Data Science helping your Sales Team
I have been selling data/ information and research reports on Industries, Companies, Economy and other data relevant for businesses to decision makers in various departments of organisations. Converging my knowledge and experience as a Sales Professional and my recent work in Data analytics, I feel that a structure can be made for the Data Analytics needs of a Sales Team and it could have the following two pillars:-
- From a Sales Persons perspective or Client basis
- Here we analyze what a sales person needs to increase sales at a client e.g. what is the best way to win or upsell to a client.
- This would require data/ information about the client, client’s products, and their business and their challenges.
- What are the latest news events about the client? And then combining news/ events data with the over all numeric/ non-numeric data.
- Client behavior from the historic transactions.
- In short, what does a salesperson needs to present (i.e show data or build a ‘story’) to get business from a client. i.e. the ammunition for sales guys needs to be built here.
- From the Sales Strategy perspective or Market basis.
- Here we analyze the market as a whole. E.g. who are the strong players in a geographical region?
- Is the current strategy good or other clients (e.g. competitors, industry verticals, etc) need to be targeted too. i.e. is the return on efforts maximum?
- What are the technologies competitors are using to make/ build their products, their market share, etc.
- How is the purchasing power or the consumer awareness in a specific geographical region? E.g. is it price sensitive or not. Product pricing guys can also be interested in such information.
- The latest news events in the markets.
- In short, optimising the SALES TEAM’s focus is the goal here.
These data could be available internally and externally and will need to be arranged for further crunching. Implementation is the key here. The data may lie in various places e.g. emails, CRM, data/news feeds, Internet, etc. Hence, finding the right data and getting every thing at one place requires a lot of commitment from an organisation perspective.
It will be very interesting to see how organisations use data science to give their Sales Teams the edge.
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