, we will share five best practices to boost sales strategy with data.

#1: Maximize Your Outreach through Effective Segmentation

A recent survey revealed that more than 50% of prospects are misfits for the product. This means the sales prospecting process consumes enormous time and effort of sales reps without delivering expected outcomes.

The reason is one size doesn’t fit all. Approaching random people can’t help acquire quality leads.

That’s where customer segmentation can help.

Customer segmentation is a business approach that requires dividing the entire target market into small groups of potential customers with similar needs, interests, and preferences. It allows sales reps to understand and analyze the target market, thereby offering them the right product fit. 

With the segmentation data, your sales team can plan a solid sales strategy and target the most relevant segments.

Here are a few approaches to segment the target audience.

• Demographic: Segmenting the target audience according to age, sex, race, occupation, and more. 

• Geographic: Dividing the audience by geographic zones, such as region, state, city, or country.

• Behavioral: Dividing them per their response towards products and services.

• Cultural: Splitting the target audience as per their cultural origin or education.

• Psychographic: Segmenting by their activities, opinions, and more. 

Take the approach that best suits your business. 

For instance, if you are a sunscreen brand, geographic segmentation data can work wonders for you. It can help you identify hot areas or the ones with beaches to reach the most relevant audience. You may further break down the segmentation using audience demographics to target a particular section of males/females as per their age and preferences.

How effective is this method?

A recent LinkedIn State of Sales report stated that 56% of sales professionals using segmentation data could accurately target quality prospects. Thus, segmentation data can be a game-changer for your business.

Count on marketing BI tools like datapine to get a 360-degree view of your customers and segment them based on their service preferences, a category like new or existing customers, or the nature of their issues. 

This will empower your sales team to make informed decisions, thereby delivering a tailored brand experience.

#2: Customize and Price the Products Right

Product customization and competitive pricing are the most vital elements for sales success. 

Product customization refers to creating a personalized product as per the customer’s requirements. For instance, you can enable customers to choose add-ons, templates, and exclusive functionalities to deliver a tailored experience. This drives customer loyalty and maximizes customer retention. 

Reports affirm that companies can achieve 40% more ROI by personalizing customer experiences. No wonder, companies like Netflix offer customized homepage content according to their customers’ response rate. 

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Besides customization, product pricing plays a pivotal role in boosting conversion rates. There are thousands of competitors selling similar products. To ensure attracting and retaining customers, you need to analyze the market and sell the products at competitive prices. 

The key here is to analyze customers’ data and competitors’ data. Customers’ data will enable you to figure out their preferences, whereas competitor analysis will help implement data-driven pricing strategies as per the market. You can also decide the pricing by considering your customers’ spending patterns and feedback. 

#3: Simplify the Sales Cycle 

The length of the sales cycle has a direct impact on the company’s bottom line.

A short sales cycle signifies a sales rep’s ability to close the deal successfully in a short period. Short sales cycles thus save time and help companies close more deals, thereby resulting in high ROI and gaining a competitive edge. 

Furthermore, this enables customers to receive quality service within less time and is therefore favorable for both company and customers. 

How can you shorten a sales cycle?

Simplifying the sales process is the easiest way to shorten its length. If your team has appropriate customer data and an outline to reach the end goal, making sales will be a cakewalk for them. 

For instance, your sales team should be well-prepared with the following set of data before approaching the prospect:

• Prospect’s stage in the sales funnel

• Buying behavior and purchase record of existing customers

• Objective/requirement and budget of the prospects

Integrating a chatbot builder platform with your website, web application, or social media channels can help your team communicate and engage with the customers for collecting this data. 

However, the hustle doesn’t end here. Research revealed that 80% of prospects say “no” four times before agreeing to buy the product or service. 

It means your team may need to visit the client’s place physically several times, which is time-consuming. To cut down on back-and-forth, digital signature tools can be helpful.

Similar to handwritten signatures, e-signatures or digital signatures allow users to sign any document virtually by using unique and secured private keys. They offer security Q&A, mobile identification, verification code via SMS, and more for additional security and authentication.

How can e-signature simplify the sales process?

Integrating digital signatures with CRM software can help sales reps extract customer-related data and create final sales agreements. They can share the presentations, product demo videos, and other information to the clients with the sales agreement virtually, thereby requesting them to sign the deal. 

