By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
From cloud computing to collecting market insights, employing data is already important. But big data analytics is set to become essential to business strategies other than simply knowing where you should market or where there may be a sale. According to the Business 2 Community, a marketing resource, organizations often forget that customer intelligence relies on big data, and it’s essential that professionals consider big data as an integral part of any sales or marketing strategy.
According to CIO, customer analytics allows companies to focus on the how they can help their clients instead of just becoming informed on the products. For example, CIO reported that IT companies are using big data as a way to examine how their solution will help the customer in real life. By examining what types of products customers need to tackle every day challenges, IT businesses are able to design a custom solution that can produce stronger results.
Big Data in Sales and Marketing
It’s so much easier to glean market insights when you have the right tools, and big data is the foundation of many types of customer intelligence software—including FirstRain. According to eWeek, an IT news resource, big data helps improve client and partner relations by providing a measurable connection between you and them. Accruing customer intelligence through traceable analytics ensures companies are able to raise their customer service and optimize their strategies for selling products or solutions.
Understanding that big data is an important aspect of your customer intelligence solution can help you optimize sales and marketing strategies. Being able to stay up-to-date on where your clients’ markets are headed and what types of solutions they’ll require can allow you to anticipate your sales or marketing growth. When you know that your customer is going to need a new information storage solution, or that the latest product innovation is gaining traction in the industry, you can create a realistic timeline and sales goals. Big data offers you a way to actually solve your customer’s problem, instead of simply selling them a solution that may not necessarily produce the desired results.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
Big data is a big topic these days. With more companies jumping on the business intelligence bandwagon, one common misconception is you can't integrate big data analytics into your business monitoring system. Now, more sales professionals may have become aware of data analytics in the past year, but that does not mean it is an entirely new development and is incompatible with CRM systems. In fact, placing data into your tracking software is exactly what you want to do. Investing in BI and market intelligence go hand in hand, and big data is a critical component of each. Being able to extract usable information from the data pile is a great way for sales and marketing reps to ensure they drive business and, in turn, revenue.
The Epic Confusion Over Big Data
Many sales professionals understand the importance of customer and business intelligence, and know analytics is part of how it all works together. Yet many reps continue to misunderstand how important big data really is to their success. Some are even unsure if they really need it. And with the infinite amount of intelligence out there, you need it, because you just cannot possibly get through all of the information without some help.
Adam Binnie, global vice president for SAP, told Forbes the process of sifting through all of the collected intelligence is a means to an end for optimizing your investment.
"While we talk a lot about the data and the impact of that data, at the end of the day […] analytics is about giving people information so that those people can have an impact on the success of an organization," he said.
In a recent article for Business News Daily, Elizabeth Palermo broke down how big data helps professionals sort through the vast amounts of accumulated insights. Palermo, a technology professional, said most software involves three data tools: extraction, architecture and query development. These basic features are there for a reason – they select only certain parts of the data pool and bring them to your attention, then, many times, the data can be stored for future use. It's wonderfully efficient.
But much of the confusion results from how messy big data can get when you don't have the right tools to figure out what you actually need. In his blog for TechRepublic, Toby Wolpe said this is where one of big data's big myths came into existence. Analytics become easier to decipher if you have the right BI platform. Wolpe also advised professionals to remember that when you have a great customer and business intelligence tool, using big data is easy.
And many agree with him, including Paul O'Leary, CTO for BI firm Quantivo, who told Forbes all of the mess results from not using an appropriate platform to get the proper information.
"The big challenge in big data visualization is going from lots of raw data and turning it into a form where you've done the calculations," O'Leary said. "It becomes very easy to visualize once you've done the heavy lifting."
When you have a system that can do that heavy lifting for you, you're most of the way there. The right platform should give you context to the data, be able to give you information right as it's happening and give you everything your customers need to be successful. Investing in the right tool can make a world of difference when industries like sales and marketing change every day.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
From the information technology industry to marketing, it seems like most professionals in almost every field are talking about the cloud these days. And it's no wonder – investing in cloud software for your enterprise lets you gain market intelligence, analyze industry trends and even examine customer analytics. The cloud will become one of the top innovations for salespeople fairly soon.
In fact, the trend is becoming so wide spread that Salesforce recently acquired business intelligence startup EdgeSpring to enhance the site's marketing cloud. If that's not enough, the investment came a week after the site purchased email marketing firm ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. The integration of business intelligence with analytics is set to help boost customer relationship management (CRM) ROI.
Cloud sales have gone through the roof, with Ellen O'Brien, executive editor at TechCrunch, suggesting recent slowdowns in cloud computing storage are due to the rapid increase in users. O'Brien reported cloud storage vendors have been around for years, but the recent uptick in the demand for customer insight solutions and tools as well as user demand, sales have significantly increased. More sales people are now investing in the tools they need to ensure the sale and to increase their CRM ROI.
Customer Conversion Flies Into the Cloud
Louis Columbus, cloud computing expert and Forbes contributor, recently wrote that now is the era of digital customer insights for the marketing industry. With the purchase of EdgeSpring and ExactTarget by Salesforce, the marketing world is on the cusp of integrating cloud computing into their customer insight platforms. But the advertising industry is just the latest in a long line to have adopted cloud analytics. Sales was one of the first.
Cloud-based services came into the sales mainstream with platform applications, such as FirstRain into Salesforce, by bringing sales people up to date on the latest customer insights and intelligence. Business analytics that use the cloud format allows you to get a glimpse into what's going on in the industry, what's trending up or down and what areas to focus on. It cuts your customer research time in half while boosting your client conversion rates skyward.
Many of us try to take time everyday to do some Internet research about our clients, but it often gets a back seat to other more pressing issues. And most of the time, treading through the clutter of information can be a hassle. Having access to one place that gives you the most important insights of the day keeps you connected with customers and be prepared for every client interaction.
