Sales data is data generated from a business’s sales team. For example, revenue per sale and average customer lifetime value (LTV). It encompasses a large range of data, which can be useful in various situations e.g., measuring the efficiency of your sales team, gaining an insight into competitors’ activity, and building efficient strategies to improve organisational decision-making.
What is sales data?
Sales data can be simply defined as anything you can measure in the sales process.
This data is valuable when performing sales analysis. Analytics help drive business decisions on crucial points such as what product to focus on, where to sell, and how best to reach customers.
One of the key prompts for collecting sales data is to provide the information your sales team can utilise to improve decision-making. Actionable insights into their own and others' performances, as well as the ability to identify improvement areas, will help sales build better strategies.
Advanced software and cloud CRM can help generate a large volume of sales data. Once you have collected sufficient sales data from various sources and trained your sales team in how to interpret this data, your team will be optimised and have everything they need to improve their pipeline.
Red Flag Alert provide unique, valuable insights and streamlines sales processes. This reduces the effort of sifting through a lot of data-driven information, wasting your money and time.
What can sales data be used for?
Sales data allows you to open your business up to growth, as well as protecting it by quickly identifying risky business partnerships and bad internal processes. Track performance against key objectives, allowing real-time decision-making and time-saving automation. With improved visualisation and a focus on data monitoring, B2B data gathering can greatly benefit your business.
Data can be split into five groups:
- Demographic: Name, email address, telephone number, location, employment history, skills.
- Firmographic: Company name, company location, industry, number of employees, revenue information.
- Technographic: Technology that an employee uses, technology a company uses.
- Chronographic data: Company location move, job join or leave, company funding, company acquisition, company IPO, event appearances, company job hiring.
- Intent data: If they’re investigating your company or a competitor, what content they’re engaging with, and whether this indicates an intent to buy.
Three of the biggest areas sales data can be used for includes:
1. Discovering your ideal customer
Sales data helps you identify new lead generation options by learning the names of individuals, businesses, job titles, email addresses, and direct dial phone numbers of those that fit your ideal customer profile.
2. Expedite your prospecting process
Don’t waste time and money chasing prospects with low purchase intent, and enable effective prospecting by utilising your sales data. Avoid pursuing bad-fit customers by being able to filter by customer technical fit, functional fit, competence fit, and cultural fit with the data set.
3. Sales process optimisation
Provide sales forecasts, income age, geographical distribution, industry news, press releases, macroeconomic factors, and sector indexes. Optimise and build your sales process by tracking your sales team’s performance regularly and monitoring this data regularly to master the decision-making process. Experiment and improve your communication process to better nurture and build relationships with leads and customers.
Where can I find sales data?
You can collect sales data from various sources within your own company. This generally includes databases and sales tools e.g., CRM, surveys, and customer feedback. Sales data analysis is a crucial part of this process as it provides an understanding of the products your customers are buying, why they are behaving in a certain way, and finding patterns in your lead conversions/drop-offs. This information then allows you to optimise your sales process.
Finding sales data on other companies can be a bit more difficult. Trade associations and trade magazines/journals are one source of market share data; trade associations often collect data on industry growth trends, sales figures, product developments, shipments, and market share rankings.
Another great source could be reviewing prospects’ purchase history and budget, this provides info on their current solution and their capacity to make a purchase. However, this can be a long and tedious process and many resources can be lost through an in-depth review of each client.
Aside from this, analysing customer behaviour and building a persona can help you study patterns that emerge among the best customers. You can then use insights you’ve found to develop a persona for your ideal sales-ready prospect.
This data can come from analysing customer activity:
- automated email campaigns
- monitor opens.
- clicks
- clickthrough rate
You can also find information from public sources such as the company’s website, social media profiles, company articles, or customer online form fills/survey results.
How to access sales data without compromising your time
One of the best ways to find sales data on your own, prospects, clients, suppliers, and competitors’ businesses is from private sources, where you can secure B2B sales data sources from payment or permission subscriptions. This includes DaaS (data as a service) providers, a paywalled website, and financial/market intelligence platforms.
You can sort data by identifying key sales metrics which are most important for your team to achieve when closing deals e.g., win rate, and average deal size. And CRM tools such as Salesforce track leads meeting your criteria as soon as they enter your pipeline. You can then review data regularly to track growth rates and resolve problem areas quickly.
With a reputable B2B data provider such as Red Flag Alert, you will have access to a vast range of data and insights. Tools within the platform allow you to build accurate prospecting lists, enhance your database with quality GDPR-compliant data, cut time prospecting and focus on closing new business, and identify prospects at the right time in their buying journey.
How can Red Flag Alert help you?
We are the UK’s best business database, providing real-time financial health ratings, and detailed information on more than 6 million UK businesses. Find and target businesses with ease, no matter how specific your criteria are, with our in-depth search function that has over 140 filters.
Red Flag Alert users have access to:
- Data on 50,000 new companies added every month
- 100,000 real-time updates per day
- Monitoring alerts
- Instant access to data via your CRM using our API
- Highly accurate growth score to target desirable businesses.
- Estimated turnover calculator to decide which companies are the best fit for you, even when they haven't published financial records.
- Best match, highly detailed and highly accurate SIC codes
Grow your business with data-driven decisions with Red Flag Alert today by starting your free trial.
