Quit sitting on that pile of valuable B2B data. No seriously, stop it! You know what’s weird to us? In a world now consumed with oversharing, clients like to keep insightful B2B marketing data tightly hidden away from their agency’s strategy-forming, creative-messaging, media-buying eyeballs. We understand the need for privacy, but we’re here to help you leverage your data beyond the superficial. So, with that being said, we respectfully ask you to knock it off.
Share, people. Share.
Now, we’ll be the first to admit that turning data into actionable items we can actually measure against takes considerable time and effort. But, if an agency can see your sales cycle from start to finish, they can identify opportunities to capture and react to customer signals that in-house sales/marketing teams might miss as prospects move through the funnel. Without this visibility, an agency has to rely on interpretations and opinions instead of cold, hard, data-driven numbers.
For us agency folk to fully analyze the effects of media, messaging and other factors, it takes B2B data specificity. More B2B data gives us more opportunities and insight into how we craft messages and who we target. It can also provide us with details regarding the impact of weather, water shortages, gas prices, market fluctuations and other economic events that may affect your sales goals from year to year.
Still though, you might be asking yourself, “So, what’s my agency going to do with this?”
Here are a few answers that come to mind:
- Establish better, more realistic goal-setting. That’s huge.
- Stop chasing “empty” KPIs and start measuring performance with KPIs that matter to your business.
- Make better-informed decisions and enhance campaign optimization across all aspects of marketing, including product mix, promotion mix, distribution and pricing.
A recent study we came across stated that 44% of marketing leaders want their agency to leverage data to make smarter, faster decisions. Sharing first party data gives them the best (and smartest) information.
That’s pretty much on the nose right there.
Fortunately, in the digital age, data can mostly be collected instantaneously. The effort is in analyzing and leveraging that data to reach existing and prospective B2B customers more effectively. When data isn’t shared or is walled off between an agency and its clients, it puts a kink in the hose that otherwise should be creating real-time sales opportunities.
Which takes us back to our initial, and respectful, request: Share.
We’ll make it worth your effort.
