5 Ways Distributors Can Use Customer Data

BY BRIAN BLUFF, CEO, SITE-SEEKER

Name a keyword - any keyword - related to data. And I can almost guarantee that it’s grown in popularity and search volume over the past five years.

“Customer data”

“Lead intelligence”

“Website data”

“Consumer insight”

“Sales intelligence”

That’s because businesses are getting better at understanding how to gather, log, store and use data to help maximize sales and marketing efforts and close more deals.

But how exactly can distributors use this type of data? And where can they get it?

Let’s dig in.

Building A Plan

Before you decide on what type of data you need and where it will be sourced, you should start with a plan. In doing so, you’ll be able to align your team, control your costs, and, most importantly, identify what you’re trying to accomplish (and increase the likelihood of doing so!)

Here are a few tips when building your plan:

• Write out your objectives and make them crystal clear. These should meet SMART criteria (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound). Ask questions to yourself when you write them. “Will the data help us improve our product offering or pricing? Will it be used to optimize our website and improve conversion rates? Will it help build our sales pipeline?”

• The plan should include the same details as any other marketing or sales plan. Things like a timeline, which team members are responsible for what, and your overall budget.

• Make sure you have a team in place that understands data sourcing and management and can execute a program that uses the data. The worst investment you can make is buying into data and having it sit on your server without putting it to work.

Once your plan is built and your budget approved, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.

5 PLACES TO GATHER CUSTOMER INSIGHT (AND WHAT TO DO WITH THAT DATA)

Now that you’ve addressed the “why,” you’ll then focus on the “how.”

Your tactics bring your plan and program to life and help ensure you’re maximizing the investment. Here are 5 important customer data sources and some ideas of what you can do with the data.

SOCIAL MEDIA Where it comes from

Let’s start with the most basic: social media. One of the least talked about perks of social media is the free data that it offers businesses and brands. If you’ve been active on social media over the years and have a decent following - you’re sitting on some good intel.

Platforms like Facebook (via Facebook Audience Insights) and LinkedIn (via LinkedIn Analytics) provide free data that gives you a breakdown of your fans and followers and reveals details about them.

What to do with it

Download the data and make sense of it (i.e., turn those huge Facebook spreadsheets into easyto-read visual charts). Your social media fan base are typically your most loyal buyers. This is prime picking to understand the makeup of your customers.

You'll want to lean on this data when building your buyer personas or ideal customer profiles. Look at the demographics, locations, interests, and other psychographics. This information can also help you prepare the best audience sets when building out ad campaigns.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM)

Where it comes from

Are you still managing customer data inside of an Excel spreadsheet? Yikes! Your customer relationship management (CRM) tool is your internal database that contains past, current, and future customers, details about them, as well as your interactions with them. If you’re just starting out, you’ll want to import old email lists, contact info from past buyers, scans from event apps, and more. It should be complete and comprehensive.

Additionally, you’ll want to continually bring new names into the system. Make sure any and all lead generation or intake forms port directly into your CRM. This could include your live chat software or your web forms. Finally, if you’re using lead intelligence or sales intelligence tools (see below), make sure they are integrated into your CRM so they pass that data directly over. Always make sure you’re using tags properly and segmenting your lists so you can keep your data clean, neat, and organized.

What to do with it

Your CRM should be your source of truth that contains all your customer data and, ideally, has sales and marketing functionality that allows you to take action on that data. Examples of CRMs with automation capabilities include Hubspot and ActiveCampaign.

Having a rich sortable database can help you better understand the makeup of your customers through the use of reports and dashboards. You can forecast sales results based on the pipeline, identify where there are snags in the buying cycle based on lifecycle stages, and carry out important sales and marketing activities like automated emails and SMS campaigns, sales task management, and meeting and call recording. Campaigns and workflows should be put in place for both marketing and sales teams to drive efficiency across departments, provide transparency around results, and ultimately foster better collaboration between the two.

WEBSITE DATA Where it comes from

There are a few different kinds of website data. We’ll focus on two. First, analytics software like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can provide anonymous page-related data. You can gain insight into what sources and keywords drove the most traffic, what the popular entrance and exit pages are, what users’ paths are on the site, and what conversions they clicked on most.

Second, there’s heatmapping software that can also be quite valuable. Heatmapping tools (like Hotjar or CrazyEgg) can monitor users’ behavior on your site, how they scroll, how they scan and read text, what buttons they click on most, and where they spend the most time on each page. It gives you extra intelligence - if layered on top of Google Analytics data.

