Ten Ways Big Data Is Revolutionizing Marketing And Sales

• Customer Analytics (48%), Operational Analytics (21%), Fraud and Compliance (12%) New Product & Service Innovation (10%) & Enterprise Data Warehouse Optimization (10%) are among the most popular big data use cases in sales and marketing.
• Customer Value Analytics (CVA) based on Big Data is making it possible for leading marketers to deliver consistent omnichannel customer experiences across all channels.

Of the hundreds of areas big data and analytics will revolutionize marketing and sales, the following is an overview of those that are delivering results today. How prices are defined, managed, propagated through selling networks and optimized is an area seeing rapid gains.  Attaining price optimization for a given product or service is becoming more possible thanks to advances in big data algorithms and advanced analytics techniques. Streamlining routine pricing decisions in commodity-driven industries where products are inelastic is also happening today.

An Overview Of Big Data’s Many Contributions To Marketing And Sales

Increasing the quality of sales leads, improving the quality of sales lead data, improving prospecting list accuracy, territory planning, win rates and decision maker engagement strategies are all areas where big data is making a contribution to sales today.

In marketing, big data is providing insights into which content is the most effective at each stage of a sales cycle, how Investments in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can be improved, in addition to strategies for increasing conversion rates, prospect engagement, conversion rates, revenue and customer lifetime value. For cloud-based enterprise software companies, big data provides insights into how to lower the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), and manage many other customer-driven metrics essential to running a cloud-based business.

The following are the ten ways Big Data is revolutionizing marketing and sales:

1. Differentiating pricing strategies at the customer-product level and optimizing pricing using big data are becoming more achievable. McKinsey found that 75% of a typical company’s revenue comes from its standard products and that 30% of the thousands of pricing decisions companies make every year fail to deliver the best price. With a 1% price increase translating into an 8.7% increase in operating profits, assuming there is no loss of volume, pricing has significant upside potential for improving profitability.  Source:Using big data to make better pricing decisions.

2. Big data is revolutionizing how companies attain greater customer responsiveness and gain greater customer insights. A Forrester study found that 44% of B2C marketers are using big data and analytics to improve responsiveness to 36% are actively using analytics and data mining to gain greater insights to plan more relationship-driven strategies. Source: Marketing’s Big Leap Forward Overcome The Urgent Challenge To Improve Customer Experience And Marketing Performance (PDF).

3. Customer Analytics (48%), Operational Analytics (21%), Fraud and Compliance (12%) New Product & Service Innovation (10%) and Enterprise Data Warehouse Optimization (10%) are among the most popular big data use cases in sales and marketing. A recent study by DataMeer found customer analytics dominate big data use in sales and marketing departments, supporting the four key strategies of increasing customer acquisition, reducing customer churn, increasing revenue per customer and improving existing products. Source: Big Data: A Competitive Weapon For The Enterprise

4. Supported by Big Data and its affiliated technologies, it’s now possible to embed intelligence into contextual marketing. The marketing platform stack in many companies is growing fast based on evolving customer, sales, service and channel needs not met with existing systems today. As a result, many marketing stacks aren’t completely integrated at the data and process levels.  Big data analytics provides the foundation for creating scalable Systems of Insight to help alleviate this problem.  The following graphic is from the Forrester study made available for free download on the SAS site, Combine Systems Of Insight And Engagement For Contextual Marketing Tools And Technology: The Enterprise Marketing Technology Playbook.

5. Forrester found that big data analytics increases marketers’ ability to get beyond campaign execution and focus on how to make customer relationships more successful.By using big data analytics to define and guide customer development, marketers increase the potential of creating greater customer loyalty and improving customer lifetime. The following graphic is from the SAS-sponsored Forrester study How Analytics Drives Customer Life-Cycle Management Vision: The Customer Analytics Playbook (PDF).

6. Optimizing selling strategies and go-to-market plans using geoanalytics are starting to happen in the biopharma industry. McKinsey found that biopharma companies typically spend 20% to 30% of their revenues on selling, general, and administrative If these companies could more accurately align their selling and go-to-market strategies with regions and territories that had the greatest sales potential, go-to-market costs would be immediately reduced. Source:  Making Big Data Work: Biopharma, McKInsey & Company.

7. 58% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) say search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing, email marketing, and mobile is where big data is having the largest impact on their marketing programs today. 54% believe that Big Data and analytics will be essential to their marketing strategy over the long-term. Source: Big Data and the CMO: What’s Changing for Marketing Leadership?

8. Market leaders in ten industries Forbes Insights tracked in a recent survey are gaining greater customer engagement and customer loyalty through the use of advanced analytics and Big Data. The study found that across ten industries, department-specific analytics and Big Data expertise were sufficient to get strategies off the ground and successful; enterprise-wide expertise and massive culture change was accomplished after pilot programs delivered positive results. Source: Forbes Insights, The Rise of The New Marketing Organization.

9. Big Data is enabling enterprises to gain greater insights and actionable intelligence into each of the key drivers of their business. Generating revenue, reducing costs and reducing working capital are three core areas where Big Data is delivering business value today.  An enterprises’ value drivers scale more efficiently when managed using advanced analytics and Big Data.  The following value tree or roadmap to value illustrates this point.  Source: Big Data Stats from Deloitte.

10. Customer Value Analytics (CVA) based on Big Data is making it possible for leading marketers to deliver consistent omnichannel customer experiences across all channels.CVA is emerging as a viable series of Big Data-based technologies that accelerate sales cycles while retaining and scaling the personalized nature of customer relationships. The bottom line is that CVA is now a viable series of technologies for orchestrating excellent omnichannel customer experiences across a selling network. Source:   CapGemini Presentation, From Customer Insights to Action Ruurd Dam, November 2015.