How Automated Data Flows Empower Sales Ops
Sales Operations are where your organization's tires hit the road. Whether directly or indirectly, the end goal of your business decisions, technology infrastructure, and data operations is to empower your sales team. It’s important to understand what resources you have at your disposal to enhance your Sales Ops potential.
In this article, we’ll explore how data is your most important sales resource, and how to ensure you are maximizing the value of that data.
The Role of Data in Sales Ops
Data provides the driving force behind modern business decisions, and Sales Ops is no exception. Sales teams rely on data across multiple applications to make vital business decisions, including:
- How to adjust pricing to maximize revenue
- What customer archetypes present the most opportunity
- How to align marketing and sales
However, making the most out of your sales data depends on understanding the relationships between the data silos within your organization.
Understanding Critical Data Relationships
The data relevant to sales empowerment is spread across multiple SaaS applications and data platforms. Frequently, these different applications are under the purview of different teams within your organization – e.g., the sales team and the marketing team. As a result, the importance of the relationship between your different data platforms can go unnoticed.
Breaking these silos and relating different data sets to each other allows your sales team to better understand your customers. In the modern sales cycle, customers are king. It’s therefore important to see the full picture of the customer journey – from initial interest to close – to understand where in your sales funnel your energy is most needed.
The multitude of checkpoints in the sales journey fall across many data platforms in your organization, so uniting these platforms and building a 360-degree view of your customers is the most valuable way to arm your sales team with the information they need to close deals and generate revenue.
CRM and Marketing Hub
The most important data relationship to consider is between your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and your marketing automation platform. Individually, these solutions contain helpful information for sales and marketing teams. Relating the two together, however, can unlock the true value of your Sales Ops data by ensuring that your sales and marketing efforts are aligned for efficiency.
Your marketing automation hub contains valuable data on outbound campaign performance and attracted leads, while your CRM provides important information on the customers those campaigns attract and their interactions with your company. Emerging from the intersection between these two data sets is a powerful business insight: What marketing and sales pushes are most effective for what customer base, and where should your emphasis be?
Bringing together an understanding of how your marketing and customer accounts are correlated allows you to more confidently allocate resources and tailor sales pitches to meet specific audiences’ challenges. As a result, your customers receive marketing materials that are of interest to them, and your company cuts down on wasted time and costs spent missing the mark on marketing campaigns. Sales can also target only the warmest leads, more easily hitting their numbers.
The Importance of Automated Data Movement
Since the true value of your Sales Ops data depends on correlating different data platforms together, the issue of data movement comes to the fore.
Understanding the relationship between your data platforms like your CRM and marketing solution depend upon the ability to break data out of silos. Once data can move freely from the platform where it is created or stored, your data analysts can easily aggregate and correlate different data sets to build a comprehensive picture of your sales efforts.
However, manually moving data around is a friction point that not many enterprise organizations can afford. Instead, the modern approach is to leverage automated data movement to ensure that data ends up where it needs to be regardless of any manual intervention, allowing your data team to simply work with the data in the platform they choose without worrying where it came from.
Choosing a Data Automation Platform
The key to unlocking Sales Ops data potential comes down to implementing a data automation platform. Data automation solutions perform the data movement necessary to understand the complex relationships between your sales and marketing data without requiring your data team perform any manual processes.
When choosing a data automation platform, it is critical to keep the following features in mind:
1. Breadth of Connectivity
A data automation platform needs to communicate with every element in your data environment. The ability to speak the language of each SaaS application, data analysis platform, and data storage solution that you use is paramount for ensuring that your data moves according to your needs. Data connectivity should be considered a make-or-break feature: a data automation solution without sufficient connectivity is unlikely to empower your sales team effectively.
2. Ease of Use
For any issue involving data movement and integration, it is important to consider the potential burden on your IT resources. An easy-to-use data automation platform ensures low overhead for building data pipelines and means that your data team does not need to wait for IT to enable their success. A good data automation solution is accessible to many different teams within your organization, allowing for data democratization and self-ownership.
3. Scalability
As your data environment grows and evolves, your data movement needs to flex accordingly. Implementing a static or inflexible data movement solution may leave you in an uncomfortable situation where adding new SaaS applications may cause a break in your automated process.
One important aspect of scalability that may go overlooked relates to licensing models. If a data movement platform charges licensing fees according to the volume of data moving through your ecosystem, then the cost associated with your expanding data needs may be difficult to predict. As you scale up, it is important that the cost associated with your data movement platform scales efficiently and in a way that you can budget for.
CData Arc can meet all your data automation needs to ensure your Sales Ops team is leveraging organizational data as efficiently as possible to enable sales and increase revenue year over year.
See what automating your sales data can do for your organization. Request a free trial of CData Arc today.
