Data is key to sales. Some research suggests top-performing sales teams are three times more likely to use analytics than teams that underperform.
Good data is detailed, accurate, and up to date. Sales teams with access to this kind of data can become more efficient by targeting their strategies at convertible leads, and not wasting time trying to sell to unsuitable companies.
An effective way to enrich your sales data is to integrate an API into your CRM. An API automatically updates your CRM with data about key prospects, giving your sales teams the information they require to deliver sales – our Red Flag Alert API does this very effectively.
How an API Helps Enrich Data
An API can enrich your sales data in several ways; here are four of them:
Provide Your Sales Team with In-Depth Data
Connecting an API based on high-quality data to your CRM will provide your sales team with rich data on prospects.
Once your CRM is connected to the API, your sales team can use this data to find companies to target and also check that these targets are suitable. This means they can focus their energy on the prospects most likely to convert. Here are some examples of how this could work:
- If a company sells software to large manufacturers, you could use financial data to check if the company will pass your credit control. By avoiding companies with poor credit, your sales team won’t waste time on prospects that can’t be onboarded.
- By using data on company size, your sales team could use this to confirm the manufacturer they are targeting is large enough to need your software.
- If you provide different solutions to companies of different sizes, you could tailor your sales material to highlight the benefits your software can bring to a company of the target’s size.
- If the data provides information about key contacts at a company, your team won’t have to waste time either searching for contact details or contacting the wrong people.
Ensure Your Data is Always Up To Date
If you use a static CRM, your data will only be up to date at the time you input it. Bad sales data is data that’s not updated regularly, which means it won’t contain the details needed for your sales team to build successful campaigns.
However, if your API is connected to sources that provide current information, it will update automatically, ensuring you are always using the most up-to-date information.
Here are several ways this can help:
- Having access to up-to-date financial data means your sales team will know that the companies they are prospecting are financially healthy enough to be able to afford your solution.
- Up-to-date data can help you spot and take advantage of changes in a company. For example, a company that sells software to manage marketing processes could look out for businesses that are growing and which may need help keeping their efforts organised.
- If the data provided includes recently formed companies, sales teams will be aware of these as soon as they are established. This means they will be able to target them earlier than they otherwise would have been able to.
Help with Lead Generation
An API can help solve the problem of insufficient data on leads. For example, if you use a web form to collect data, you’ll know how much of a problem web form abandonment is. Some sources suggest up to 90%. Incorrect data on these forms can also be an issue.
However, using an API can help solve both these problems. The API can use the information input into the form – such as the name of a company – and then automatically populate the CRM with other relevant data about the organisation, such as size, financial health, and location. This will give your sales team a fuller picture of leads than they would have had otherwise. Also, abandonment rates should decrease if you have a simpler web form.
Enhance Your Sales Team’s Efficiency
Using an API to automatically input data into your CRM can seriously increase the efficiency of your sales department.
It means sales personnel won’t need to input data themselves, freeing them up to focus their efforts on actual sales. When you consider that some research suggests salespeople only spend 39.5% of their time selling, this could have a serious impact on sales team efficiency.
Additionally, if your business is having trouble getting your sales team to engage with the CRM, they may be more likely to do so if they feel that interacting with the CRM frees up their time so they can focus on selling.
How Red Flag Alert Can Help
The Red Flag Alert API can enrich your CRM with data on every business in the UK from ten high-quality sources. We update our database on daily basis with over 100,000 business changes, that’s 2M a month and 24 Million changes a year. Here is how your business can use this data in your CRM.
Step 1: First we’ll clean your CRM of old or outdated data, so there are no duplicates within the data set. Following this, we’ll set fields so key information is captured in a way that is advantageous for your business.
Step 2: We’ll then ensure that your old data matches the data that will be collected from Red Flag Alert.
Step 3: The final step is to set up the API, so it can enrich the data in your CRM and update it regularly.
Once everything is set up, we also show you how you can use the data in a way that provides the most value to your business. Additionally, we provide training to your sales team to ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to using the data.
Our API can be integrated with a number of popular CRMs, including those from Sugar CRM, Capsule CRM, and Hubspot CRM.
For a free consultation about how you can use Red Flag Alert’s API to enrich your sales data, get in touch with Richard West on 0344 412 6699 or richard.west@redflagalert.com.
