28 March 2022
The amount of data that are created every day grows at an explosive pace: according to a study by Seagate and IDC, by 2025 the total amount of digital data will reach 163 zettabytes.
By analyzing Big Data and timely receiving business signals, companies learn to identify hidden regularities and grab the sales opportunities, thus improving their business performance.
What is Big Data?
Big Data is a structured or unstructured extremely large data sets used for statistics, analysis, forecasts, and decision making.
The term ‘Big Data’ itself was proposed by Nature editor Clifford Lynch in a 2008 special issue – he meant the explosive growth of digital data in the world.
Since 2014, Big Data are in the spotlight of the world’s leading universities, specializing in applied engineering and IT development. Then IT giants – such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, EMC, followed by Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, joined the process of Big Data collection and analysis. Today, Big Data are used in all industries and sectors.
Big Data and business
When economic competition starts to intensify, it is vital for companies to offer their services to customers at the moment when they are most in demand, and do it quickly. Therefore, the role of marketing keeps growing – this is no longer a side branch of the business, as it was before.
According to a 2019 McKinsey study, 83% of CEOs consider marketing a potential major growth driver.
Now marketers can take advantage of modern Big Data technologies and powerful analytics, which really boost the capacities of marketing departments. If earlier they had deal with small fragments of data to build a picture of the whole, and the data were sometimes stored where it was problematic to export them, then now the situation has dramatically changed.
Now we have features such as the Sales Accelerator, which is an additional module for EasyBusiness, covering some specific countries, for which rich information being collected thanks to Big Data analysis are added on top of the company data of the Kompass premium B2B database
Every year, starting 2004, IBM Corporation conducts a study, in which company directors are interviewed. The new study, titled “Taking the Challenge: How CMOs Can Begin Filling Information Gaps,” involved more than five hundred chief marketing directors from 56 countries and 19 industries from around the world.
The results of the study showed that 94% of respondents believe that analytics will play an important role in achieving their goals. However, there was an increase in the number of directors (82 per cent of respondents compared to 71 per cent three years earlier) who felt or believe that their organizations are insufficiently prepared to enjoy real economic benefits from explosive data growth and require a system of alerts that would signal the go-sell opportunities to make a deal.
To fill that gap, they can be assisted by an improved smart alert system operating in the global prospecting solution EasyBusiness: once the user creates a target list and activate the alerts on it, he/she starts receiving alerts about new positions, new leads and news about the executives working in those companies. These operational ‘beacons’ are key to monitor the situation in the companies and to get hooks in order to engage those prospects, follow them up, influence the decision-making process and get to close the deals
The study also reveals that when the CMOs work closely with the IT managers, the business goes far more successful. Marketing directors’ priorities now fully correspond to the needs of the digital economy.
The power of Big Data analytics: by analyzing a huge amount of unstructured data, the program can detect many correlations that the wisest human analyst cannot even guess about. Any company has a huge amount of unstructured data – about employees, customers, partners, competitors that can be used with business benefits: improve the effect of promotions, achieve sales growth, reduce personnel flow, etc.
Application
Revolutionary technology increases the percentage of the best decision making by 69%, and operational processes become more efficient by 54%.
According to a recent survey from NewVantage Partners, 96% of companies are reporting of measurable business outcomes from investing in data initiatives and almost 92% of companies are reporting plans to spend the same or more on Big Data/AI initiatives.
Business is about making decisions and then about their consequences. Sometimes the consequences are profitable and sometimes difficult to cope with. In most cases, companies make decisions based on instincts and intuition. The use of Big Data and business intelligence has completely changed management competence. According to BARC, more than 40% of companies around the world take advantage of Big Data.
Big Data technology has changed the way marketing used to work for business and allowed to increase sales by fully meeting the needs of customers.
This is not a scheme that accelerates decision-making, but its integration with business processes, ensuring reliable forecasts and faster introduction of promising innovations, can lead to increased business efficiency.
Big analytical data can be used to analyze the database of potential partners, identify their consumer characteristics, and even factors that affect the decision to start cooperation. Their analysis and monitoring system using smart alerts and signals provides an opportunity for sellers to better understand their potential buyers and prepare the ground for successful cooperation.
Customer behavioral data are now available in real time. Thus, much of what was previously available through research and study can now be learned from Big Data sources. And all these information assets are generated constantly, irrespective of any research processes.
Analysis of the database will help you to activate on time smart alerts about changes occurring in the status of potential customers. Alerts have been improved by allowing a user to put a specific company in a list and activate alerts on it. One click on the company profile – and you are aware of what is happening in the business of your potential buyers. These signals will help you find common points of contact and use marketing tools to convert a prospect into a customer. All this became possible within the EasyBusiness solution, which offers not only online prospecting and the generation of targeted marketing lists, but also a smart alarm system brought by the Sales Accelerator and Big Data analysis.
The use of Big Data, business intelligence, and a ‘potential deal signal’ system allow companies not only to identify demand or initiate sales, but also to find out exactly what drives the purchase decision making and what circumstances favor improving customer relations. Which, of course, gives business a truly competitive advantage.
Summary
Technology development will help Big Data stay here for a long time. According to Statista forecasts, by the end of 2027 the Big Data market will grow by $103 billion.
Most people mistakenly believed that Big Data was intended only for large companies or transnational corporations. But this is far from true. Big Data can be used in any business, regardless of its size – small, medium or large. Today, Big Data has become a real digital prospecting tool, helping companies make point analysis of potential customers, while the usage of a system of business signals and smart alerts helps to monetize the results of this analysis.
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