Due to market and technology pressures, every business is becoming digital and moving towards the goal of being a data-driven organization. Because of this, investments in data and analytics technology are high. Having more access to technology is a plus, but technology by itself does not produce value.
It needs to be paired with people who understand it, but there is currently a gap between the large volume of data that is being produced, and the skills people have to comprehend it and make decisions based on it. This gap presents the risk that the abundance of data could help sales teams drive more business and better serve customers, but they do not understand it.
Through data literacy and cultivating a data culture, this risk can be avoided. If you don’t know what data literacy is, Gartner defines it as “the ability to read, write and communicate data in context, including an understanding of data sources and constructs, analytical methods and techniques applied, and the ability to describe the use-case application and resulting value.”
Because of different personalities and skill levels that are found in organizations, improving data literacy isn’t always easy. To help you along with your journey, we recommend you align with your data and analytics leaders on their strategy, and work together to accelerate data literacy in the sales organization
Improving data literacy alone is not going automatically create a data culture. It’s the responsibility of sales leadership to communicate and nurture the importance of data and the skills to use it. It’s also their duty to make sure all users are empowered to improve their skills.
Data trends like Machine Learning, Self-Service, Data Wrangling and Augmented Intelligence are making a data mindset and proficiency even more important. The adoption of these trends is increasing, and they weave analytics right into the operational fabric of sales, leaving reps with no other option but to work with data.
These trends are leading to a new mentality where data and analytics is the enabler to the overall business strategy, which makes it necessary for the skills of employees to be taken care in order to increase data literacy and cultivate a data culture.
Start making data-driven sales decisions now and sign-up for the free trial of Eagle Pharma CRM®.