Sales has always been a people business, and it will continue to be. But the game is changing. To bring out the best in every part of the commercial organization, growth champions systematically amplify people power with data, analytics, and technology. They don’t just generate new insights—they take a holistic view and systematically set the prerequisites in place to turn those insights into actual impact. The payoff? Above-market growth and an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) increase of 15 to 25 percent.For a long time, B2B sales has focused on making calls, hosting in-person meetings, and shaking hands. Customer development was often based on individual intuition and experience. Many sales reps focused on the types of clients and opportunities with which they were already familiar. The downside of this is that it results in a tendency to neglect new, potentially disruptive opportunities, such as bringing a highly innovative solution to all relevant and prospective customers even at the risk of sacrificing some revenue in the short term. While sales reps’ experience remains relevant, it isn’t sufficient to keep a company on top of an ever-more-crowded marketplace characterized by fast-changing customer needs and the rapid growth of new channels.Over time, sales managers started using data and analytics to improve commercial performance. But it quickly turned out that data alone was not a cure-all either. Not all data was relevant. Not all sources were reliable. And not all sales organizations were able to translate data into meaningful, usable insights, let alone act on the insights to improve performance. “We simply don’t have the capacity to analyze it all,” said one executive. Added another: “We only capture ten to 20 dollars of every 100 dollars of the growth opportunities we discover in the data.”As the growth of digital channels accelerates, more data become available. In response, companies are ramping up their efforts to reap the benefits. According to our data, 64 percent of B2B companies said that they expect to increase their investments in predictive analytics. Many players, however, are not yet satisfied with their return on investments (ROI). So far, only a handful of growth champions have cracked the code for sustainable, data-enabled commercial growth. What are these outperformers doing differently, and what can their peers learn from them?
- Finding the value: They combine internal and external data and build algorithms to identify and prioritize concrete growth opportunities across the customer life cycle, from acquisition to retention.
- Planning the campaign: They establish as central “value cockpit” to prioritize and pursue growth opportunities systematically and make the right trade-offs to drive value at the customer level.
- Activating the omnichannel journey: They align customer experiences and opportunities with unprecedented precision across channels and touchpoints to drive conversion and maximize sales ROI.
- Empowering the seller: They support the front lines with relevant insights, robust capability building, and incentives, and actively monitor progress consistently on all opportunities across all campaigns.
- Getting better: They make it easy for their sales organization to feed lessons learned at the front line back into insights generation to improve the system over time.
- While each of these levers is powerful by itself, outperformers pull them all together for optimal impact (Exhibit 1). They use data and analytics to build a growth engine that propels their commercial organization from merely generating insights to actually delivering impact. They digitally empower sales reps of the future by providing them with all the information they need to succeed: data on the most valuable, prioritized opportunities, competitive battle cards on how to approach a specific lead, and real-time visibility into their entire sales funnel—all easily accessible on their computers, tablets, or mobile phones. They spend less time pulling together data and more time engaging with customers based on that data, which deepens and fosters the relationship. Their managers have transparency into performance at all times and can suggest rapid adjustments, interventions, reassignments, and targeted coaching or training to maximize value. Setting up a potent data-driven growth engine requires investment, but it pays. Outperformers report EBITDA increases of 15 to 25 percent, generally achieved through a combination of sales growth and margin improvements over the course of several years.
Finding the value
With ever-increasing data and analytical tools, the opportunities to identify new leads for sellers have multiplied. The range of use cases includes finding and winning new customers, selling existing customers the right products and services at the right prices, and retaining customers with the right measures. Many companies are already taking advantage of some of these applications. What sets outperformers apart is their systematic, comprehensive approach to data-driven value maximization. They start by identifying those opportunity clusters where data analytics can make a real difference. They then use expected value as the common currency for prioritization, typically starting with one or two use cases, such as entering white spaces, to create momentum. They leverage data and analytics not only to identify opportunities but also to calculate and compare the value at stake to enable fact-based trade-off decisions about resource deployment and investments.
