Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

And the theory does seem to make some sense on the surface, doesn't it? With more data, a salesperson can make more-profitable decisions about how to price or what discounts to offer, right? And, with better data at their fingertips, surely a salesperson would make more-profitable decisions about what other products they should offer?

Well, as is often the case, these companies later discovered that the theory just didn't line-up with reality.

In most cases their salespeople didn't have time to leverage all of the data that had been made available to them. They didn't have time to play amateur "pricing analyst" or "cross-sell analyst" along with the rest of their duties. And even when a salesperson did take the time to access the deeper information, most often it wasn't to actually formulate better decisions at all. Instead, the information was being used to justify the decisions they had already made through gut-feel or intuition, thus defeating the whole purpose!

I've seen this dynamic play out more times than I can count. A company will go to a lot of effort and expense to put a ton of data at salespeople's fingertips, only to discover later that it's not really being used to make more-profitable decisions. It's frustrating, to say the least. But frustration can be a powerful catalyst to new thinking and conceptual "evolution."

Faced with the reality that simply providing access to data is not nearly enough, some leading B2B companies have changed their thinking about CRM for sales. They've concluded that their salespeople don't need more data to look at and analyze, if and when they find the time. No, what their salespeople really need is better, more-profitable answers.

So, these companies are now taking their CRM initiatives to the next level by applying advanced statistical science to all that data they have worked so hard to aggregate and clean. Instead of relying on human-beings to access, understand, and correctly-interpret the massive amounts of data in their CRM systems, these companies are deploying sophisticated optimization software to analyze the data and provide the answers--automatically, and in real time.

For salespeople, this "answers" paradigm is proving to be a boon to their performance and productivity. A salesperson is no longer expected to delay their sales cycles while they access and analyze a bunch of additional information related to pricing, add-on products, and so on. Instead, they have all the answers right there in front of them--optimized, deal-specific answers based on scientific analysis of more data they could ever analyze manually.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm still a big believer in the original promise of "better decisions through better data." But when it comes to sales, specifically, I believe that companies would do well to take a hard look at how they are actually using all of that data in their CRM systems. Would you agree?

There's a big difference between simply providing access to data and using data to provide more-profitable answers--and in sales, that difference can mean millions.

What are you doing to overcome the "data-to-decision" gap in sales?

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About the Author: Rafe VanDenBerg is a business strategist and profitability consultant at Zilliant, where he serves as the vice president of strategic marketing.