Why Building a Data Driven B2B Sales Culture is The Challenge, not Data

There’s the old saying; "sales is mostly art and some science", but its very rapidly shifted to "Mostly science with some art", but is it really a science problem that we need to solve in this shift?

Universally data has completely redefined how a business manages risk, drives efficiency, identifies new markets, deeply understand customers at scale, reduces costs etc. Essentially data supports & solves issues across the entire business for our customers.

Even industries that were considered “last to likely embrace tech” are now data driven and embracing digital at breakneck speed, even the “human touch industries” like medical are massively investing in data. I’ve seen blood donation organizations having significant data driven “donor experience teams”, even blood donation which is conceptually sitting in a chair is using data to really augment their business! But stubbornly B2B sales hasn’t really embraced data and its not even looking like it will embrace data any time soon. 

So has B2B tech sales turned out to be a bit of a digital laggard?

Based on real world experience of working directly with sales teams across the globe every day, I think the discussion needs to take a step back from our immediate go to discussion around tech and focus on at how you build a data driven sales culture as a foundation first.  

Sales Is the Customer right? Have we actually asked sales to run through where data intelligence would augment, accelerate or support them in landing on better discussions?

I often see this as the critical stumble, if you look at how “touch” industries use data, it’s to augment or personalize the customer experience not digitally deliver the experience. So if Sales is the customer, how would data augment their business and make them more impactful right now?

Invest In Skills Training for Sales on How To leverage Data, or Fail.

We all know or sell adoption, user implementation and training services to customers so they can realize value quicker, right? So why don’t we then invest in the same approach for sales?

A lot of our sales teams can’t even use LinkedIn, the CRM or many other free data sources let alone paid data tools. That’s the skills point front and centre.

As a fundamental part of any data driven strategy, you need to change the culture training sales on how to extract value from data and embed it into their selling framework. It’s also an on-going journey like any skills training required to shift culture; it’s not a onetime tick the box approach. Without this fundamental investment its doomed to fail.

Side Note: As part of your new “ongoing investment” in sales, please invest in some real laptops / tablets or such…I can’t believe how many technology teams are selling technology then are actually using 4 year old 13” low res laptop recovered from a customer project…doesn’t that say it all really?

Maybe You Already Have Data Intelligence Team?

Assuming the goal is to build a Data Driven B2B Sales culture, then a specialized data intelligence will likely only mask the underlying issue. When you replay it; If sales don’t know what to ask the data team and the data team doesn’t know what will help sales, then that will most likely not solve the issue.

If you already have a Data intelligence team, then investing in sales skills training will then allow your data team to orchestrate out data to sales, accelerating value quickly. But without alignment to sales for value and addressing the sales skills issue, it might just remain an expensive team in the corner.

Special side note to data teams: You are critical to the business, but as you know you could be working on much more advanced insights with bigger business impacts if your audience knew what was possible and wasn’t just asking for BI dashboards.

Maybe You Already invest Heavily in Data Sources: Most organizations already have some investment in data and generally that can range from tens of thousands to millions when you consider systems, people, licenses etc. And that’s the point, if you are investing in data and sales isn’t extracting value, then its time to re-think what the gap is.

The Old "We Don’t Have the Right Data Pushback" This is the old sales 101 strategy of deflect and keep deflecting. Until you understand how data can augment sales and sales understands how to extract value from it, then really no amount of data will help anyway, and deflecting it won’t make it go away either!

The Time Is Now: You Need to Start Building A Data Driven Sales Culture

B2B sales has steadily become more complex over the years, its accelerated even more recently. The selling process now spans multiple areas and stakeholders in customers.

Bottom-line; B2B sales is getting significantly more complex and time consuming, its certainly not getting easier anytime soon. Of course, there is a whole other technology based customer data lake, tech revenue ops discussion here that I’ll skip over, these are scale and acceleration discussions which often can be confused for solutions.

Bottom-line: As sales leaders there is now a definite unavoidable decision to either start the journey on building a data driven B2B Sales culture or be left behind. Strangely isn’t that what we’ve been selling to our customers for many years?

Brian Allsopp is Chief Executive of FusionGrove, a specialist in helping B2B sales teams redefine how they leverage big data for sales intelligence.