The value of data-driven sales strategy in B2B eCommerce
The rapid thriving of products such as consumer data platforms and fields like machine learning indicates that companies from all industries try to transform data into value. In uncertain times like these, where the future of many businesses is on the line, using data-driven marketing and sales strategy seems to be a necessity. But what data is particularly worthwhile for your sales team and how can conversational commerce help you collect vital information for your eCommerce business?
Turning consumer data into knowledge
Consumer data essentially refers to all gathered information about your Client, including basic, behavioural, engagement, and attitudinal data.
Basic data
Basic data contains the usual information collected in and processed by CRMs, particularly name of the company, contact’s name, their e-mail address or phone number and firmographic data such as annual revenue or industry. Gathering basic data allows you to determine how many of your clients share similar characteristics, segment your audience and eventually reach out to prospects who may engage with your product. You can collect basic data thanks to IP address, website cookies and device ID.
Behavioural data
Behavioural data gives you a chance to understand the buyer's journey and focuses on all the actions on your online store, marketplace or an eCommerce platform. It consists of transactional data such as subscription details, purchase details, average order value, cart abandonment and average customer lifetime value. It also involves product information such as the most recent product viewed, top product interest or repeated actions and qualitative data such as user attention or heatmaps (clicks, scrolls, mouse movement).
Engagement data
Engagement data refers to all data points describing the interaction between the customer and your company. It includes website and mobile app interactions such as unique visits and page views, demo requests, traffic source, as well as email engagement which means open and click rate, click-through rate, bounce rate; social media engagement, such as post likes, shares and native video views, and last but not least product desirability and customer service information.
Attitudinal data
Attitudinal data is what people think of your company and what kind of attitude they have towards your product. It consists of metrics on consumer satisfaction, purchase criteria or customer complaints - all collected through satisfaction surveys or online reviews. All of these insights create a holistic picture of how your brand or product is perceived. They show your customer’s preferences, sentiments and reveal the room for future improvement.
All the details mentioned above are significant for scaling your business and setting the stage to enable growth in your company. But as the development of data analytics, machine learning and AI continues, the amount and type of available intelligence are consistently growing. So you have to be very cautious while choosing what your business and your sales team need the most. And the answer is - intent data.
The power of intent data for B2B sales
Intent data is a collective term that describes the digital footprint left by individuals and companies. And it is not just limited to customer’s activity on your website but considers their whole behaviour across the internet. In short - it’s a combination of engagement data and off-site site data that includes in particular:
- Downloads
- Participation in webinars
- Online subscriptions
- Online product reviews
- Website views
- Searched keywords and topics
But why is intent data so crucial in B2B sales?
The turning point of intent data is to show the level of company’s engagement that is already aware of your product and prospects who look for solutions similar to yours but haven’t come across your website yet. As a result, your sales team can gain insight into details of your potential clients, get to know their context and focus on those who are most likely to decide on the purchase - simply on those who represent a strong buyer's intent.
Besides identifying high-quality leads, buyer’s intent analysis, when carried out accurately, helps you accelerate sales outreach, customise your website, and sales messaging as well as set the ground for sales conversations.
Conversational analytics
As Meetsales is a sales enablement platform and a conversational commerce tool, the most crucial data related issue for us is what information can we provide for your sales team, thanks to video and audio input from their clients. We have already talked about the significance of face to face meetings in the remote sales process. But there’s something more to human interaction when it comes to collecting data thanks to live conversation.
The truth is that within just one online meeting with your customer, you can gain more insights about their engagement, than by tracking purchase history or even by analysing their profile’s history. And this is where the enormous advantage of collecting data through video conferencing lies. It hands you all contextual information that you need and as a result, gives you a deeper understanding of customer’s engagement and intent in just one go. All these data form collective know-how that you can leverage to build a customised and robust buyer-centred sales strategy that will ease and shortcut the sales cycle.
In practice, thanks to accurate evaluation of buyer’s engagement sales reps can estimate credible closing time and more efficiently prioritize their clients. They can plan all their actions ahead and schedule with week’s advance clients who are ready to close the deal and those who still need some time to make an informed decision.
Another point that we have to address is the possibility to merge AI and machine learning with videoconferencing, which is revolutionising unified communications one step at a time. This game-changing technology automatically and thoroughly analyses speech by detecting individual words, context, speakers’ mood or sentiment and measuring plenty of other essential parameters. The great benefit of live conversation analysis is that it brings out hard data which is no longer subject to your sales rep’s interpretation but functions as genuine support for the whole sales team and your company.
Future of eCommerce is data and AI based
End-to-end customer data analysis in eCommerce is critical to provide long-term buying trends and detect future needs. Used properly, it can help you reshape your marketing and boost sales. But to achieve that, it is essential to know what data precisely you need to succeed, define them and follow that path closely. Combining traditional and conversational data with AI and machine learning solutions will help you create value for your B2B clients and promote business growth.
Implementing new technologies is an important matter for us at Meetsales; therefore, our platform is ready to support conversational analytics as soon as possible. We realise the complexity and immensity of the topic, so we encourage all the business analysts and growth hackers to share their thoughts and start a conversation about the data-driven sales process’s perspective. Let’s talk!
