Optimum Sales – What do we do with BIG DATA?
Having information about customers has always been one of the main objectives of marketing and sales departments, as far as I can remember, since the 1920s. Although it has evolved.
Having meaningful customer information has always produced countless processes of both disruptive and incremental innovation in companies’ customer engagement processes. There is always an exception, they say in countless forums and famous quotes, that both Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, during the launches of the Ford T and the iPad, respectively, did not conduct market studies because customers did not know what a car or a tablet was. I find it hard to believe that they did absolutely nothing.
For many years, consumer markets have been segmented by sociodemographic criteria (gender, age, marital status, number of children, etc.) and companies by criteria such as sector of activity, revenue, number of employees, etc. These segmentations caused situations where there was too much generalization, for example, in consumer markets, paradoxes like the following occurred: Joaquín Sabina and Julio Iglesias were in the same segment, men, 60 years old with the same profession; it is obvious that they are not the same customer profile. In companies, the same thing happened; on many occasions, under the same heading, you would find a commercial subsidiary of a multinational as well as a national factory. The former decides very little locally, while the latter decides everything locally and in much broader areas.
The emergence of the S.M.A.R.T. era and the fact that consumers accept the “terms and conditions of use” without reading them has led to the massification of information on the consumption habits of individuals and companies, and from here, new business opportunities or old opportunities in customer segments where we didn’t know we could sell. In other words, the era of Big Data has arrived, meaning an infinite amount of data about our customers and consumers in consumer markets, or about our customers’ customers if we are in B2B markets.
From our point of view, the handling of massive information or BIG DATA has generated a paradigm shift in the analysis and decision-making of marketing and sales directors. What is that new paradigm? Generating individualized offers, moving from sociodemographic customer segments to segments divided by consumption habits, to segmenting companies by the intensity of use of our products or solutions according to sectoral criteria.
Ultimately, Big Data changes the approach to customers by marketing and sales, making individual needs the corporate objective.
| David Galve | General Director www.linkedin.com/in/davidgalve |  |
