Note: Today’s guest post is just one in a series provided by Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research Group. Denis is a top CRM market researcher who advises end users in CRM selection, deployment and use while also publishing a steady stream of analysis on many of the industry’s most popular topics and emerging trends. Today’s post is part of a mini-series from Denis, beginning with Data, Information and Knowledge.
Your data strategy might be failing your sales process. Conventional attempts to cleanse data, remove duplicates, and ensure uniformity and accuracy are very important but if that’s all you do, you end up with the same stuff your competition has. And if sales is about exploiting differences in information (and it is) then all you can exploit is your price, usually in the downward direction.
Sales deals are not won on data any more — that only gets you in the door. The whole sales process is one long attempt to upgrade data into useable information and ultimately into knowledge that you can use to help your customer make an intelligent decision.
Throughout a sales process reps have meetings, listen to concerns, make presentations, and arrange demos or other proofs of concept for one purpose — to give the customer an accurate vision of a solution that fits the need like a glove. In other words knowledge that this is the solution they are looking for.
If business, and selling in particular, was static this would be easy and data would be all you need. You could look up a company, find the parties responsible for purchasing your kind of product, visit to make a few claims about suitability, and close.
As a matter of fact, every market goes through a phase like this. It’s called exponential growth and it doesn’t last very long. For a brief moment sales reps are mere order takers and simple lists of companies, phone numbers, and names are about all they need, hence the drive to get accurate data.
Sooner or later, though, the sales process turns into a buying process, the customer holds all the cards, and a vendor has to really work for differentiation and justification or someone else will get the deal. This is normal but the tragedy is that some sales reps and their organizations never learn that the time when data was enough has gone by.
At this point, data is not much more than an essential building block. You need it but even more, you need to be able to combine it with other facts to derive information about your quarry. Information is a bit more amorphous and it is also situational — one person’s information might only be another’s data.
For example, who owns a company can classify as both data and information. As a simple statement of fact it is data — company A owns company B — end of story. But suppose you want to know where a purchase decision originates as in locally or at headquarters? In this case ownership might be an important bit of information you need to use to plan a sales campaign.
Too often sales reps charge off in the direction of company A and invest precious sales resources and time only to discover (rather expensively) that they need to start over at company B, or worse, hand the deal off to the rep covering company B.
Who knew?
Well, the original rep could have known if he or she was focusing not just on clean data but on the information requirements of the deal. Marketing might supply a marketing qualified lead with all of the aforementioned data, but the rep and the company, if it doesn’t want to waste sales resources, has to come up with the next level of information and eventually knowledge.
That’s an easy example, a more interesting one would include a rep locked in a nasty dogfight with a competitor over a choice account that both want. Suppose the customer sees the competitors as more or less equal in capabilities and features. The natural tendency would be to go with the lowest bidder, all things being equal. This is where leveraging information becomes very valuable.
The trick to winning this deal might be in finding a new differentiator based not on products but on customer need or outlook. You won’t find that in a database or a list and analytics won’t deliver it on a platter. But you may discover it in a corporate filing or a comment by the CEO in a news article.
Finding that needle in a haystack requires a different approach to data analysis. It comes from using a different kind of big data technology to filter the Web. That’s where products like InsideView come in. Rather than collecting, cleaning, and collating raw data, which is still important, InsideView looks for information that users can combine to produce the knowledge they need to differentiate their offerings in the minds of decision-makers. And it is the combination of available data with new knowledge that can turn the tide in any deal.
At the end of the day, we need all three, data, information, and knowledge to be successful in today’s markets. That’s why sales strategies based only on data are meeting with decreasing success.
About the author
Denis Pombriant is a well-known front office analyst and thought leader. He is the founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group, LLC and the Bullpen Group, LLC. Pombriant’s work appears in most major CRM publications in both North America and Europe. He is also working on a new book for publication this year. For more information, visit his website at beagleresearch.com.