This saves their time and effort in performing administrative work and visiting the clients to get the document signed. Besides, the clients can check all the details and complete the transaction virtually without hassles. As digital signatures are legally binding, there are zero chances of fraud. 

#4: Track the Crucial Success Metrics

Sales success metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) determine the sales team’s performance by analyzing their achieved goals. Tracking these crucial measurable data or metrics can help companies identify the team’s strengths and key challenges, thereby implementing a better sales strategy to ensure long-term growth.

Here are a few vital sales metrics to consider.

• Total Revenue: This is the amount of income generated from sales operations.

• Revenue by Product/Service: This is the income generated per product/service.

• Win Rates: This indicates the total number of closed deals.

• Market Penetration: This metric refers to the existing or acquired customers compared to potential customers in the market. 

• Percentage of Revenue from Existing Customers: This measures the revenue generated from up-selling and cross-selling to the existing customer base. 

• Percentage of Revenue from New Customers: This signifies the income generated from fresh acquired customers every quarter or month.

• Year-Over-Year Growth: This compares the yearly income generated from sales.

• Average Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): This refers to the revenue a business expects from a customer throughout their association with the company. 

• Customer Churn Rate: This metric indicates the customers who discontinued using the products or services of a company. 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This signifies how likely a customer will recommend a business to others.

Opting for an advanced and reliable sales metric dashboard is a requisite to collect, review, and analyze these metrics while maintaining accuracy. For instance, consider this sales dashboard, which enables you to track and view these metrics on a single screen, thus allowing you to make successful business decisions.

Notice the state-of-the-art sales cycle length visualizations that this tool offers. Utilizing this data, you can keep a tab on all sales operations and maximize profits.

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#5: Provide Ongoing Sales Training

According to HubSpot’s latest Global Sales Enablement Survey, 40% of organizations failed to achieve revenue goals.

The reason is not being able to adapt their sales process as per the market changes. 

Ongoing training helps salespeople keep up with market trends and upgrade their work strategies with the latest insights. This minimizes knowledge gaps and enforces a data-driven mindset, thereby enhancing their skillsets and productivity. 

Research advocates that sales training can improve win rates by 29%, which is massive. Understanding the need for ongoing training, 71% of companies have invested in online training courses for their employees.

To ensure your team’s best performance, consider providing them with ongoing training. 

Collect industry insights and data and host training sessions at regular intervals to notify employees of any changes. Address their challenges and invest in tools and technology that can simplify the sales cycle. This practice will pay huge dividends in the long term.

Conclusion

Sales is no longer an intuition-led game. Data is vital to make informed decisions and streamline the work processes of sales reps. 

The shared data-driven sales strategies and practices depict how data can save the sales team’s time and effort in acquiring and converting leads. 

So, implement these practices to leverage the power of data and maximize your ROI and profits. 

The post 5 Best Practices to Boost Your Sales Strategy With Data appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

Digital transformation is a broad term that is difficult to define precisely. Think of digital transformation as a way to future-proof a business. But, you can consider it a change in the business activities to prioritize your business’s digital presence. Various industries and departments use this phrase in different ways.

For instance, when it comes to Human Resources, a digital transformation entails streamlining operations and digitizing personnel data. An accounting department may consider leveraging electronic contracts, data collecting, and reporting as a part of the digital transition.

Here, you can take a quick look at how the world is going digital, meaning, a high scope for your business if you are looking for a digital transformation.

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Digital transformation of your business is possible when you can use emerging automation, Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in your marketing.

However, when it comes to digital transformation in marketing, there is a larger revolution in how marketers use modern tools and technologies. The key to leading a successful digital transformation in marketing involves using and maximizing the capabilities of a business’s digital presence. In other words, it means employing technology to constantly improve the whole company model, including its offerings, customer service, and operations.

Approach To Digital Marketing

Your key marketing leaders should be tasked with helping organizations achieve significant growth so that they may generate considerable value now and in the future.

One way to leverage digital marketing involves defining KPIs for marketing automation. These generally include:

• lead conversion rates, 
• click-through rates for ad campaigns, 
• number of emails opened by recipients,
• completing a specific goal (downloads, calls, clicks, etc.)

Generating intended outcomes will require a marketing professional with a knack to automate key activities. First, they need to pick up the right tools that allow marketing teams to assess the organization’s progress and better understand the behavior of its clients.

