When selecting a restaurant, you’d likely ask friends for recommendations, do an online search from reliable and trusted sites, and check out the menu before making a reservation. It’s this data that allows you to sort through all the choices, make an informed decision, and have a memorable meal.
If only it were that easy when it comes to sales planning, prospecting, and account segmentation strategies. Traditionally, these tasks have relied on a certain amount of subjective opinion, historical CRM data that may be outdated, and independent, third-party data that may — or may not — be reliable for your cut of the market.
In an ever-evolving B2B market driven by outcomes, you don’t have time to waste on guesswork or relying on unreliable data when you’re prioritizing sales efforts.
The Dizzying Effects of the “Swivel Chair Approach”
For many, the sales planning and market evaluation process involves gathering and reconciling historical data from internal and external sources. Without consistent and reliable data, you risk relying on inaccurate information — and that can lead to wasted efforts, suboptimal sales resource allocation, missed opportunities, strategic misalignment, and low win rates. Bottom line? Sellers are not set up for success and, ultimately, your business pays the price.
The “swivel chair approach,” when disparate data is gathered, then manually transferred between processes, can lead to inefficiencies and an incomplete — or incorrect — view of the opportunities that could have led to big revenue wins.
Inadequate data has very real consequences. Consider the customer service platform vendor forced to make assumptions about segments to go after and companies to target based only on their own limited historical data. Accurate information could uncover inherent blind spots in their planning and open new revenue streams for their business.
Or, consider a cyber security platform vendor who used a freelance consultant to build a propensity-to-buy model, but now can’t update it with new data. The result? Wasted and inefficient resource allocation, missed opportunities, inability to efficiently iterate on the original findings and potential loss in revenue.
Sales and Revenue Operations teams consistently strive to streamline operations and improve accuracy through automation and better system integration. But, don’t discount the critical importance of gaining access to data that is consistent, contextual, and reliable at a granular market level.
When Data Can’t Be Trusted, the Cost Can Be High
When it comes to data used to support planning and prospecting functions, trust can’t be overemphasized. Trusted data is informed, accurate, consistent, relevant, and has been vetted through stages of the data value chain. It’s data that sales operations can reliably use to identify areas of growth, set goals and priorities, improve sales productivity, increase competitive advantage and, ultimately, increase win rates.
But, gathering data and intel for sales planning can be challenging:
- Multiple, independent data sources make it difficult to build cohesive and consistent plans.
- Historical internal data often leaves out current market dynamics and external factors needed to make key decisions.
- Competitive analyses may be faulty or incomplete.
- Force fitting data to match growth projections leading to increased pressure and unrealistic expectations.
- And, defining ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and actual opportunities can be too much of a guessing game.
Fortunately, there’s a better option. By leveraging reliable data and strategic intelligence, you can break through complexities, drive operational excellence, and enhance sales performance.
Transforming Sales Operations Through Trusted Data
Trusted data is mission critical to formulating robust strategic plans and go-to-market (GTM) strategies. Trusted data is the foundation you need to optimize resource allocation, ensuring sales resources are invested where they will generate the highest returns. Planning that is strategically data-driven, and again built on trusted data, leads to improved sales outcomes and higher win rates.
To effectively plan, you need to define your addressable market, but all too often Total Addressable Market (TAM) calculations are too macro-level for actual sales planning and don’t reveal actual opportunity. This is why current, accurate, and trusted data is so important.
To more clearly assess the situation, you need Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) data based on your own ICP metrics, such as geography, technology markets, and targeted industries.
And finally, you need Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) data, focusing on the market share you can realistically acquire, enabling you to set expectations and allocate resources where they have the best chance of reaping reward.
Data-driven TAM, SAM, and SOM calculations ease the process of market analysis with insights driven from high-quality data. This supports resource allocation by ensuring sales efforts are invested where they will generate the highest returns and assures that sales goals reflect market realities and are directly tied to ICP.
Access to granular data can help assess the viability of your ICP, as well as give insight into previously untapped sales opportunities. This solution negates the limitations of relying on historical data and/or past experiences alone. It identifies adjacent markets and potentially underserved or emerging markets within territories which leads to increasing competitive advantages and more productive sales outcomes.
In short, trusted data helps you address very real questions, including:
- Which potential adjacent markets should be targeted for new growth opportunities?
- How does our ICP definition translate to sales planning and account prioritization?
- Is my competitor vulnerable in specific areas of the market, like certain revenue bands, geographic regions or vertical markets?
- Are my projections accurate? Will they help us reach our goals — or maximize our growth potential?
The IDC Velocity for Sales Advantage
IDC Velocity for Sales provides reliable data-driven TAM, SAM, and, most importantly, SOM projections aligned to your areas of growth focus. So, you can streamline — and fine-tune — sales planning and prioritization with insights driven from the highest quality data. Your sales goals will reflect accurate market realities and will be directly tied to your ICP. This, in turn, ensures sales resources and efforts are invested where they will generate the highest returns.
You’ll be empowered with strategic insight that can’t be gleaned from one-off purchase intent data sources alone. IDC Velocity provides you with a clear, granular view of your competition in specific markets with market share data you segment yourself. This access to granular data can help expose the most productive pockets of your ICP to focus on, as well as give insight into previous untapped sales opportunities.
With IDC Velocity, you no longer face the limitations of relying on historical data and/or past experience. It identifies adjacent markets with untapped opportunity and potentially underserved or emerging markets within territories. And, this leads to increasing competitive advantage and more productive sales outcomes. IDC Velocity makes specific recommendations, and the logic and methodology of those recommendation engines are clearly explained in the tool. So, you can validate the direction or make adjustments.
Additionally, IDC Velocity provides recommendations of specific accounts most likely to spend and gives direct intelligence on competitors’ market share in specific segments allowing for broad organization planning to specific account prospecting.
The impact on business outcomes is significant. Sales teams are most effectively deployed. Annual planning cycles achieve greater efficiencies. Market opportunities are validated. Faster revenue growth is achieved through speed and agility in GTM. IDC Velocity is designed to help you cut through guesswork and maximize prospecting success.
Conclusion
Trusted data is the driving factor that enables strategic sales planning and precision prospecting.
If you’re looking for the right data to better understand your addressable market and competitive landscape, boost lead velocity, and improve win rates, you need enhanced data-based intelligent insights from a solution like IDC Velocity.
Explore IDC Velocity and see how easy it is to revolutionize your sales strategies and operations.
