Big Data and Business Analytics in Marketing and Sales Technologies

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.” - John Maynard Keynes

forest The current growth in big data and business analytics (BDBA) related to marketing and sales technologies is fascinating. The technology in this space is moving so quickly it’s challenging for an individual to stay current on developments, technologies, companies and competition. There are opportunities in data integration and with the volume of stand-alone tools and data now available it’s also challenging to optimize the workflow and results.

How fast is BDBA for marketing and sales growing?

The explosive growth in BDBA for sales and marketing technology is fueled by the demand for data, to drive more efficient business decisions and process in reaching customers and attaining company results.

The 2019 worldwide spend on BDBA solutions will reach $189 billion, growing to $274 billion by 2022.
Year over year, IDC reports that the spend on big data and business analytics in 2019 is 12% greater than it was in 2018.
BDBA-related Sales and Marketing technologies will stimulate a material portion of that spend.

The effect of BDBA on sales and marketing is supported by correspondingly big, overwhelming numbers and the enormity of choices available to marketing and sales professionals:

830 SalesTech vendors in 38 different categories
7,040 solutions identified in the 2019 Marketing Technology Landscape
2017-2019 growth in the marketing automation industry is $500M to $1.2B

Convergence of the technologies to enable closer teamwork between marketing and sales still seems elusive. Even with the evolution of marketing and sales tools, we see data like: “Only 35% of salespeople think marketing knows what they need.” That’s an abysmal threshold for teamwork across an organization: with or without a flood of new technology. If teamwork and organizational alignment on a prioritized common goal of securing revenue customers is a top priority, can 65% of businesses really be at a competitive disadvantage? Better performing teams will gain customers, share and revenue by streamlining and more efficiently aligning to convert prospects to customers and demand gen to revenue. Assuming that drive for improvement is happening, the rationale behind the 2022 $274B BDBA forecast is persuasive.

What’s the opportunity? Tools, Data & Teamwork Across Functions

The work bench for marketing professionals is cluttered with a wide array of tools that don’t work together well. There is one study that reports that the average organization “…uses a staggering 91 different martech tools”. Or stated a little differently by Craig Davis in 2017: “…most companies work with an abundance of tools. Sixty-nine percent of respondents use at least six solutions, and 31 percent rely on more than 10. Then there’s the 2 percent of marketing executives who don’t even know the size of their marketing stack, which is its own separate headache.” Add the complexity of campaign management and the problem expands: “Marketers are on average using more than 12 different tools, and some are using more than 31 tools to manage campaigns and data.”

Sales is no less bewildering:“The 68% of respondents who reported having a dedicated sales enablement tool named more than 150 different solutions when asked to identify the tools in use — demonstrating confusion in the market around what is truly needed to enable reps.”

While we might accept that’s a good as the state of the technology is now, we have to anticipate breaking down barriers between tools for a better coordinated and integrated experience. We should expect that the pieces can work better together. Marketing and sales professionals need to ingest and blend disparate databases in a single coherent platform and with 2-way, real-time communication between corporate marketing and field sales. Directionally that has to be an opportunity that is attracting even more investment and innovation resources.

There’s a convergence point coming for sales and marketing technologies.

What’s ahead? ~Predictions~

The success of data-driven ABM over more traditional models will accelerate adoption of more technology and even closer alignment of marketing and sales. BDBA adoption in marketing and sales technologies will accelerate that alignment.
Development of BDBA marketing and sales tools that enable or accelerate seamless interaction and easily cross-conversant databases from diverse sources.
Less proliferation of siloed tools or databases and more emphasis on technology that unifies and brings it all together.
More investment, more unifying choices: in short, proliferation in the near term of choices but with a few critical offerings that truly stand out by effectively bringing the pieces together.

About Troparé Inc.

Troparé offers a B2B enterprise marketing data management studio with best-in-class data onboarding, marketing, sales, and location-based predictive prospecting solutions. Built to overcome the challenges of working with disparate data, Troparé’s Marketing Data Management Studio (MDMS) and Field Sales Technology streamline and empower marketing and sales professionals to operate more effectively and efficiently.

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