Self-Service Access to Data Increases Sales Success
Greater access to data, frequent use of analytic tools, and the adoption of data at higher levels of the organization lead to better sales performance, according to the findings of a global study by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Qlik.
Virtually all – 97 percent – of companies who indicated they were very good at executing on sales objectives had real-time, self-service access to customer or account data. Of those, three in five of these firms said they access sales reports one or more times per day, says the study.
The survey of 550 global sales leaders, confirms that sales performance is a near-universal priority for companies, with nearly 80 percent of companies indicating that managing sales performance was “somewhat important” or “much more important” than other business objectives.
At the same time, however, companies lack a degree of sales confidence with only a quarter of respondents citing they were “very good” at executing on sales objectives. Insufficient or poor quality data was one of the top barriers to better sales performance, cited by 27 percent of respondents.
“The companies that succeed aren’t the ones that have the most data; it’s the ones who really understand it and know what to do with it,” said Colin Day, global head of marketing operations at financial technology company SunGard. “The data and the insights are only as good as the current information you’ve got,” he adds.
