How To Evolve Your Organizations With Data

Mike Burton, cofounder & SVP Data Sales, Bombora.

Data has revolutionized the business world. No longer do executives have to make guesses about the best places to invest, or the right kind of audiences to pursue. Today, they can access a wealth of data and insights to make informed decisions that will likely yield a high return.

Of course, that’s the optimal outcome when using data. Taking insights and putting them into action within an organization is a different task, and it’s rarely easy. There are a lot of sources of data, and some executives may be overwhelmed. Others may hear that particular data sources can improve their business, but they struggle to make the insights actionable or implement them across the enterprise. Even after the fact, results aren’t always immediate.

Three business leaders who were guests on the Intent Data Exchange podcast have gone through these challenges and come out on the other side with plenty of real-world experience in using data to drive sales, marketing, and even product development. Successful data adoption has put these businesses closer to their customers and made their teams much better storytellers.

Here are some real-world examples of how executives at Cision, SAP, and Juniper Networks have used data to make informed decisions that have led to business growth.

Data To Inspire Marketing And Sales Alignment

Putney Cloos, the CMO of Cision, has an interesting outlook on how to align sales and marketing, informed by her experiences at Kraft, McKinsey and American Express. In our conversation, she talked about her aspirations to deliver an impact in her role as chief marketer. Early in her career, she sought to learn more about the intersection of marketing and sales in a B2B context.

“Every marketer and commercial team member should be thinking this way: what are the needs of your buyer that you can serve with your solution, rather than just purely what is the functionality of your solution itself,” she said.

More importantly, both marketing and sales teams need to be talking about these customer pain points. It seems obvious, but even today, organizations struggle to find sales and marketing alignment. This is often because one team is selling, the other is marketing, and neither team is solving.

With intent insights, Cloos’s marketing organization can inform sellers about which products accounts are interested in and actively researching, making life much easier for the sales team and unifying the two departments.

“I really think that the role of the marketing organization is to fuel sales, and fuel them with high-quality leads and intelligence,” she said. “Anything we can do to make our sales colleagues hit their goals in an easier way, a more enjoyable way for them, is joy for me.”

Data As A Tool To Influence Change In Process

Data has always been at the core of Paul Logue’s professional journey, starting with his time as an aerospace engineer and up to his current role as SVP and Global Head of Insight at SAP. Logue is responsible for all of the company’s intelligence, including customer intelligence, marketing intelligence and sales intelligence.

By functioning as an internal innovation center that serves every employee at SAP, Logue and his team have seen how data can unlock bottlenecks and influence internal change across the enterprise. This includes the marketing and sales teams, but also HR, the events team and even facilities management.

So how does someone in Logue’s shoes propel massive organizations to buy into the data that will change their day-to-day lives? In his early days at SAP, change management was the biggest challenge for Logue and his team. A slow and steady approach eventually won the race. When you have the patience, you can build wins and gain momentum over time.

“It’s going to take time. If you can’t accept that, do something else, “said Logue. “You’re going to get a lot of rejection, and it’s not going to be easy.”

At SAP, Logue and his team started very small to show how data can make a change. His advice to leaders is to “believe you can build something that will be transformative in the market and transform how sales and marketing actually do their job and work.”

Data To Guide The Customer Experience

When Michael Marcellin became CMO of Juniper Networks, one of the first things he did was hire a team of data scientists. Marcellin wanted to prepare for a shift to the digital landscape, which he called “the new battleground.”

For Marcellin and Juniper, that battleground extends beyond marketers and sellers to training engineers and customer support teams. “Everything is digital. You’re kicking off so much data, but if you don’t know how to harness it and make sense of it, it’s worthless,” he said.

That approach has guided Juniper networks in understanding how their customers respond to those products. The data was then used to deepen relationships and better set up products and services for the next batch of customers.

“Building the relationship and making it a long-term relationship even after that first initial sale is equally, if not more important,” Marcellin said.

Data Empowers Executives To Drive Growth

While it’s very clear that the right data and insights can alter a business’s trajectory, almost every executive faces some form of resistance, whether hesitancy to change a daily process or some kind of departmental territory dispute.

More than anything else, the best piece of advice that comes up, again and again, is to start small. Use a few test cases to demonstrate that new data can actually make things easier for the key stakeholders. The easiest way to get buy-in is to demonstrate that data can make people’s work easier. Once an executive can do that, they’re off and running on making their organization a data-centric company.

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