Sales and marketing are a business’ life blood. They also have a reputation for costing a lot and being challenging to measure. Today, I’d like to spend a little time zeroing in on the questions organizations tend to have about these areas of their business and how data analytics for marketing and sales can help answer them.
Data Analytics for Marketing and Sales Starts With Questions
Two weeks ago, I wrote that almost all analytics initiatives begin with good questions. Last week, I spent some time discussing how true this is for human resources; the same holds true for sales, marketing, and customer management.
Here are some I hear companies ask most frequently:
- How much are we really spending on marketing, and for what return?
- Which of our marketing channels are working best?
- Which version of our new ad will work best for us?
- What percentage of our leads turn into sales, and is that number consistent across products and sales teams?
- How much are our customers worth to us?
- Are our customers happy? Consistently?
- Which customers are leaving and can we prevent them from doing so?
The answers lie in data you already track – if you can piece it all together.
Marketing Data
In today’s Web-centric economy, new Internet-based sales and marketing tools seem to pop up each week. The good news for marketers is that for any online marketing problem and target audience they can dream up, there is a tool to help build and reach that audience.
Need to push a newsletter or email-based advertisement to a mailing list? Enter “MailChimp,” “Campaign Monitor,” and a dozen other mailing list management tools that will allow you to send your messages and track results. Prefer to place a Web-based ad? Try Google’s “AdSense” or ”AdKnowledge.” Need to build your organic search results? Build a blog and track your traffic with “Google Analytics.”
The big challenge here is that with so many “best of breed” tools at your disposal, keeping track of your marketing initiatives, what you spend on them, and what kinds of results you get back can be quite a challenge. And that’s especially true if you want to do run an offline campaign through direct mail, a regular old TV ad or other traditional method.
Here are the categories of data you can expect to try to wrangle between all these systems:
- Email lists, campaigns and responses.
- Online advertising campaigns and responses.
- Blog posts, Web traffic and inbound email.
- A centralized list of potential customers.
Sales Data
Fortunately, once you’ve got a good set leads, tracking them from contact information to sale is a lot easier — at least from a software perspective. Sales and capture activities are typically tracked in systems called “customer relationship management,” or CRM, systems. These have been in widespread use for about a decade now, beginning with products such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM and eventually spawning a host of boutique products for various industries.
Your CRM will allow you to track data on:
- Salespeople, quotas and assignments.
- Products, prices and catalogs.
- Leads, opportunities and capture activities.
- Proposals, quotes and sales.
Order and Customer Management Data
Finally, once you’ve made a sale, it’s important to track what you receive from your customers, what you send them, their level of satisfaction and if they buy again. Typically, this kind of work is tracked in either an accounting system or an industry-specific “enterprise resource planning,” or ERP, system.
Your ERP system will help you track data on:
- Orders, invoices and fulfillments..
- Customer acquisition and churn.
- Customer support and satisfaction.
Find Those Answers With the Right Analytics Techniques
Once you’ve found the right questions and the data required to answer them, it’s up to a good analyst to employ the right analytics techniques to find some actionable answers. Some of the techniques listed below can be executed by organizations staffed with curious managers who know how to create a basic spreadsheet. Others require specialized skills.
All of theses can reduce uncertainty if applied properly:
- Basic reports to track metrics such as open opportunities and progress toward sales goals.
- Dashboards that monitor key metrics such as pipeline value and customer attrition rate, and detect when things are getting out of hand.
- Cross-system analysis combining marketing, sales and customer support data to allow for calculations such as return on advertising investment and customer lifetime value.
- Scientifically constructed studies and surveys to gauge customer satisfaction.
- Advanced statistical analysis to determine what factors really drive important metrics such as sales conversions and customer churn.
Use Those Answers to Make Better Decisions
As with most areas of your business, data analytics for marketing and sales are most useful if they reduce management’s uncertainty to the point where the right course of action is clear.
Perhaps one method of Internet advertising costs far more than you make on the eventual sale of those products. Perhaps one portion of your sales organization far under-performs another. Perhaps customers who do a lot of high-value business with you are becoming unhappy – but could be made happier by interacting with the right people in your company.
Smart use of data analytics can help managers make the best use of limited marketing and sales investments and help managers show the rest of their organizations that marketing and sales dollars produce measurable results.
If you’d like to learn more about data analytics for marketing and sales, or how data analytics can help other aspects of your business, download our new guide:
DataClear is a Baton Rouge-based data analytics consulting firm. Contact us for a free 30-minute consultation and discover how your company can profit from data-driven decision making using tools that won’t break your budget.