Empower your Sales Team with Actionable Insights

This transfer of customer data is typically done by integrating a Marketing Automation solution like Dynamics 365 Marketing or ClickDimensions with a CRM system like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. The merging of these two technologies creates an integrated environment that is perfectly poised to allow your sales teams to leverage customer analytics.

With an integrated environment, what type of data can your sales teams leverage? Let’s take a look at five specific customer analytic resources.

Website Analytics

If you are a sales person, the mention of Website Analytics may immediately have you categorise this as a “Marketing” data point. While it is an important data point for Marketing, it can be a powerful source of customer analytics for the sales team as well. According to Forrester Research, 74% of B2B buyers are conducting at least half if not more of their research online before talking with a salesperson.

With an integrated system, the sales team can view within the CRM environment all of the web activity that a lead and/or contact has engaged in with your company as well as the search terms used to find your company’s website. Having visibility to this activity will give your sales team insights into the customer’s preferences as well as potentially what stage of the buying cycle the customer is at. If a customer is visiting your “client success stories”, you may rank this lead higher than one who just visited one page on your website and it happened to be your “about us” page. Also, when you do have that first interaction with the customer you now have more context in which to direct your conversation.

Social Analytics

Did you know that 75% of B2B buyers are now using social media to research vendors? (Source: IDC) Similar to the website analytics, wouldn’t it be beneficial for your sales teams to be able to view the types of social posts that their prospects are engaging with online? This data point can be passed from a Marketing Automation tool directly into CRM. The ability to view the type of information your prospect is consuming helps to provide an informed, relevant conversation with your company’s prospects.

Email Analytics

Email analytics offers you the ability to see what email campaigns have been sent to your leads and/or contacts. With an integrated system, this goes beyond the global view of email performance and brings it down to the contact level. Using this type of analytics will give your sales team visibility into what emails the contact opened, what links they clicked on and how many emails they have engaged with. Looking at these insights will again give you a framework for determining where the customer is at in the buyer’s journey and where to focus the sales efforts and conversations going forward.

Content Analytics

We are in the age of content, with a focus on informing, educating and supporting our customers during their buying journey. It’s about being there with the right content at the right time when the customer has the need or the problem to solve. It’s about creating thought leadership in the industry in which you serve and pulling customers in as they build trust from the content you share and in turn trust you with their purchase. And it’s working, according to Forrester Research, 82% of buyers viewed at least five pieces of content from the winning vendor.

White papers, e-Books, blogs, videos and webinars are great examples of content. Having visibility into what content is most relevant to your individual leads and contacts will once again give you insights into the problems, challenges and goals your customers are facing.

Lead Management Analytics

The goal of marketing activities in most cases is to generate leads for the business. Leads can be generated with several strategies but common use of digital lead acquisition is the use of landing pages and web forms to convert a website visitor into a lead for your business. This lead may be generated because your prospect would like to download a piece of content that you have developed like an eBook, or maybe the landing page has a form submission for a promotion you are running or another example may be a quote request form on your website.

Those are just a few examples. The goal of these conversion opportunities is to generate leads for your business. Many businesses are then deploying a targeted lead nurturing strategy to further qualify the lead before passing it along to the sales team. This is a very effective strategy as your marketing teams are passing along qualified leads to your sales team rather than all leads. Once that lead is passed on to sales, what data can the sales manager see that might help in the sales process?

With an integrated environment, the sales manager can see what forms have been submitted and the actual fields that were captured. In addition, they can see landing pages and surveys that have been viewed and submitted. Having visibility to this will most certainly help you in understanding where the customer is at in the purchasing cycle and when and how often you may want to engage with them. Your team could even choose to deploy a lead alert strategy based upon the system of answers submitted on the form. This would trigger a notification to the sales team and hopefully then a touchpoint out to the customer before your competition does!

As you can see, there are ample opportunities and strategies to take advantage of the customer analytics being gathered by your marketing teams. Leveraging technology that can pass the data to the sales team and then educating your teams on the value and use of the data will be core to reaching your defined sales goals.

To learn more about how Dynamics 365 can solve your business challenges, contact Storm Technology.