Big Data for B2B sales?

Many people think Big Data is much related with B2C industries, where combining different sources of data with marketing could increase the win ratio.

But in B2B sales!?

B2B sales are much more personal, plenty of face-to-face interactions, even meetings with a group of people at customer’s premises.

If a customer is definitively not going to buy your product or service, when would you like to know it?

A Key Account Manager typically knows everything about the customer and likely about the whole customer’s Industry. Some sales executives are used to playing sports with their customers after work where an intimate environment is created. B2B sales are commonly associated with an “Art” rather than with a “Science”.

So how can i.e. golf be substituted by a software platform? How can Big Data approaches help a B2B sales representative then?

If you are either a salesperson or a business man, please answer this pretty easy question: If a customer is definitively not going to buy your product or service, when would you like to know it?

Correct!

The sooner, the better.

And I hope you agree with me that sometimes your customer contact does not have the whole information or he/she is not allowed to share it with you, even both of you have a great personal relationship. You need clues. You need some threads of which you can pull out, in order to spend your time in the opportunities with the highest potential and to save your company a lot of money stopping a loser bid process

But you are not starting from scratch. I am sure your sales force is already using Business Information tools without realizing they are running some kind of Big Data analysis. Examples given:

• Linked In, which provides key personal and professional information about customers, executives and leads. Now there are no “cold calls” since Linked In exists. Accurate queries can bring you to perfect business partners in a remote country. And so more.
• Google News, which allows your sales representatives to be up to date of key news affecting their customers and their industries.

Nevertheless, Big Data is much more for B2B sales. It is already helping companies when prospecting new corporate customers or promoting new services to cross sell.

Big B2B Telcos and IT providers have started to run Propensity Models and Sweet spot Analysis. They are getting big amounts of information about existing customers and leads from public and private sources of data: geographic, footprint, IT budget, contracts, media, etc., etc.

These reports are pushing the B2B sales teams to approach customers with higher probabilities of buying new services due to monitoring of metrics as competitor’s contract end date, proximity to my network, implementation of a new ERP which requires more bandwidth…

So the brilliant B2B sales people of the 21st Century will have to deal with Big Data reports, scorecards and automated suggestions. The best performers in Sales will be the ones who know how to stretch the Big Data tool, how to match queries with business information and to leverage on few window opportunities. These sales people will add their skills and expertise (“Art”) to systematic search processes about their customers and leads (“Science”).

Yes, but do I really need a Big Data tool?

Let’s make some basic calculations: if you manage just 5 big accounts. You typically deal with 10 people on average on each customer. Most of them are in Linked In. Some of them tweet and post regularly. Some of your competitors and partners are they followers too. Plus some key directors in those companies who spread opinions and news which could be relevant for your business. It means that the ecosystem in each account sums +50 people generating 200-250 messages per day on average.

Would you appreciate a Big Data system that could work for you in the backstage and brief you just the key information based on your key words and tags?

I would.

And I would love a message like this:

“Good morning, my dear boss. The corporate Internet contract of your customer ‘Sports TV’ with your competitor ‘ABC Tech’ is approaching to its end. The CEO of Sports TV has said in an interview that “they want to lead the next generation of TV on Demand”. I have found 1,270 comments on social networks about their current system and 18% of customer’s posts were complaints. Our optic fiber network footprint is just 500 meters from their new data center so access costs will be 50% less than our last offer 2 years ago. In Linked In, there is a new Head of Content Delivery Network at Sports TV, so they must be investing in this area. He tweeted 2 weeks ago from an event of one of our CDN competitors. I hope it helps.”

So are you open to Big Data on B2B Sales or not?

Me too…