Some of the key marketing automation tools include:

• Oracle Eloqua
• HubSpot
• LeadSquared
• Pardot by Salesforce
• Constant Contact

Moreover, your marketing automation experts can leverage these tools to identify and monitor digital marketing actions relevant to ongoing campaigns.

Steps To Driving A Successful Digital Transformation

Once you know why digital transformation is necessary for business growth, a successful digital marketing team can help a business evolve with the right strategy. They can deliver the right message at the right time to the right person in the right location with adequate. Such an approach will require blending in data with digital technology so that your customers get more value from your services, advertising, and offers. That said, now we will look at some key steps you need to follow in order to ensure a successful marketing digital transformation.

1. The Basic Scope Of Automation In Digital Marketing

Marketing automation may automate some of the most time-consuming procedures associated with marketing operations, such as sending out emails. Other tasks include:

• Track and report digital marketing campaigns: Your automation KPIs should involve monitoring and reporting on campaign activity as your team leverages various channels to reach the target audience. Several marketing dashboard tools allow you to generate automated online dashboards and reports to track your most relevant KPIs in one place.

• Converting leads: This involves automating the process of generating and converting leads is a lengthy one, but it may be automated quickly. For instance, you can trigger emails to soft leads after they’ve downloaded anything from your site. Such emails may include specialized information or content tailored to convert those leads into customers. 

• Social Media: You may use various social networking platforms to post photos, write text, and target certain websites. Tools like HootSuite can help automate posting on various postings at a predefined time.  

• Email newsletters: Create and distribute email newsletters automatically to save time.

2. Create A Marketing Funnel

You can include digital marketing in the idea of a conventional marketing funnel that gauges an impact on how prospective consumers respond, eventually leading to a commitment to buy.

The marketing funnel was before the arrival of digital technology which included the following phases:

• Awareness: Here, your prospective customers initially become aware that you provide a product or service they may be interested in.

• Interest: Next, you will have a set of customers interested in learning more about your business and whether it can meet their demands.

• Consideration: This is where you have a set of probable buyers giving it some thought to buying your products and services. Here, they are showing more interest than just generating curiosity.

• Intent: When individuals begin to develop toward a conclusion in favor of a product because they believe they need the product or service.

• Decision: The final stage is where the customer chooses to do business with you.

Bring digital transformation to your marketing department and redefine the acquisition process backed by data. Your digital marketing KPIs can help marketers with additional essential multi-stage interaction and analytics tools. When you have set KPIs and got the right digital marketing tools at your disposal, your business will benefit from the following:

3. Refine Digital Channels

Your digital marketing team can determine how much the existing marketing tools and platforms are worth. This includes considering the website, automation tools, social media, customer database, and analytics platforms in more detail. 

Later, your team can find the right channels that offer better ROI. Also, they may consider whether these channels help pull the data that help decision-making? A thorough examination of the channels and available resources can ensure that you’re well prepared for any change when running a successful business. 

4. Breaking Silos

A comprehensive digital marketing plan ensures that all your marketing channels communicate with one another and operate in tandem. It is not a good idea to log in and out of ten different accounts to track your customers’ journey.

With an integrated marketing approach, your team can break down data silos by consolidating data management processes as a part of your digital transformation. This way, your team can operate more efficiently and collaboratively. The goal is to have clear information about your audience, their behaviors, and probable next steps. In order to do so, you can benefit from an interactive online marketing report that provides a centralized view to support relevant decisions and keep teams connected.

5. Interactivity-driven Social Marketing

Your prospective customers may connect with your company accounts on social media and ask questions that help them with the decision. They may use those platforms to make comments or feedback on the content they have just interacted with. Sometimes, they may simply like the post you share or even post it on their profile sharing. Such instances will need you to empower your business with social marketing tools like BuzzSumo for social engagement, Keyhole for #hashtag analysis, etc.

Major Digital Marketing Areas

While you go ‘all digital,’ there are a few aspects that you need to consider for 360-degree growth. You need to leverage a mix of digital media methods that blend in a range of specific solutions aimed at different marketing verticals. Comprehensive digital marketing will have your team addressing the following areas as a part of the transformation plan.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click advertising is another prominent digital marketing method. Often, you will leverage search engines (Google), social media platforms(Facebook, Instagram, etc.), or video streaming sites (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) to display your ads. 