What to do with it

You should always be focused on the customer experience. In today's digital world, that experience often starts online (and, in many cases, is important throughout the entire customer lifecycle). How does a user find you? What's their first impression when they land on the site? How easy is it to find information? To contact you? To re-connect with you?

By combining Google Analytics and heatmapping software, you can bolster your marketing measurement efforts. It can help you with keyword research and search engine optimization (SEO). It can help you improve your landing page experience, which improves advertising conversion rates and drives down cost per click (CPC). It can help you modify your website to build or eliminate pages, PDFs or panels, and streamline navigation. All in all, website data enables you to improve the experience among buyers and helps drive more sales.

Lead Intelligence

Where it comes from

Lead intelligence is a newer form of data. There are a number of tools out there - some better than others. They use reverse IP lookup to identify businesses on your website and provide an added layer of intelligence around what those folks are doing. Lead Forensics is the one we recommend.

Perhaps you’re thinking, doesn’t Google Analytics do the same thing? It does - but the problem is - Google is always anonymous data. With a lead intelligence tool, you can see the actual business who visited, what industry they belong to, their location, how large the company is, what source drove them to the website, what pages they spent time on, and for how long. They also provide contact information for those businesses.

What to do with it

The beauty of lead intelligence is that you know the identified business is interested and/or familiar with your company. Or else they wouldn’t be on your site. They are likely not at the purchase stage yet (or else they would have directly reached out to you), but, likely, they are at least in the research or consideration stages. And that’s huge. Take a closer look at company fit, the pages they viewed, and the content they digested, and decide how you’d like to approach them.

You have a few options: you can call, send an email, connect or engage on social media, send a direct mail piece, or enter them into a list to be advertised to later (i.e., remarketing helps stay top of mind and/or helps draw those users back to the site). Typically, lead intelligence users embrace at least one outreach method and help increase the number of prospects on their call or email lists. It can also help shorten the buying cycle.

SALES INTELLIGENCE Where it comes from

Sales intelligence is similar to that of lead intelligence with one major distinction - it is customer data among folks that have indirectly expressed interest in your product rather than directly. Let me explain it this way: lead intelligence looks at visitors on your website, so they’ve directly shown that they are interested in what you are selling. Sales intelligence looks at external buying signals to indicate how interested and ready they might be in your industry, product, or service. It’s sourced from content they’ve consumed online, ads shown to them, events they’ve participated in, and many other online resources. It’s sometimes called “intent” data.

Beyond intent data, sales intelligence also features rich, accurate contact information for folks that you might want to reach out to based on your ideal customer profile. They feature HUGE databases of business information and contact details. This could include location, title, company size, industry, tenure, and more. Two of the larger sales intelligence platforms are ZoomInfo and Cognism.

What to do with it

Like lead intelligence, you have the same outreach option when looking at your sales intelligence data. Perhaps you might want to connect on LinkedIn to get a conversation going? Maybe a soft email featuring a personalized Vidyard video will spur a response? Maybe a friendly - but direct - phone call is deserved? Sales intelligence can help give you a peek at potential buyers and tee you up for a timely touch.

Many tools also have data enrichment capabilities. This means that, if connected to your CRM, they can reference their billions of bits of contact info, and keep your CRM’s database complete, full, and always up-to-date. Finally, sales triggers help warn you of potential needs that these buyers may have. By referencing important online news - like an acquisition, a round of new hires, or a new product launch - you can help better time your outreach. CRM data, lead intelligence, and sales intelligence lists can also be uploaded as custom audience lists into advertising platforms for improved remarketing efforts too.

Summary

If your distributorship isn’t leveraging customer data yet, it’s time to get moving!

The massive explosion of data software and its ability to source, store and act upon customer data has opened up a new world of opportunity for savvy sales and marketing folks.

To avoid getting overwhelmed (or misusing the data), it’s important to always start with a plan. Outline what you’d like to accomplish with the data, identify where you’ll need to go to get it, and how you’ll ultimately use it.

Make sure sales and marketing teams are aligned, so they use the data to support each other and the company. If used right, data can help you find and talk to more potential buyers and help close more deals.

Lastly, always make sure to respect CAN-SPAM, CCPA, GDPR, and any other laws that apply to your data and your business.

That’s all for now. Happy Data Diving!