How Big Data affects sales professionals
This is the story of Marcos. He has been in the world of sales for 30 years and has always been a successful salesman. He knows the sector, his company and his product like nobody else. But above all, he knows his customers. He really knows them… a lot! For most of them, he is a friend. He has accompanied them in their joys, and also in many of their sorrows.
Marcos attends the first annual sales cycle meeting of his company, a world leader in his sector, and is stunned. The new global corporate project, Data 4 Sales Excellence, aims to soon have Artificial Intelligence suggesting to sales reps like him what their ideal daily sales actions should be.
As a first phase of the project, a new dashboard with a powerful visualisation interface for the user will be introduced this year: DataInmersive. It will integrate all data-driven information sources, which are collected from customers. Data will be collected from a wide range of sources: CRM, navigation in the company’s portals, historical purchases and proposals, marketshare, listening in social networks… And more to come.
The aim of the project is: to make data-driven business decisions. Your company has decided to become a true Data-Driven leader. And the commercial department will be a spearhead. That is what the commercial director and the CEO himself announced early in the meeting.
During the breakfast break, the conversation is unanimous. Who the hell is going to tell me what my clients need, software, statistics? I know my clients best, many are friends, if not almost family. What are they telling me?
This story is becoming more common, and will become more common. Big Data is the new oil of the Digital Age. And the organisation that is not able to capture high-value data is dead. That is what many gurus claim.
Implementing a data-driven culture in a successful organisation is a big challenge. One of the basic ones is to convince experienced professionals that data-based decision making adds more than it subtracts. Countless studies show that decision making, both in the general corporate environment and in business and marketing in particular, suffers from significant biases that lead us to be not as efficient as we should be. Biases that we generally do not consciously recognise. In addition, Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence provide great value in creating predictive analytics about what decisions our customers will make. Of course, sometimes with patience and a lot of trial and error.
When I have accompanied some of our clients in this type of project, it is essential that the protagonists of this historic change, which breaks decades of successful practice, feel and understand how this new way of working and making decisions will affect them. Let’s take a look at some of them.
What does it represent to them in their day-to-day life, in general?
- Living moments of uncertainty in a world of continuous and accelerated change.
- Get out of your comfort zone, unlearn and keep learning on a continuous basis.
- Go beyond your personal skills and abilities to get to know customers deeply. Data is customer-centricity
- Further develop forms of communication and influence, individualised to:
- To each client and their individual decision-making motivators.
- To each communication channel (omnichannel).
- Customer segmentation.
- To multi-product strategies.
- …
- Change in the way of communicating: from information via data to storytelling. To tell or to bore.
- Evolving the way of working with skills that are already in demand in the market.
- Improve their own employability, inside and outside the company.
- Handling data even better: collecting, interpreting and generating conclusions.
- Ability to ask new questions aimed at improving their commercial efficiency.
More specifically, let us look at some additional benefits:
Advantages in terms of business information analysis capacity
- Detect new trends and patterns in customer decision-making.
- Improve customer segmentation.
- Easier to “move” customers from one segment/category to another.
Advantages over excellence in decision-making
- Avoiding the cognitive biases we all have. Good feeling vs Data-Based.
- Improved decision making: by integrating accumulated experience and data-driven predictions. Rely less on hunches, experience, intuition and avoid biases in decisions that all humans have.
Commercial efficiency and performance benefits
- Better empathise, and personalise sales messages to the customer and to the number of commercial activities carried out, according to:
– The customer’s main motivational driver.
– What messages have the most powerful influence and how to explain them.
– When is it best to carry out the commercial action and through which channel.
– …
- Increased impact and influence of commercial activity.
- Greater efficiency with the time spent on commercial action, as well as with the resources employed and the “return” on the action.
John P. Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita Professor Emeritus of Leadership at Harvard Business School, said that the process to generate organisational change is not “analyse-think-change”, but “see-feel and change”, although that is the subject of another post. Be that as it may, to see-feel and change, arguments are needed. And these are some of the arguments.
What are yours?