A leading supplier to the food industry, for example, wanted to set its commercial organization up for future growth. But where, exactly, was the opportunity? The company used the customer life cycle as a guiding framework to identify the most promising use cases, from new-customer acquisition and business expansion to churn prevention. This effort revealed the potential to double their profit within three years. Additionally, the systematic approach helped the company prioritize opportunities according to expected value and resource availability. “Based on these insights, we drew up a road map of data-driven commercial use cases for the next three years. The idea was to capture the value in a step-by-step approach,” say the company’s leaders. They started with global quick wins that reflected the current business cycle, such as winning back valuable lost customers, before moving on to more advanced applications, such as the conquest of new customer segments and cross-sell opportunities that required more data and more sophisticated selling capabilities.
Planning the campaign
Data mining can often uncover hundreds, if not thousands, of customer-level opportunities. Even seasoned sellers find themselves overwhelmed by the endless lists of leads some algorithms generate. Some don’t even know where to start. To address this issue, B2B growth champions lead the way by adopting a campaign mindset. They establish a central “value cockpit” that cuts across all opportunities and all stages of the sales funnel. Based on the information collected in the cockpit, they set targets, direct the sales organization to the most valuable opportunities, and help it to maximize impact at the customer level. “The cockpit helps us make trade-off decisions between multiple opportunities, such as a cross-sell to a customer, a pricing opportunity, and the retention of a high-value customer at risk,” a pilot user reports. Says another: “The great thing about the cockpit is that it unburdens me of having to pull together data from a dozen different sources. It frees up at least half a day every week that I can spend to engage with customers.”
To make this new way of thinking and working tangible for the sales team, an Asian mobility company established a cross-functional “win room” for data-driven campaigning in the aftermath of COVID-19. The team plotted and executed a multicampaign program to target white spaces identified with the help of advanced analytics. It generated playbooks, including a central process for message development, to ensure speedy execution. To track progress, the company used data dashboards and organized agile review sessions to improve campaign design and manage performance as the program unfolded. Over the course of only seven weeks, the company recovered 90 percent of the revenue lost in the COVID-19 crisis, and conversion rates improved fivefold.
Activating the omnichannel journey
In the past, channel choice was often limited, and customers were often allocated to a single channel, such as in-person coverage for bigger accounts and distributors or telemarketing for smaller targets. In contrast, outperformers take a more differentiated, omnichannel approach that combines traditional and digital channels. In the future, customers will be able to select the channel that suits their needs at each step of their journey. According to our most recent B2B Pulse Survey, 83 percent of B2B executives believe that omnichannel is equally or more effective compared with traditional methods in reaching and serving customers, yet 68 percent also say their sales team has experienced increased channel conflicts as a result of more omnichannel sales.
Successful companies put data and analytics to work by aligning channels and touchpoint to opportunities based on multiple factors, such as the size of the opportunity, the complexity of the offering, and the interaction preference of the customer. An agricultural inputs distributor, for example, was struggling with its traditional distributor-led sales model. Facing threats of disintermediation by larger producers and direct-to-grower offerings, some of its customers found it increasingly cumbersome to do business with the company. In response, the company turned to digital, data, and analytics to reinvent its sales journey toward omnichannel. It started by creating a deep understanding of the customer and seller journey through focused interviews and design thinking workshops and used the insights to prioritize critical digital features, including a customer-experience hub with key statistics, such as purchase history, and an e-commerce purchasing tool. Within six months of launching, more than 60 percent of customer revenues were registered on the portal. Freed from basic transactions and tasks and supported by new flows of data and analytics that helped to identify personalized leads, the sales force was able to focus on more strategic, higher-value growth opportunities. The effort resulted in a billion dollars of revenue delivered through the digital platform and lowered churn three times for digitally engaged versus non-engaged customers.
More generally, data and analytics allow B2B growth champions to maximize ROI at the customer level across the entire spectrum of channels and touchpoints on the buying journey. For example, data-driven, partly automated omnichannel management enables companies to profitably pursue opportunities that were previously ROI negative, such as the acquisition of smaller customers or long-tail pricing optimization, thanks to the lower cost of digital channels. At the same time, this kind of differentiation helps sales reps better focus on the situations in which they can create the most value for their customers and for their company.
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