Retailer Best Buy is in the midst of a financial turnaround effort, and big data will play a pivotal role in that effort. The company’s CEO Hubert Joly has noted that a new data project called Athena will take center stage in overhauling its marketing program to develop more targeted and personalized communications for consumers.
Best Buy will target customers through analyzing past purchasing behavior, browsing history and demographics, according to Joly.
“[We will] implement programs for key buying occasions like gifting, life events and registry, and new movers, in addition to creating greater engagement with customers for our loyalty program and our credit card offering,” Joly notes in an article in AdAge.
Best Buy is among a growing number of companies maneuvering to harness the growing volume of data about its customers and prospects to try to boost its bottom line.
But where do companies start to identify the sales and marketing metrics that matter most in data analysis efforts? Aberdeen Group has surveyed 124 marketers and salespeople to pinpoint which metrics are the most valuable to measure marketing effectiveness.
While multiple metrics all have some value to the majority of the respondents, the “sentiment of value” varies by metric, and there are some clear distinctions between which metrics marketers – as opposed to sales leaders – value, according to the report.
Both sales and marketing highly value net new revenue growth as well as the length of the sales cycle. Furthermore, both groups agree that metrics for sales quota attainment, percent of leads closed, top-line revenue growth and revenue growth from customers are highly valuable to determining the effectiveness of marketing.
However, “marketing values sales cycle length slightly more than sales, which may be due to marketing’s focus on leveraging funnel metrics to model their impact on revenue,” according to the report. “There is no doubt from other studies that sales length is an important metric to sales, however the perception by sales that this metric is less important for measuring marketing success indicates that sales doesn’t see marketing’s influence on sales cycle length the same way that marketing does.”
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