Until the early 2020s, customer meetings, trade shows, and events were the most important channels for B2B marketing and sales. However, the pandemic changed all that, and businesses now expect marketing and sales to exhibit the same level of targeting and value that’s found in consumer retail.
In what seems almost like an overnight transition, B2B companies were forced to digitize their marketing and sales processes. This dramatic shift was the catalyst for the overhaul of SSAB’s marketing data strategy and an accelerator of our digital transformation.
Marketing for a steel company is expected to have the same precision, timeliness and value we are accustomed to in consumer retail. In today’s information-saturated environment, irrelevant inappropriate marketing content is simply annoying. So, we wanted to find ways to better measure the efficiency and results of our marketing, as well as improve the collaboration between marketing and sales through shared data. Developing customer experience is of shared interest.
Luxid has been one of our important marketing technology and data partners as we’ve pushed ahead with our digital transformation.
Our move to a new data warehouse meant that all our essential data needed to be moved to one place and then harmonized. A unified view was then created for that data. This important shift in data approach revealed the changes that we would need to make in the organization to see improvements in our sales process and achieve better results.
Our digital transformation is a lot about renewing the operating methods of marketing and sales. It requires both the development of marketing technology and internal organizational efforts to break down data silos.
And we have a lot of silos – we have more than 50 social media channels alone. On top of that, we have different sales systems, such as CRM, and our website generates 7000 – 8000 customer contacts annually. Previously, each channel was managed within its own system. Sales data was available to everyone in sales through dashboards, but the data was owned and managed and available for further dashboard development only for BI team.
Significant sales growth from data amid the pandemic
Our technology-driven approach to marketing and our transformation in data utilization reflect a broader shift in B2B business that extends even into heavy basic industries. It demonstrates the untapped value that lies within data.
The first signs of this shift emerged amid the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, two experts from our Brazilian sales unit were tasked with focusing solely on processing customer contacts – or leads – that originated in digital channels. The duo examined, among other things, old contacts that had not been activated, targeted tailored marketing at them, and focused on generating new leads as well as advancing the sales process.
Over the following year, the sales of our Brazilian unit and the number of new customers grew by 25%. Of the orders received during the year, 75% came from new customers, and as much as 75% of these new customers originated from leads processed by the team.
Through our transformation in data utilization, we were able to quickly demonstrate how a well-functioning process and proactive lead contact can, at its best, yield incredibly impressive results.
In the next phase, artificial intelligence will be harnessed to aid in the analysis of customer data. Luxid, together with other partners, is currently supporting SSAB to develop a generative AI-based user interface that will enable sales and marketing experts to interact with customer data. They will be able to request information about a customer along with data-driven action recommendations. This will build our expertise and enhance our ability to understand the significance of data as an integral part of our work in a new way.
A CDP will enable real-time targeting at SSAB
We are also exploring the potential of having a customer data platform, with the investment being prepared by testing various use cases. A CDP would give us real-time targeting in marketing with the precision of an individual customer profile. It would enable us to integrate customer profiles with real-time behavioral data gathered from many different sources and repositories. Ultimately, we would benefit from real-time marketing targeting and automation.
Data can serve as a motivator for work, but its utilization must be given a chance. We know at SSAB that if we have a deeper understanding of data within the organization, we will be able to unlock the true value of that data.
Our data transformation is showing us that it’s essential to understand what you want to achieve from data and how technology makes that possible. It requires long-term commitment and collaboration across the organization. For us, the most effective model is to proceed step by step – from identifying use cases to piloting and then to broader implementation based on the results and the proved value.
Find out more about the work that Luxid is doing to unlock the power in data and to help customers with digital transformation.
