Small Business Guides: Growing your Business Through the Use of Sales Data

Effective data analysis and usage can help you connect directly with the businesses or families in your community or thousands of miles away who are most suitable for the products and/or services your business offers. #salestips #salesteam #SalesLife

Access to quality data can be, and usually is a quintessential part of any successful direct-marketing or direct outreach effort. In today's competitive business environment, any small business owner or entrepreneur looking to grab the attention of a desired audience surely must go the extra mile to do so.

It is important that you, the business owner, and/or sales manager, do not look at your sales data or sales leads (alone) - be it B2B or B2C - as the silver bullet needed to help derive positive sales outcomes.

It is essential to view your sales data, and your access to fresh quality sales leads as the fuel needed to drive growth as far as your sales activities go. One need not skip the various proven steps required to attract and retain profitable client relationships via direct sales.

The more you know

Having access to pertinent details about an individual, whether as a representative of an organization or a consumer with whom you wish to do business, allows any skilled sales professional the advantage of being able to offer suitable solutions and also anticipate a prospective customer's needs.

Your sales scripts and/or ad copy will be crafted in a way as to allow your prospective customer to fully understand and appreciate your value proposition as it relates to their individual or business needs.

You and your team, in this context, will have the full advantage of being able to address all the pain points associated with those who (typically) seek what you are selling.

Intel about your audience or prospective customer, even as mundane as age, gender, level of education, etc. When taken together and worked through your sales infrastructure and big data machine, can help illuminate many of your sales representatives to the unique needs of your sales prospects.

For example, we know as one gets to be a certain age, there are needs, wishes, and concerns that only become clear and imperative to us during these and other stages in our lives.

Once you are able to access specific demographic and psychographic data about an individual or company, you are able to present your products in a more palatable way.

A mother of three, age 35 - 45, married living in a condo, with a "good" credit rating (730+), making over $100,000 - all data points that can be accessed via any of the unlimited sales leads platforms - will probably be interested in financial products like insurance products, loan and credit solutions, and so on.

She might however be more inclined to consume products with lower interest rates. She might also be a great candidate for investment products that are built to fund a child's education, the future purchase of a bigger home, and so forth.

When reaching out to such a candidate, it helps to build most of your offers around that which she cares bout the most: The family, and the specific concerns someone in her income bracket might have.

Getting to know your audience

I am sure it is quite unnecessary to tell you that marketing -effective marketing - goes way beyond just gathering contact information about a person or business and inundating them with information about your products and/or services meant to help ease the pain of a specific problem.

First, we will need to know if this person has this problem or knows someone who does. We need to try to anticipate while carefully trying to understand the perspective (day in the life) of one who has such a need or want.

We will need to get to know a little bit, no scratch that, a whole lot more about our audience to be able to truly connect with them and present value. There are many ways to do this.

Larger organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to understand every aspect of the lives of those they wish to sell to. I am talking about focus groups, peer studies, surveys, and so on.

As a matter of fact, through careful research is how back in the 1930s and early 1940s, various soap manufacturers such as Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive realized that various household cleaning products including soaps could be sold to housewives via overly dramatic mid-day radio shows.

Hence the name Soap Operas. The first of its kind, “The Guiding Light”, premiered on NBC Radio on January 25, 1937

The basics

As a small business owner, you may not have resources that match that of say a Facebook or Pepsi.

This, however, does not mean that you too cannot come up with your own unique way of getting the data you need about your ideal customer and creating various customer profiles and scenarios to help you reach more folks who fit the mold. As time goes on, you will get more efficient at doing both.

For now, you just need to ask yourself these three questions:

Where would your ideal customer or client fit in as far as their age, gender, marital status, income level, ethnicity, and so on? These are the basic demographic data points one needs to know about the ideal persons or person who is more likely to buy one's stuff.

What is the best way to reach your ideal customer ? and what are the unique pain points associated with the reason they would want to avail themselves of your product or service?

When you set out to understand who your ideal customer is, as I said before, it helps if you have had some years of transactions under your belt. Hundreds, even thousands of active customers here and there.

If you are in this unique position and your interest in this content is to get some insights and ideas on how to streamline your direct-marketing campaign(s), or perhaps to help you understand your customers better for the sole purpose of developing new products and services for them, then you need not look any further than your own customer data to try to get a better understanding of who your patrons are.

For the rest of us, we can engage in an analytical try and error exercise to try to better understand our entire business through the eyes of those who spend their cash with us.