A few weeks back I wrote a post titled – Are You Providing ‘Big Data’ For Your Inside Sales Team? – and explored the concept of “informationalization” after reading Thomas Redman’s post on the Harvard Business Review’s blog. I discussed its relationship to the importance of managing a successful inside sales team by providing them with big data.
As I was writing that post I realized that not only could “informationalization” be related to my team and their data needs, but also the data deliverable that is integral to a client engagements success. To briefly recap, Thomas Redman defines “informationalization” as “to make existing products and services more valuable to your customers by building in more data and information”.
The importance of evaluating just what your product or service is delivering to your clients is critical regardless of your offering, your marketplace, or your audience. I think we all can agree that every buyer wants to receive a high amount of value from the partners they engage with. With this in mind while managing a teleprospecting program, you should always maintain a firm grasp on how you are not only presenting program results but also just what you are presenting. I see this idea as part of the core of what Thomas Redman refers to as “informationalization” and always looking to add more data and information into your service.
There are standard metrics that we must track (activity numbers, connect rates, opportunity uncovered rates, etc.) as inside sales managers. While these are critical, it is also important to expand on these and provide the details that make up these figures to your clients. This can be as simple as a report containing the details of the conversations you are having, or a report capturing the competitive trends that the program is uncovering. Where you see your increased ROI is in providing the details of the details; meaning providing you’re clients with the specifics around the contact you had the conversation with, the source the contact derived from, as well as the trends that are arising in the conversations.
These are just a start to the deliverables that should be expected from you as a service provider. It is also important to have a strong understanding of your client’s marketplace, internal measurement requirements, and their measurement criteria for your programs ROI. Remember, the idea is to make your service more valuable and an easy way to provide a stronger ROI is taking your current data analysis and reporting to a more granular level.
What are some other ideas around the types of metrics you feel are important and other thoughts on the concept of “informationalization”?
