Maximize Your Sales Team’s Productivity with Data Management

Data influences almost every single thing that we do. This is especially true for businesses, to which, data is sacred. The right set of data can help any business accomplish business goals, gain more customers, and increase its revenue. Businesses should have a data management process in place to optimize their marketing efforts, make data-driven business decisions, reduce operational costs, and more importantly, improve their sales team’s productivity to increase their revenue.

Data Management Can Help Your Sales Team Save Time

One of the most important resources for businesses is time. If you don’t speed up your processes and get more done in less time, it can affect the rate of your team’s productivity and lose some time-bound business opportunities. In fact, a recent survey shows that 66% of sales reps’ work hours is spent on non-sales activity and 50% of sales reps surveyed feel that they spend too much time trying to find the right person to contact. This means wasted time and resources for your business.

With properly-maintained data, you can gain many benefits for your business. This extends to your sales teams. Sales reps need to make the most of their time and optimize their capacity to close more sales for your business. The right data management process can help you maximize the use of your business data to drive up your sales team’s productivity. You might have tens of thousands or even millions of data points available in your CRM system, but if they are not properly managed, you won’t be able to use them to your advantage.

It’s Not Always About the Tools

One of the steps that many businesses take when they feel that their sales team isn’t peforming well is to buy new tools or incorporate additional sales processes. These can include coming up with a sales playbook for your team or using additional sales enablement apps that just make the job more complicated. There is nothing wrong at face value with adding new tools, but if you are constantly providing your team with dirty and unorganized data, then your new tools will not help much in the long term.

Your sales team heavily relies on the customer and pipeline data they are provided. For them to make the most of every connection, it’s essential that you improve your prospecting methods to identify the most qualified contacts. Moreover, cleaning up and managing the data before you hand it over to your sales team can help reps focus more on contacting prospects instead of cleaning up your messy data or working with inaccurate information for wasted calls and emails.

What Your Sales Team Should Focus On

To help your sales team focus on core functions and close more deals, here are some tasks that they should prioritize:

1. Making phone conversations
2. Searching relevant records
3. Send out well-written emails
4. Contacting prospects on social media channels

But if your sales team is spending a lot of time updating, organizing, or correcting records and attempting to contact people using incorrect information, then you are just wasting your team’s time and your business resources. Think about the amount of money you have to spend just to build a team of talented sales reps. From recruitment and hiring to onboarding and training, your business may have already spent a hefty amount of money just to make sure that you have the right people on your team. If all of their time is used to clean up data, then it will take you longer to get your ROI.

By following proper data management practices for your customer database, your sales reps won’t have to struggle with contacting prospects, and they’ll be able to make more sales in less time. Organizing and cleaning up your data can help you optimize records usage and eliminate costly mistakes due to dirty data. Using old data can be more difficult to deal with and can waste time otherwise spent nurturing opportunities and closing new business. Bad data can even render your marketing efforts ineffective. But with a good data management system, you can guarantee that the data you are using is still relevant to your business.

This is why you should think about how your data is being managed and used. Do you have a quality process in place to make sure that all the data being entered in your CRM is accurate and relevant? How credible and useful are all of the records saved in your database? Think about this can affect every call experience made by your sales team and how it can impact your ROI altogether.

Data Quality Matters for Your Sales Team

Refining the quality of your data should always be made a priority. To make sure that your sales team has all the information that they need to close out more sales, here are some data management practices that you should consider implementing.

1. Improve your research process

The quality of your data will greatly rely on how your research is done. To get the hard-to-find industry data that your sales team needs, you should start by improving your research methods. Start broad, then dive into the specifics. You should also know how to recognize a quality source and make sure that every data point you collect is verified by several sources.

2. Incorporate quality audit in your process

Apart from improving how you do your research, including a quality audit in your data gathering process should also be a priority. Set up an audit team to make sure that every customer data set passed to your sales team is relevant, accurate, and useful in your sales process. Implement a lead scoring system such as ranking leads from 1, 2, and 3 or by using terms like hot, warm, or cold. This will help sales and marketing teams understand which data to prioritize. This quality scoring system can also serve as your sales manager’s guide on how to appropriately allocate customer records to different reps based on key details such as territory or company size. This process will increase the sales team’s overall efficiency and productivity since the data they will be working with will be sales ready.

3. Include custom data programs in your resources

Using customized data for your marketing and sales processes can also help your team save time. With custom data sets, your sales reps won’t have to filter through irrelevant records and just focus their efforts on calling or sending out emails to the right people.

Why Outsource Your Customer Data Management

To help enable your sales reps to succeed and close more deals, they need to be equipped with high-quality data. But cleaning up and managing large amounts of data will always take up large amounts of time and resources. Data management can be addressed with in-house staff, but if you don’t have the manpower to do so, you can consider outsourcing to a reliable business partner. If you want to improve your data management processes to be able to boost your sales team’s productivity, you should think about hiring data managers or contacting an outsourcing partner to handle it for you. And if you are considering outsourced data management, contact us here at Assivo to help you get started.