5 Ways Centralizing Customer Data Can Grow Revenue

Picture your sales and marketing tech stack ten or even five years ago. Now picture it today. Chances are, it’s more than doubled in size.

That growth isn’t a bad thing. Numerous technologies have popped up over the past several years that offer improvements in critical areas like sales pipeline acceleration, lead generation and productivity through automation. And most of these new solutions deliver on their promises.

But now you’re faced with a brand new challenge: How to manage and connect all these solutions. Because as valuable as each technology is on its own, they’re extraordinarily more powerful together. When combined, these solutions bring together data from every stage of the customer journey to tell a more complete story and improve access to those insights.

As a result, until you can effectively connect all the solutions in your sales and marketing tech stack, you’re missing opportunities to use your organization’s full dataset to grow revenue.

So how can you make the data that’s available in one system actionable in an entirely different system? It comes down to unifying your existing tech stack. Once you do so, here are five tactical ways you can begin to increase revenue.

1) More Granular Segmentation

A unified tech stack means that you can easily combine data from multiple tools. In turn, this setup allows you to build extremely granular segments by pulling on information from a variety of key systems to power more personalized content and targeted marketing campaigns.

For example, with this setup you can build a segment of prospects that:

  • Fit the ideal customer profile (as determined by your CRM and data enrichment tool)
  • Visited the pricing page and at least two other pages of your website (as determined by your site analytics)
  • Have a certain lead score (as determined by your marketing automation system)
  • Are not being worked by an SDR (as determined by your sales enablement tool)
  • Are not in an active trial (as determined by your product or data warehouse)

…and then send those prospects an email via your marketing automation tool about a new ROI calculator your marketing team built -- all with a few clicks, automatically.

2) Refined Lead Qualification

Far too often, B2B sales organizations spend time on leads that will never go anywhere (e.g. due to lack of buying intent or poor fit). While it’s common to treat all leads the same way, it’s also a mistake to do so. Instead, you need to prioritize leads so that the best fit accounts -- based on interest and intent -- get the most attention from sales.

Unifying your martech stack makes this possible by allowing for refined lead qualification. For instance, with a unified martech stack you can:

  • Pool together multiple sources of interest and intent data, such as starting a free trial, visiting the pricing page or beginning a chat conversation through the website
  • Match that intent data with fit data like company size, prospect job title/management level and revenue
  • Make this combined data available for sales to see in their CRM or with a notification via Slack

And once you have this type of lead qualification system in place, you can introduce powerful automation to speed up the experience for leads who are the most ready to buy -- and that you want to buy from you.

3) Enriched Sales Conversations

What if you could arm your sales team with more context on accounts to help them increase prospect-to-customer conversion rates and cross/upsell opportunities? Unifying data across the sales and marketing stack and making that data easily accessible can help.

By unifying data from across the organization, you can provide your sales team with accurate, timely buying signals that they can use to focus in on the right deals and close them faster. Additionally, arming sales reps with deep context on each account’s interests can instill confidence in prospects (and even customers during cross/upsell conversations) that you know their business and are therefore well-positioned to help solve their challenges.

Once you have unified data, you can also automate highly manual tasks (e.g. sending emails, logging notes) so that reps can focus on making connections and building trust. Ultimately, this setup makes it possible for sales to create an amazing buying experience and build stronger relationships that increase revenue.

4) Simplified Revenue Attribution Reporting

Revenue attribution reporting has challenged marketers for years, largely because the different tools that house customer data are siloed.

Despite this challenge, your marketing organization needs to answer questions about campaign influence on revenue to determine where to invest marketing dollars to see the biggest returns.

Unifying your sales and marketing tech stack alleviates this challenge to support smarter, more data-driven marketing investments. Specifically, connecting these systems allows you to pull together all the data necessary to tell a complete story about the journey of a customer from beginning to end. And once you have this comprehensive insight, you can accurately determine which efforts work best so you can make informed marketing investments.

5) Time Savings and Efficiency Improvements

What if your go-to-market teams didn’t have to deal with spreadsheets or copying and pasting data to move it from one system to another? Instead, they could focus on more value-add activities like campaign management and analysis, A/B testing and content development.

Unifying your customer data across sales and marketing systems makes it possible to automate these manual tasks, which frees up time for go-to-market teams to focus elsewhere.

And the truth is, those value-add activities are not only what will help improve your organization’s marketing and sales efforts, but they’re also what your go-to-market teams actually want to do.

The Results Are Real: How B2B Leaders Have Grown Revenue

Ready for even more insight on how centralizing customer data can grow revenue? Download our latest eBook, 5 Ways Centralizing Customer Data Can Grow Revenue (featuring insight from Clearbit, Outreach, Appcues, Oz Content, Drift and more), to get more insight and tips into each of these topics and see real results from B2B leaders.

Get your copy of the eBook here.

Angela Sun

Angela brings over a decade of B2B technology marketing experience to her role as the Director of Marketing at Hull. Prior to Hull, she spent 5 years at utility data aggregator, Urjanet, where she held various roles in demand generation, marketing operations, and product marketing.