In the late 1900’s, a slow trend was developing within the financial industry. With increased frequency, investment firms began embracing the power of technology to make smarter and faster decisions about their money. Tools such as algorithm and electronic trading became widespread, as they provided massive benefits including cheaper transaction costs, less error and greater transparency in the markets. Investors and traders used these tech-heavy platforms to make tough decisions and move billions of dollars every day.
Like in finance, many other industries began developing and using technology solutions to improve processes. A tech boom occurred. But what people didn’t understand was that a massive amount of data was being accumulated within these technology solutions – with massive, yet unexploited potential. Throughout the years, more and more people began unearthing this data and wanted to use it to help their company succeed. From this came the growth of big data analytics.
Data is growing exponentially in a mind-boggling fashion. In the past two years, we as a society have produced more data than in all of history prior. How crazy is that? In 5 years, the big data industry has increased from $3 billion dollars to approximately $17 billion dollars.
Then There Are Marketing & Sales Teams
More and more companies are embracing the power of data. However, for some reason, many sales & marketing teams in general remain in the ice age in terms of data analytics.
It is clear that the old days of sales won’t work now. Guesswork and trial and error can only go so far, and are slowly needing to be replaced by a new way of thinking that revolves around making sales a precise science. By that, I mean being much more quantitative, analytical and metrics-driven.
That’s what we here at LevelEleven are all about. Sales organizations need to be pushed toward modern, metrics-focused environments where leaders live and breathe data – because from sales data comes successful strategies backed by hard, justified analysis.
According to a study done by McKinsey & Company, companies who utilize big data & analytics improve profitability by 5-6%. Sales leaders with a big data mindset are seeing success with their approaches and have invested over 50 billion dollars on marketing & data analytics.
The ROI of Sales Data
Look at it this way – leaders who don’t embrace sales data are essentially leaving money on the table that their competitors will snatch up. According to the same McKinsey study, marketing ROI can improve by 15-20% using big data. There are billions of sales data points floating around that can help companies identify customer behavior and use it to best sell to them. Why not use them?
Here’s an example. Nationwide Insurance decided to give big data a try… and the results were mind blowing. While marketing expenses across insurance companies as a whole went up 62% in three years, Nationwide’s marketing expenses didn’t go up at all. Using big data analytics, Nationwide was able to generate 20% more demand using 11% fewer employees and almost 5 million less in sales and marketing costs.
And they don’t stand alone with these results. Companies of all shapes and sizes are beginning to recognize the powers that lie within data. Here at LevelEleven, as a team that helps hundreds of leaders optimize their team’s performance using sales data, it has been refreshing to be able to develop processes and strategies that we can justify using data as backup. We’re able to see the effects of our work in a much more quantifiable fashion, and this promotes a more rewarding – and productive – environment as a whole.
In essence, it’s not about who has the most sales data, but rather much more about which leaders are able to be creative and productive with their data to help drive analysis that leads to real results. It’s a challenge that more and more sales leaders are undertaking. Will you?
[Source: “Big Data, Analytics, and the Future of Marketing & Sales” – McKinsey & Company]
