Where Is Your Data Coming From?

Shownotes

David Mead, Director of Sales Intelligence at Deluxe Corporation, joins Andrew to discuss how he uses data to shorten the sales cycle and help sellers get in front of actionable buyers. As open market data becomes more valuable and software as a service tool becomes more prevalent, sales processes are becoming increasingly complex. However, this doesn’t automatically translate into more profits. David shares the value of sales intelligence and how companies can more efficiently allocate their sales resources.

About the Guest

David is the Director of Sales Intelligence at Deluxe Corporation and has been in a B2B Go-to-market space for nearly 20 years. Before Deluxe, David built intelligence and sales operations teams for both US bank AND Wells Fargo, all focused on getting to market faster and more intelligently in a competitive B2B market. David also consults in his off time, helping established businesses and start-ups refine their sales data practices. Outside of Work, David is married and a father of 4 daughters.

Connect with David Mead

Key Takeaways

• Sales intelligence is a field that is still relatively new, with every sales organization spending some amount of resources on intelligence to create prospects and leads and work their process.
• The evolution of open market data has driven sales processes into rapidly complex models, which makes it more difficult for sales teams to separate the noise from the indicators.
• To understand when a buyer is likely to purchase, an organization needs to pull in data from different sources, including open market data and competitor data.
• A target list for sales should be specific and should be throttled to match the salesperson’s capacity to work leads.

Quote

“Eliminating those [CRM systems] licenses was enough to just pay for an FTE whose role would be to read the data, interpret it, and then get it to the sales team in a timely manner, which meant more sales and happier salespeople. The point here is that we don’t want the sales team spending their time triaging data. We have to protect the salesperson’s time. Every hour they spend not selling correlates to less revenue for the organization.” – David Mead

Highlights from the Episode

Can you tell us a bit about your background and your current role at Deluxe?

David spent most of his career living within sales organizations, taking part in almost every aspect of sales and revenue operations, and led teams with various levels of complexity for both national and international sales efforts. In Deluxe, he leads a sales intelligence team with the end goal of having salespeople spend more time selling and less time looking for someone to sell to.

Can you share with our listeners the evolution of Sales Intelligence and the future it holds for those in the B2B space?

The open market data and availability of software as service tools drive sales processes into complex models. This prompts companies to establish distinct teams to handle sales intelligence. Only these organizations that start to build this discipline will outperform their peers in the next few years. Having both the instincts of the sales leader and the availability of data pose great value to the organizations.

More tools produce more data. It has come to a point where it’s too easy to pull data from your CRM, making it difficult to separate the noise from indicators. How do you address this challenge?

With a lot of large and expensive CRMs out there, in reality, salespeople track their sales with simple tools such as Excel simply because they can control the inputs with the desired format and the relevant data, nothing more. The heavy data driven by the complex sales processes are expected to be dealt with by the salesperson as the one to triage all the information and figure out how to translate it into sales. Sales teams have no way of leveraging the CRM system and the money used for this better be used for Sales FTEs, which meant more sales and happier salespeople.

If more data is not the solution, but the right data is, How do you define what is relevant/ important data?

It depends because every sales motion is different and no B2B buyer is the same. This is where the art of sales comes into play. Defining what’s important for the customer requires an organization to spend time pondering the reasons behind purchases, the problems they are solving, and the factors that push the organization into the buying motion. After this, the data market can help organizations figure out what information can help in uncovering the triggers for the buying motion.

How do you define your target list?

A target list of sales needs to be highly specific and matched with the salesperson’s capacity to work on those leads. It is much different from marketing, which is focused on the broader audience and creating brand awareness. In most cases, target lists are too large.

TAM/ICP is great, but who can you sell to? The need to identify the Current Addressable Market, as opposed to the Total Addressable Market.

Focusing on your sales team’s efforts is the key to efficiency. The size of the market makes it seem like every organization is a potential client, however, the reality is that the market is much smaller. The question to ask now is what is the current addressable market? How many organizations are in a buying motion for our product? This information comes in handy for sales intelligence in the organization.

How are you and your organization adapting to the current economic downturn?

In light of the current economic situation, doing more with less cost is key. Sales intelligence is one of the helpful solutions for organizations to make a big impact at a relatively low cost. It is all about being efficient with data and getting the sales team into the right places. It is a constant search for ways to adjust to the changing landscape and businesses had always been under pressure because of varying factors. It is all about identifying the trends and ensuring that the value propositions in place are aligned with those.

Is there a book, blog, newsletter, website, or video that you would recommend to our listeners?

• How Will You Measure Your Life? By Clayton M. Christensen