There are a few constants in any sales-oriented business. Chief among them: data is key. Data can be the single source of truth across your company. When you have the right data, you can improve performance, make better decisions, and create new opportunities for increased growth.
When the right data is in front of you, you can use the information to fill the white space. White space in sales can allow you to find new opportunities to cross-sell or sell additional products and services to a customer. In addition, a solid white space analysis can also allow account growth and enable you to do more business.
This begs an important question: Just what is white space in sales? And what specific data points do you need to achieve the necessary pipeline acceleration and financial clarity that solid data can bring?
What Is White Space in Sales?
White space is a domain where opportunities exist to expand your business. It represents untapped sales opportunities where you may sell additional products and services to an already existing customer. In essence, white space enables you to increase your revenue without investing in expensive marketing efforts, since you’ve already acquired the customer in question. All you have to do is s align their needs with your products.
So, what data points do you need, and how can a tool like Salesforce with Next Quarter help you gather and analyze this data?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs refer to critical data pieces that enable you to compare similarly situated customers, such as business types, the volume of sales, location, and more. If you have access to KPIs across your entire business, you may identify impactful sales opportunities that allow for cross-sales based on certain indicators.
Sometimes, members of your sales team can mine the data and identify these opportunities. Other times, AI-informed insights can find spaces where customer connections exist.
Once you have this information, you can create an account plan that enables you to propose and pitch to a customer.
Cohorts
Data can save you—but it can also overwhelm you. You must use existing technology to create customized ways to aggregate your data into useful cohorts. Cohorts is a simple way to visualize an ‘apples-to-apples’ representation of your accounts. Access to this information enables you to perform more insightful data analysis and then create more useful comparisons.
Building these appropriate data cohorts requires a few pieces of information. First, you need data that is accurate and readily available to allow for easy comparisons. You’ll also need insight into where comparisons can be made across the entire business line. This information requires access and data that isn’t siloed. AI-informed data analysis may be able to help you find this information.
It is critical to remember that developing these data cohorts together requires the appropriate data tool that treats data as a single source of truth.
Cross-Sell and Up-Sell
The right data can show you what you have sold to the customer. From there, you can identify specific white space opportunities, including:
- Cross-selling: If you have a large enough customer, they may have other business departments that engage in their own purchasing. Can you sell products or services to these departments? Can you create a proposal or account plan that gives them a discount while increasing your business line?
- Up-selling: If customers are happy with what you sell them, they may be even happier with additional products or services. The opportunity may exist to sell them more or increase the product’s value.
Data can indicate when these opportunities exist and the best way to make such a pitch.
Customer Intent
Knowing a customer’s intent is key. What are they looking to accomplish? What are their pain points? Where do they have gaps that you can fill? What competitors are they researching?
With the right data tools—including a contact manager, a robust pool of data, and data-collection algorithms—you may be able to manually or automatically find information that can point out a customer’s intent. This information can help you craft better and more specific proposals.
Ideas and Demand
Building a customer pipeline isn’t always about making an active sale. You can use data tools to create ideas and demand to build a soft pipeline of what you can sell to a customer. This information can be fed into an appropriately configured account plan, enabling you to create a soft pipeline ready to go at a moment’s notice. This data helps you create sales ideas and find ways to figure out demand without clogging your pipeline and resulting in lost opportunities for your sales team.
Partner With Next Quarter
As you can see, white space growth is not easy to achieve. It requires conscious effort, appropriate training, and the right data collection and analysis tools.
Fortunately, Next Quarter is here to help. Next Quarter is the first AI-based account planning tool and one that is used by many businesses on the Fortune 500 list. In addition, Next Quarter operates within Salesforce to get you the data collection you need, helping you achieve true business growth.
Ready to move forward with expanding white space opportunities? Contact us today to schedule a call and learn how we can help your business.
