In the pursuit of bottom-line success, businesses today have a powerful ally at their disposal - data, according to an article by Forbes. By ensuring that your company's data is comprehensive, consolidated, and easily understandable, you can take significant strides towards optimizing and bolstering your revenue operations.
1. Ensure Data Completeness
The notion that businesses are sitting on an untapped reservoir of data is a prevalent one, but not all data is created equal. True data completeness stems from identifying the precise data necessary to measure your business objectives and subsequently taking action to capture it.
To pinpoint the essential data, it's crucial to establish a consensus on your goals and how they will be quantified. This principle applies universally, whether you're pursuing project-specific aims or overarching company-wide objectives. Often, different departments within an organization assess success differently, causing friction, particularly between marketing and sales teams. The remedy lies in aligning on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to foster collaboration among teams and unite everyone under a common goal.
Once you've clarified what metrics are being tracked, it's time to evaluate your data collection methods. For instance, if you previously measured email campaign success solely by open rates but have now identified click-through rates as a more accurate KPI, you'll need to ensure that your website analytics include source tracking.
This approach also helps identify gaps in data collection and provides a roadmap for addressing them. For instance, if your customer database often lacks business phone numbers, consider making phone numbers a mandatory field on your lead forms.
2. Consolidate Your Data
Historically, different departments have operated in silos, collecting data from various sources and keeping it segregated. However, for revenue operations to thrive, this compartmentalization must give way to a unified approach. Siloed data not only increases the risk of duplication and errors but also hinders effective communication. To harness data effectively, it must reside in a single repository—a single source of truth.
Achieving this unified data repository is a process that requires time and effort, with 80% of businesses still grappling with it. Nevertheless, it's an essential step towards data alignment, a prerequisite for robust revenue operations.
Integration is a pivotal step in achieving a consolidated dataset, although it's not always straightforward. Depending on the number of applications in use across your organization, a one-size-fits-all solution may be elusive, and some systems may need modification. The process involves identifying the most critical existing applications and those that are challenging to change, and then selecting a solution that strikes a balance between the two.
Once your single data source is in place, consider enlisting a data cleaning service or conducting in-house data cleaning to eliminate duplicate or erroneous data. This is a critical step because neglecting it risks rendering your data unactionable, leads going unattended, and revenue losses. According to an IBM report, poor data quality costs companies an estimated $3.1 trillion in revenue annually, underscoring the significance of this undertaking.
3. Enhance Data Comprehensibility
Incorporating effective data visualization into your strategy is also essential. It allows employees to quickly discern trends and metrics, fostering a deeper understanding of the data. Whether you utilize a business intelligence platform or develop in-house dashboards, flexibility is key. Employees should have the capability to dissect data with multiple filters and analyze different variables.
In today's digital-first landscape, understanding the complete customer journey is paramount.
Customer interactions often span multiple departments and don't follow a linear path from marketing to sales. Visualizing this complex journey, complete with interactions from every department, is crucial for driving leads and sales. When marketing and sales can both view customer interactions, they can collaborate more effectively to plan the next steps in moving customers through the sales pipeline.
Lastly, ensure that data access is provided to all employees who require it. Accessibility empowers your teams to make data-driven decisions and contributes to a more informed and agile organization.
By taking these steps to enhance your company's data strategy, you'll be better equipped to optimize your operations and drive revenue growth.