The key to the firm’s remarkable turnaround was its new ability to combine, sift, and sort vast troves of data to develop a highly efficient sales strategy. While B2C companies have become adept at mining the petabytes of transactional and other purchasing data that consumers generate as they interact online, B2B sales organizations have only recently begun to use big data to both inform overall strategy and tailor sales pitches for specific customers in real time. Yet the payoff can be huge: As a sales executive at the chemicals company told us, “There’s no need to rely on intuition and guesswork anymore.”
To understand how sales organizations are beginning to use big data, we interviewed 120 sales executives at a range of companies around the world that have significantly outperformed their peers in revenue and profitability. These in-depth conversations suggest that micromarket strategy is perhaps the most potent new