Data-savvy Sales Ops and Salesforce Admins earn 10.7% more than their peers. In their report for IBM and the Business-Higher Education Forum, Burning Glass Technologies conducted a comprehensive study of the marketplace for data science and analytics skills. They found that the data science job market is growing rapidly, and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.
“We project that by 2020 the number of positions for data and analytics talent in the United States will increase by 364,000 openings, to 2,720,000. In 2020, job openings for data scientists and similar advanced analytical roles will reach 61,799.”
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Source: The Quant Crunch, Burning Glass
It’s not just finance and technology organizations that desire data-savvy employees, either. Being able to derive valuable insights from large amounts of data makes you indispensable within a sales organization, as well.
Sales organizations that rely on data and analytics outperform the competition in all areas, leading to increased sales and remarkable growth. According to McKinsey, 53% of fast-growing companies rate themselves as effective users of analytics.
Source: McKinsey & Company
As more sales organizations realize the importance of hiring data and analytics talent, demand and salaries will continue to rise.
“When you can demonstrate the ability to analyze data and make informed recommendations to your employer, you become an indispensable part of your team no matter what type of work you’re doing”
– Mirjana Schultzat, president at technology staffing firm Instant Alliance. Source.
In fact, Sales Operations and Salesforce Administration talent with Big Data Analytics skills already earn an average of 10.7% more than their peers, according to PayScale’s Workforce-Skills Preparedness Report
“The technology, at its most basic is not difficult to learn, but the understanding of business process data is the hard part. I’m living proof of how important that experience is having tripled my salary in a little more than 3 years.”
― Bill Powell, Salesforce Administrator and 2x Salesforce MVP
It’s clear that the key to securing a new, better, higher-paying job in Sales Ops or Salesforce Administration is to make sure you stay up-to-date and master these new technologies and skills.
4 Ways Data is Being Used to Increase Sales Performance
The most successful sales organizations are utilizing advances in data collection, analytics, and artificial intelligence to generate remarkable B2B sales results in 4 primary areas:
- Improve Lead Generation and Pipeline Management: By comparing leads to historical data on similar customers, you can now segment leads in your pipeline based on how profitable they are likely to be and how engaged they are (an indicator of how quickly they are likely to close). Instead of wasting time reaching out to leads that aren’t likely to be interested in your products, you can now use your sales data to generate a list of the most viable and profitable opportunities to contact first. Pipeline data can also allow you to identify and fix weak points and bottlenecks where leads are getting stuck, or falling out of the pipeline completely.
- Better Understand What Drives Success: Organizations are utilizing analytics not only to allocate resources more efficiently, but also to identify the highest-performing sales collateral, sales processes, tactics, and even the specific traits that make some salespeople more successful than others. They then use this data to replicate these successes over and over again.
- Maximize Customer Lifetime Value: By looking at purchasing patterns among each of your customer segments, you can generate personalized recommendations for what customers can buy next, based on what similar customers have bought in the past. Using data to identify underserved customers and making personalized cross-sell or up-sell recommendations is a quick and sustainable way to boost revenue and maximize customer lifetime value. In addition, companies can utilize their customer data to identify the factors that indicate a customer is at risk of leaving for a competitor, so they can proactively reach out to those customers and hopefully retain their business.
- Nail Down the Right Price: Using market data and dynamic-pricing engines, companies can test many different price points to determine what the optimal price is for each solution, and even for each segment of customers. Some companies have discovered that, in order to maximize revenue, they actually needed to raise prices.
Most Sales Organizations Are Still Not Data-Driven
According to McKinsey, the majority of sales organizations today (57%) do not view themselves as effective users of advanced analytics.
The problem? Most often, organizations aren’t collecting accurate, complete, or timely sales activity data in Salesforce in the first place. There are two main reasons for this:
- Salespeople must enter their activity data manually. To do so takes precious time away from selling. Salespeople see manual data-entry as a high-cost, low-return activity. Many prefer to skip it so they can spend more time selling.
- The data in Salesforce is often incomplete, inaccurate, and out of date, because high-performing salespeople today are focused on the customer. It’s hard for them to make time to enter complete, thorough, and accurate data into CRM systems. The best reps often cut corners, if they bother to enter data at all.
Because of poor data management, managers and administrators often can’t trust their Salesforce data when they need it to make important decisions.
Sales organizations must work smarter, and can’t afford to waste time on administrative tasks, misalignment, misinformation, going to market with the wrong value proposition, or not acting at the needed speed.
Until now, no reliable technology has been able to make Salesforce updates effortless and automatic, or deliver strategic insights.
About ZynBit
ZynBit is a Salesforce email integration for Outlook, Gmail, and Outlook 365 that works in the background to automatically record and sync sales activity data with Salesforce.
Your sales reps can carry out their work like they normally do, sending emails, booking appointments, making phone calls, etc. As they work, ZynBit automatically tracks all of their sales activities, without them having to think about it.
Best of all, ZynBit gives you an easy way to collect, analyze, and derive valuable insights from your company’s sales data, allowing you to generate massive value for your organization, command a higher salary, and advance your career.