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This is an advertising model where you pay per click, meaning every visit to your website from those links will cost you a certain amount. This is one of the popular ways to drive traffic to a company’s website, as you have a lot of visibility on platforms where you place an ad.

2. SEO

Your transformation into digital space is incomplete without SEO, as it is a great technique to increase your website’s visibility and drive quality leads. In simple words, SEO is a technique to put your site on top of search engine results for certain terms (called queries). When someone searches for content related to your company or product, you want to be amongst the top to gain traction. And this will need your SEO team to take some actions using relevant tools.

• Keyword research: Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Ads, etc to identify the right set of keywords to rank better.
• Web traffic analysis: You can rely on Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel, etc.
• Link Building: Use any of these top SEO tools to identify where your competitors generate backlinks and target those websites to build links that pass link juice to your website. Activities include guest posting, forum commenting, account creation, etc.

3. Social Media Marketing

Using social media to promote your content and brand can significantly impact your bottom line. Your overall marketing mix may benefit with the help of social media since most individuals have accounts on at least one of these sites. This can be seen with the increase in social media ad spending, which is expected to exponentially grow in the next years, as seen in the image below.

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You can opt to create social media corporate accounts that can help generate leads, increase traffic to the website, and enhance your brand awareness while being an effective free marketing tool. Here are some of the social media sites you should use as a part of social media marketing.

• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• Instagram
• Linkedin
• Twitter
• Facebook

Additionally, to track the success and performance of all your social efforts you can benefit from an interactive social media report. These reports offer a centralized view of all your SMM marketing activities and allow you to find improvement opportunities on the go. The image above is an example of a scorecard report tracking the performance of 4 social channels. The value of this tool lies in its visual nature. The colors red and green can tell you at a glance if your KPIs are performing as expected or if something needs to be changed.

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Bottomline

A wide range of business operations and marketing activities are affected by digital transformation. First, your marketers need to grasp the audience, learn from digital pioneers in other industries, and then equip your business with the right data.

Maintaining and increasing the ROI of your digital marketing requires constant improvement and iteration. The ever-changing digital landscape puts you at the risk of falling behind if you stop after just one or a few activities. Keeping your business at the forefront of digital growth for years to come requires you to be on top of the current marketing trends and be willing to try new things continuously. One way to do so includes driving marketing BI in your organization. These solutions will allow everyone to adopt a digital approach to their decision-making process in an easy and intuitive way.

The post A Complete Guide To Driving Digital Transformation In Marketing appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.

Regardless of the type of website you back, your SEO efforts determine its success and performance. As a website owner, you might already be implementing several digital marketing and SEO strategies to drive performance through your website. However, very few know that an efficient way to do so is by tracking and managing the KPI metrics which would portray the SEO performance of your website. Even today, 15% of the searches on Google are new, giving companies plenty of opportunities to improve their rankings. 

With these things in mind, here are some of the most important SEO metrics and KPIs that you should track for your website:

Top 9 SEO Metrics To Track

1. Organic Traffic

Let us ask you a question: What is the most important goal that you want to achieve through SEO? More visibility? More customers? The road that leads to accomplishing all these goals is getting organic traffic on your website. Organic traffic is one of the strongest indicators of your SEO performance, wherein a steady increase shows that your rankings in organic search are improving as well. 

This metric will let you know whether all the efforts that you are making are effective in bringing new customers to your website so that you can start working on conversions. If you have a WordPress website, several WooCommerce SEO guides can help you take care of this metric and others mentioned here. 

2. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is an important metric for web traffic analysis and indicates the percentage of people who have visited one of the pages on your website and left without visiting any other page. More aptly, it refers to the percentage of people that leave your website without taking any action such as clicking on links, subscribing, or filling out a form.

However, a high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad sign for your website, if it is built around content and you expect people to visit only for single-page sessions. A conversion-based website such as an online product seller, or ecommerce store on the other hand would need to proactively work on reducing the bounce rates on their website.

3. Keyword Rankings

As the most powerful search engine that exists today, Google’s search algorithm forms the basis for SEO efforts undertaken by companies. Keeping a check on your keyword rankings will ensure that you have a general idea of the direction in which your SEO efforts are headed, and will help you select the right keywords to integrate within your content. 

