With more SaaS applications in use today, the volume of data and number of data silos across organizations have increased dramatically. This has led to salespeople often facing challenges accessing and analyzing the information they need to build reports, make decisions and close deals. When sales teams don’t understand their data, they struggle to understand their customers and what it takes to make a successful sale.
Thanks to ongoing digital transformation and cloud migration, businesses find their data spread across more disparate systems than ever before. Your sales data may live in one system, while your accounting data lives in another. Demand generation and customer data may live in even more systems.
With data so spread out it can become difficult to realize a full picture of your sales process from end to end, and that’s when it’s beneficial to integrate your data. When you integrate all of your sales data, your teams gain a 360-degree view of your business and your customers, enabling deeper insights that can lead to better customer success, more closed deals, and ultimately, increased revenue.
Supporting sales teams
When data access is democratized with easy-to-use, no-code connectivity solutions, salespeople are empowered to work with exactly the data they want in their preferred tools and applications. This allows sales to analyze the customer journey, see where gaps might exist, and fill them appropriately to provide customers with the buying experience they’ve come to expect.
When their data is fully integrated, sales teams can make data-driven, actionable decisions, becoming less reliant on gut feelings to choose where and how to direct resources. Well-designed integration solutions benefit sales teams and lessen the burden on IT teams to build, deliver, and maintain integrations. Modern low/no-code integration platforms aim to empower citizen integrators and analysts to work directly with their data, allowing IT to focus on more critical tasks.
You can extend the same kind of integration across an organization: marketing teams gain a complete picture of the results of campaigns and content creation, finance teams get deeper insights into how the business is functioning and more.
What about the customers?
When data is integrated, sales can gain a 360-degree view of customer data from first touch to close and renewal. This helps define and clarify customer needs, identify areas for improvement in the sales process and inform organizations of any product gaps that need filling. Customers also gain a better, more personalized buying experience that caters to their specific challenges and requirements.
Between the expansion of remote work teams and ongoing cloud migration, sales teams need to be able to access their data from anywhere, whether that’s in a home office, in the field, or from a corporate office.
Cloud-based connectivity and no-code integration solutions will continue to grow to meet those needs, enabling salespeople to connect and access their data from anywhere within the cloud tools of their choice.
Sales teams shouldn’t be afraid of diving into their data. Connecting and analyzing your sales data is vital to understanding your customers, and adopting an easy-to-use integration platform empowers even non-technical users to derive value from their various reporting and sales tools. With connected sales data, sales teams can deliver on their numbers with more flexibility and ease.
Eric Madariaga is chief marketing officer and co-founder of CData Software, a leading provider of data access and connectivity solutions. Eric is passionate about the intersection of marketing, technology and data. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.