Home » Why You Need a Data-Driven Sales Team—and How to Implement It

Why You Need a Data-Driven Sales Team—and How to Implement It

Selling is a numbers game.

Wait, wait… we don’t mean this in the traditional sense.

(In fact, we believe that a wide-net, “spray and pray” approach to sales is certainly not the best way to go by today’s standards.)

What we mean is that if your goal is to maximize your sales productivity, your first step should be to look at the numbers. This is the myriad of data your team has about your customers, your team’s performance, and more.

Your next step: dive in head first.

1. Define the data-driven sales team

Before we go too far, it’s worth nepal phone number data clarifying what exactly it means for a sales team to be “data-driven.”

Let’s start with a more general (and admittedly vague) definition:

A data-driven sales team is one that has integrated the analysis and use of data into all sales-related processes and activities.

As you might imagine, organizations that have become truly data-driven typically outperform their competition—by a pretty wide margin, too. High-performing sales teams are 3.5 times more likely to have used a data-driven approach than their under-performing counterparts. And companies that have “injected” data into their daily operations are 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their competition.

There are a couple of key words get your 470 area code the easy way: just 3 easy steps to atlanta we want to draw attention to: “integrated” and “injected.” In other words, truly data-driven sales teams don’t just “use” data; they find ways to “integrate” and “inject” data into their daily activities through data transformation . Essentially, they put data at the center of everything they do. For these teams, data and tangible evidence are never overlooked. In fact, it’s more often the catalyst that leads the team to make a certain decision or take a specific action.

In this article, we’ll look at everything that needs to be done to make your sales team truly data-driven in their day-to-day activities.

Before we get into that, let’s talk about some of the more specific benefits of being data-driven.

2. Three key benefits of being data-driven

As we just mentioned, data-driven sales teams are more productive and profitable than their underperforming competitors.

But these are actually the products email leads database of data-centricity. You become more productive and more effective not just by becoming data-centric, but because of what data-centricity allows you to do.

Let’s look at this question a little more, if you don’t mind.

1. Standardized (and optimized) sales processes

It’s simple:

Most sales teams and organizations end up wasting a lot of time, money and energy because they haven’t really optimized their various processes.

First, sales teams waste a lot of time “reaching out” instead of actually being productive.

As the image above shows, nearly a fifth of the average salesperson’s day is spent searching for relevant information. It’s not about “putting to use” the data collected, it’s simply about searching for it.

As we’ll discuss a little later, one of the first steps to becoming data-driven is creating a central data hub that your sales team (and other employees) can access when needed. The easier it is for them to find the information they need, the faster your sales team can get to work.

Another problem with not being data-driven is that you may be wasting resources without even realizing it.