While tracking this metric, you need to assess whether you are targeting the right keywords for your website and if not, then include high-performing new keywords to attract more traffic organically. For best results, you should target keywords that are performing well locally, as well as in the markets that you want to target. 

4. Average Page Load Time

Just in case, this metric sounded too technical to bother about at the outset, you should know that it is directly related to the bounce rate of your website. The speed at which your website loads can make or break your SEO performance. In fact, did you know that 1 in every 4 visitors will abandon your website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load? 

If your website takes too much time to load, chances are that your bounce rate will be higher, which is an indication that your visitors are not finding what they need on your website. Moreover, with the number of internet users on mobile phones increasing rapidly, it is important to note that your website will take more time to load on a mobile device, compared to a desktop. 

5. Organic Conversions

Similar to other metrics that define the SEO performance of your website, organic conversions can be quite crucial in determining the success of your website. Every growing website aims to convert organic traffic into qualified leads which can contribute to its success and performance. The organic conversions on your website determine the quality of your website traffic. A high inflow of traffic without generating any leads or sales is of no use for the overall performance of your website. By ensuring that customers are taking action on your website, you can be assured of better results consistently.

6. New Backlinks

While there are no shortcuts to success, creating backlinks has often been touted as one of the fastest ways to better SEO performance. Backlinks can fetch you new traffic and reach your target audience through multiple sources, increasing the likelihood of higher traffic on your website. The difference that backlinks can make is apparent when you compare two web pages with similar on-page metrics – the one with more backlinks from high-domain authority sources will win. 

A higher number of backlinks translates to more traffic as well as better rankings on Google, thus taking care of your complete SEO performance and online visibility. For effective results, you should constantly update your backlinks, maintain their accuracy and follow the trends related to the backlinks regularly. 

7. KPIs for Authority

When we discuss the KPIs and metrics that you need to track for your website, it would be wrong to not mention the ones that determine your website authority. Google algorithms are updated now and then, but the goal that every website chases remains the same – consistent increase in domain authority. 

In SEO, domain authority directly pinpoints the trustworthiness of a website by measuring it on a scale of 0-100. Higher the score, the more trustworthy the website. New websites usually have lower scores, however, the success of your SEO efforts should be able to improve this score consistently. Domain authority can be increased through backlinks, however, this system is often abused by websites that post poor-quality backlinks on multiple domains. Keeping track of your authority metrics with the help of KPI tools will enable you to constantly monitor if your strategies are bringing the expected results.

8. Mobile Traffic and Rankings

Last but far from being less important, is the constant scrutiny and management of mobile traffic and rankings. As of 2020, 3.6 billion people use smartphones and thus browse the internet on their mobile devices. Understandably, assigning too much importance just to desktop users and ignoring the mobile-friendliness of your website is no longer an option – regardless of which vertical you operate in. 

Having an adaptable interface, and including features and elements that are convenient for mobile users to navigate and use, is crucial to the success of your website. To be able to cater to the needs of the mobile users effectively, it is important to constantly track the behavior and performance of your website on mobile devices, so that you can fare well on mobile search results – which now comprise nearly 60% of all searches. 

9. Image SEO

You must ensure that your targeted audience can find your website through image search. To ensure your images appear in Google’s image search, I’ll share a few ways.

The most ideal way to optimize for Image SEO is to write updated ALT tags of your images on the site. 

A descriptive ALT tag will help search engine bots understand what the image is all about as the search engine crawlers are not yet smart enough to comprehend visuals. 

Plus, make sure your image is relevant. A good graphical abstract personifying your blog’s message will be invaluable. It will be directly relevant and effectively deliver the message of the text. 

You need to ensure the images are optimized in size, which will help your landing page load quickly in web browsers.  

Closing Remarks

While there are many ways to drive the traffic and revenue of your website, and managing your SEO performance, the aforementioned metrics can be a great starting point. By monitoring these metrics with help of data analysis tools, you can ensure that your SEO performance is effective and ready for scaling up. 

It is important to maintain consistent performance on these metrics so that your website can generate the desired results for your business. Effective SEO performance can help you gain more brand visibility, recognition and in building greater brand value.

The post Top 9 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) KPIs & Metrics You Must Track appeared first on BI Blog | Data Visualization & Analytics Blog | datapine.