Strategies for Improving Sales Adoption and Leveraging Data

Leveraging data enables companies to combine data from various sources into meaning and valuable information. It’s very important to know the value of data, how to use and apply it. Leveraging data is becoming more popular but only a few businesses are using it the right way.

To grow your business you need to know how to use sales adoption and integration data tools correctly. The reason behind most data failures is a lack of understanding of how to use data properly and poor alignment of current organizational strategies.

Here are a few strategies for improving sales adoption and leveraging data.

• Experiential learning

For any company, it is challenging to adopt a new sales approach, process, or solution. Adapting new behavior takes some time. The best way to overcome this challenge is to provide experiential training to your sales professionals from the very beginning. Training new business development representatives (BDRs) on sales tools from the start help them understand how to use them to their maximum advantage.

You need to ensure that your first-line managers are knowledgeable and fully trained so that they can explain the new processes properly and this way they will be able to handle any questions or queries from salespeople.

• Attract salespeople

Most of the salespeople find it difficult to adapt to new sales processes. The reason behind ignoring new sales processes is that salespeople don’t know how these new sales approaches and processes are going to increase sales, performance and how it is going to benefit the company and them. So, it’s very important to attract salespeople by showing them how new sales processes will benefit them.

It’s the responsibility of managers that every time they introduce new sales processes they must focus on explaining it and inspiring the salespeople before jumping in to execute it. If you force new processes onto your sales team without explaining them properly you will face problems like low adoption rates and inconsistent data.

The best way to get the support of your sales team is to discuss and review metrics of success with them. For example, if company A’s close rate is 80% and yours is just 50%, it will show the sales team how company A’s sales process differs from yours. This will give BDRs a clear picture of how the sales adoption process will help them achieve their goals and benefit the company.

• Design an effective and simple sales process

Many companies design complex sales processes consisting of too many steps and sub-processes. It has very little chance of being an effective tool for salespeople. This is too confusing and difficult to follow, resulting in salespeople skipping steps and saying that this new sales process doesn’t work for them.

An effective sales process needs to be simple and logical, consisting of a few qualification items and step to step process.

• Integrate data quality controls

Poor quality data leads to negative user experiences, lost revenue, missed opportunities, and more disastrous consequences. If you want to create good quality data you need to implement quality controls to validate its integrity. This makes sure that business users are leveraging good quality and relevant data.

• Comprehensive data governance strategy

A data governance program consists of rules and regulations which are prepared to handle any issues regarding data. Data gets exposed to new processes, uses, and transformations when it travels through the supply chain and it can affect data integrity. By establishing a comprehensive governance strategy and integrating quality checks, companies can prevent poor data quality issues and help gain users’ trust in the company’s data.

Data governance helps aligning understanding among IT and different departments of a company. A common understanding of data assets by different departments of business removes all users’ confusion and doubts.

Squaristic uses various effective ways to increase sales by leveraging data effectively.