Data from digital marketing teams is a key factor in a business's bottom line. - Sky Technologies

Data is the lifeblood of business in the 21st century. It’s no longer just for big businesses with lots of money.

Almost every organisation now strives to become data driven – as shown by the fact that 94% of companies that believe data and analytics is essential to their growth. Despite this, marketers are missing out on a huge opportunity sitting right under their noses – data from their digital marketing teams.

Given its unique position at the fore of both awareness and consideration, data generated by marketing is an (untapped) asset for the entire business– especially sales and service teams. However, all too often data remains siloed away in multiple platforms, meaning organisations are failing to see the advantages and importance of streamlining processes and aligning teams.

Decentralising data and bringing sales, marketing, and service teams closer together is key. Complete with a look at the ways effective data management and revenue operations (the framework that focuses on business alignment to drive revenue growth, known as RevOps) can be the key to unlocking your data, getting ahead of the competition and driving the bottom line for your business.

Empowering sales and service teams with digital marketing data

Many companies are capturing data around existing customers to understand what their likes, improve personalised experiences and identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell. But marketers are also becoming well versed in buyer intent data, which can be fed back to sales teams to help them reach prospects at the right time, on the right channels, with the right messaging when they are most intent on buying.

Ultimately, this data can provide insights across the entire organisation – be it sales, marketing, or service. Data can provide throughout the buyer journey by supporting everything from nurturing prospects and delighting existing customers, to mapping personas and uncovering emerging trends.

But of course, achieving this isn’t easy. Unlocking the value of data is both a science and an art.

RevOps: aligning teams with an agile, data-driven framework

One way forward-looking organisations are striving to get ahead is via revenue operations (RevOps). In a nutshell, RevOps is a method that focuses on alignment between marketing, sales, customer service and executive functions to establish an agile, data-driven framework throughout the entire customer life cycle.

Traditionally, these functions have operated separately, giving rise to siloes where data is managed independently. This in turn impacts its quality, completeness, and accuracy, and ultimately fails to provide a single source of truth. RevOps can play a pivotal role in overcoming this. It can help to establish a framework where you can deliver the unified data strategy that supports an end-to-end perspective which all teams need to grow revenue.

So much so, that 75% of the highest-growth companies will have a RevOps framework by 2025. But successfully using your RevOps framework requires the input of quality data, the ability for teams to easily import data, a healthy marriage of internal and external data, and effective data management.

Harmonise organisations through master data management

While organisations recognise the need to be data driven, 80% currently struggle to manage the volume, variety and velocity of their data.. Gathering, managing and making sense of marketing data therefore requires master data management (MDM).

Simply put, in the words of Gartner, this is a tech-enabled discipline where IT and the wider business work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets. Data is of course fundamental to this. But above all, it’s a coalescence of people, processes, policies, and technology, to transform data into insight.

This is a journey which requires a clear roadmap to understand the current state of data in your business – and the people, processes and technology that underpin it. Only then can you look to break down silos, harmonise your approach, and empower people with a single source of truth to drive decision-making,

The power of partnerships in becoming truly data driven

Data – including that from digital marketing – is essential to guide investment decisions, keep the wider business informed and ultimately fuel success. Freeing up data flows to better support your organisation, however, comes with complexity.

Fortunately, there are partners you can lean on to bring the expertise and a rich track record of mastering data management and RevOps in their own organisations, and for countless customers as well.