Crafting Solutions
Popular Data
One of the best parts about learning how your sales team identifies and tracks people is that the same process shows up in other areas of focus. This includes social networking sites. Even though there is a lot of buzz about Facebook and how they share or sell data, they (and nearly every other social site) use member data for sales purposes. Even when they do not release the raw data to other companies, they still analyze that data for purposes to sell to you. Google has mastered this sort of data analysis with the Ads platform. As a friend has stated, when you are not paying for the product you are the product.
All of this combines to make sales skills and the related data a trendy topic in the current business world. The more you know how to wheel and deal with this data, the better. You can launch a successful consulting business solely based on your ability to help your customers know more about their customers. Of course, there is still a lingo challenge in this arena besides just understanding how to work with the data. I think you will find that is the smaller hurdle to overcome. Honestly, if you like the number-crunching and data analysis part of programming, then CRM data is a playground of ways to analyze a situation.
A Lot of Data
Another area of focus that can be used by sales skills is big data. It is important to remember that sales are not just about the person that makes the purchase, it is also about the product. This is where people have their head explode. Think about all of the shopping cart checkouts and the permutations of products and the attributes related to each one of those products.
That alone gives you an almost unimaginable number of ways to slice and dice trends and common denominators from checkout to checkout. When you combine that with personal traits you can find facts like women between sixty and seventy years old buy products that are blue far more often than ones that are red, but only if the product is larger than one square foot in size. I made that up, but that is the kind of detail one could potentially derive from sales data.
That is where you can not only provide value for your boss; you can also create all new products. The business intelligence field is just getting started with ways to analyze data and find new ways to improve sales. The work you do could lead you to a revelation that launches a product and even a company.