B2B business data is a precious commodity, the more information you can gather about your clients, partners, and vendors, the better you can refine your strategy and move your company forward.
When we talk about B2B data, there are a number of specific examples. For example, B2B data may encompass:
- Basic information about the companies you’re engaging with, including business names, demographics, and sizes.
- Sales data, including purchase histories for each of your business clients.
- Marketing data, including analytics reflecting the reach of your business development and lead generation efforts.
- Information about past customer interactions, as gleaned from your CRM database.
It’s vital not only to gather this information but to put it to good, effective use. Thankfully, there are a number of ways to leverage B2B business data to build out your strategy.
Understanding Your Target Audience
What are some of the specific ways in which B2B data can help you improve your strategy? First and foremost, data allows you to better understand the audience you’re selling to. In turn, that helps you be more precise in your messaging, your pricing, your outreach strategy, and more.
Consider a few specific ways in which you can use B2B data to enhance your understanding of your audience:
- Creating detailed company profiles. Taking the time to analyze a rich collection of data, spanning everything from the size of the companies you’re working with to their annual revenues, will allow you to create detailed profiles. These profiles can serve as valuable reference points as you further flesh out your B2B marketing efforts, summarizing some of the needs, goals, and pain points of the decision-makers you’ll be trying to persuade.
- Understanding behavioral patterns. A thorough review of sales and purchasing data can reveal much about how your customers actually interact with your products and services. Knowing more about customer purchase volume and frequency allows you to adjust your messaging and resource allocation.
- Conducting a competitive analysis. Data doesn’t just allow you to better understand the people you’re selling to. It also provides information about your competitors. We’ll say more about this later, but for now, it’s critical to make a data-driven assessment about your competitive landscape, and to better understand how you can distinguish your business in the eyes of potential buyers.
- Segmenting your audience. One of the most important components of B2B marketing and lead generation is audience segmentation. Simply put, you need to address different factions of your audience with different messages and methodologies, ensuring you’re always providing tailored, relevant information. Data evaluation lets you segment your audience based on clear metrics.
- Gleaning customer feedback. Finally, note that B2B data provides a way for you to synthesize feedback from previous customer interactions. This information can be used to fine-tune your products and services, or to equip your customer service team to handle issues more promptly and professionally.
These are just a few of the ways in which B2B companies can leverage hard data to improve their audience insights and targeting.
Additionally, understanding data flow diagrams can provide a visual representation of how information moves through your business processes, aiding in identifying bottlenecks and optimizing operations.
Leveraging B2B Data for Market Research
To succeed in any B2B endeavor, it’s crucial to have a keen understanding of the broader marketplace. While markets can shift and evolve over time, data analytics can provide a clearer sense of where things stand. In fact, there are a number of ways in which B2B data can fuel market research:
- Assessing the industry. B2B data can provide a keener understanding of current trends, technologies, and market dynamics within a particular industry. This can help with identifying growth opportunities, or gaps in the existing marketplace.
- Gaining geographic analysis. Another way in which B2B data can yield greater understanding of the marketplace is by helping companies to break down geographic trends. For example, certain products or services might fare better in particular areas, based on the local economy, the regulatory environment, and other such factors. Even knowing something like LLC approval time in a particular area from reputable sources like LLC University can guide broader B2B strategies.
- Benchmarking. One final way in which B2B data can be useful is by providing an opportunity for industry benchmarking. Comparing a business against industry standards is a great way to monitor overall performance, and to set reasonable business goals.
Simply put, B2B data can be an effective tool for sizing up the broader marketplace, and for locating opportunities for greater market penetration.
Building a Data-Driven Sales Strategy
Still another use for data is developing a more effective sales strategy. In fact, B2B data can provide a sound infrastructure for sales teams, guiding their efforts in more ways than one:
- Providing options for market expansion. Data related to the broader marketplace may present some new industries or verticals to enter, or some opportunities to distribute products across a wider geographic range. For B2B companies, market expansion can be just as important as market penetration when it comes to overall business development.
- Enabling your sales team. B2B data can be an incredibly valuable tool for sales team members. Providing your sales personnel with data-driven insights can help them narrow their audience targeting and refine their sales pitch. It may also help with the development of content that educates and qualifies leads or nurtures the sales pipeline.
- Supporting account-based sales. Account-based sales is an increasingly major focus in the B2B space. Essentially, the account-based method is all about targeting high-value accounts as opposed to individual clients, using a highly tailored strategy for each of these big accounts. Of course, B2B data is a prerequisite for identifying these accounts, and for tailoring the message accordingly.
In summary, having a treasure trove of data is imperative for B2B companies looking to steer their sales efforts toward greater and greater success.
Optimizing Product Development and Innovation
Beyond sales and marketing applications, data can also be a tremendous asset to product development teams, guiding them in their efforts to iterate, innovate, and improve the current product portfolio. Consider just a few examples.
- Identifying market needs. Again, data can serve as a map and compass for understanding the competitive terrain. That involves understanding where there are needs not being met among your target audience members, which can point toward avenues for further innovation.
- Analyzing usage patterns. Which product features do your B2B consumers tend to adopt and use most readily, and which are more often ignored or discounted? This kind of information may be invaluable as your development team brainstorms new versions or future iterations.
- Evaluating product performance. More generally, it’s important to look at hard data and metrics to understand how products perform. Metrics such as customer satisfaction, return rates, and support requests are all germane to your product development efforts.
- Prioritizing innovation. Data may also be leveraged to determine which new products or features will offer the highest ROI, and should therefore be prioritized in the development process.
- Considering partnerships. Finally, B2B companies can assess market data to identify potential partners for co-development, or for strategic alliance opportunities that can enhance existing product offerings.
The bottom line for B2B companies: Data is the lifeblood of product innovation, and can result in a portfolio that is all the more favored over your competition.
Measuring and Analyzing Performance
One final use of B2B data to consider is in measuring and analyzing business performance.
There are a few specific types of insight that should be prized:
- Sales performance. B2B companies can assess the efficacy of their sales strategies by employing any number of data points, with examples including total sales, conversion rates, average deal size, and sales cycle length.
- Customer acquisition and retention costs. Data provides insight into the total cost required to gain a new customer as well as the investment needed to hold onto an account. Specifically, data on customer engagement and feedback can help identify factors affecting retention.
- Financial performance. Of course, it’s always wise to use quantifiable data to assess overall financial performance. Metrics like total revenue, revenue growth, and revenue by product or service line can all be used to adduce business profitability.
- Employee performance. B2B data may even be implemented as a way to monitor employee performance. For example, it may be worth monitoring individual sales performance metrics such as quotas achieved, deals closed, and customer interactions.
There’s really no end to the ways in which robust data collection and analysis can help B2B companies understand their current performance level… and seek continuous improvement.
Using Data to Guide Your B2B Endeavors
Simply put, there is more data available to business owners than ever before. It’s important to recognize the value of that data, specifically for improving market positioning, for enhancing the product development process, for refining audience targeting, and for monitoring progress toward key business goals.
As you consider your own B2B endeavors, make sure you’re drawing from concrete data to light your path, and to point the way toward better and better performance. Use the different data applications we’ve explored here as a jumping off point for your own B2B company.
