How Engagement Analytics Can Boost Your Sales and Marketing Initiatives
Back in 2014, Adobe announced a new trend in sales enablement: mobile. Their research shows that consumers, B2B and B2C, increasingly listen to pitches and make purchases when on the go. Subsequently, sales teams who invest in mobile sales enablement tools stand to benefit.
- 84 percent consider marketing sales apps and other “on-demand” tools are important to successful sales enablement.
- 86 percent believe integration (of data) enhances sales productivity.
- 89 percent view data analytics as critical to effectively using sales enablement solutions.
Like the statistics say, mobile apps and documents won’t deliver the goods alone. Marketing sales apps must be tied to engagement and sales analytics to produce desired results, such as shorter sale cycles, increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, and more accurate forecasting.
Research
A lot of time is spent discussing the importance of knowing one’s customers. A valid point—knowing current customers helps identify similar, high-quality ones. Armed with the information, a salesperson in the industrial or manufacturing field can put out “lures” and reel in more viable prospects.
However, the sales analytics found with a mobile sales enablement app offers opportunities for other kinds of research. Salespeople can now assess and analyze the non-customer. With that kind of data, they can turn more prospects into leads, and more leads into loyal, paying customers.
Segmentation and Personalization
Email works great, but salespeople might not always know what happens to a PDF or link. They might not even know that an email made it past the spam filter. While some of that has changed with email marketing technologies, salespeople sometimes still feel that they’re working in the dark.
A dedicated marketing sales app can make a huge difference. It tracks what customers and non-customers visit and view, as well as scads of other data points. The sales professional can then use that information in a couple of ways. They can segment the audience into specific categories. They also can personalize additional communication, nudging a contact ever closer to asking for more information or deciding to make a purchase.
Channel Effectiveness
As analytics have improved, so, too, has the ability to monitor channel effectiveness. The obvious example arises with the website; through analytics, marketers and salespeople can see which channels and efforts produce the largest yield.
A similar scenario arises when marketing sales apps integrate with engagement and sales analytics. A salesperson knows that email works best with one client, whereas another prefers online chat. They can even assess which documents and resources work better than others, allowing them to prioritize those communication channels over others.
Automation
Automation has a critical role to play in the sales cycle, particularly for salespeople who spend their days making client visits. They need tools that make their work smarter, not harder.
They find it with a modern marketing sales app. Salespeople can use the tool to set up automated triggers, something akin to the If This, Then That (IFTTT) for smart devices. The triggers keep the sales process moving, even if the salesperson literally is half a world away from the client. Sales analytics only enhances the capability. Salespeople can use the data to fine-tune triggers further, as based on customer profiles, activities, lead scoring, and other information.
Forecasting
The best sales forecasting occurs when data is shared across the organization rather than kept in silos. Most businesses today champion the idea, though they sometimes struggle to carry it out in actuality. It can be a challenge to gather all the data and combine it in order to derive some sense and action plan from it.
Sales analytics, via a marketing sales app, mitigates the difficulty. Salespeople share their data, which can be easily accessed and analyzed by managers and the C-Suite. As a result, they become an even more integral part of the company. Their work creates data that can be used to predict future growth; to identify and evaluate new verticals or sales channels; to study customer engagement and sales cycles; and to discover unmet needs.
Engagement and sales analytics are the way forward in a mobile-first world. They help salespeople meet customers’ demand for on-the-go materials and solutions; solidify client relationships; and, ultimately, increase the company’s bottom line. What’s not to love about them? For more information about mobile sales enablement and analytics, check out these success stories.