In the digital era, sales and marketing professionals have a wealth of tools, insights and intelligence from data that allows them to know, rather than feel that they’re following the right course.

Now, thanks to advances in equipment and asset service data, sales and marketing are poised to take the lead and use asset data to better target customers and create new revenue opportunities. This under-used and largely untapped resource is adding a significant edge to sales and marketing teams globally.

Connected asset and service data hold insights far beyond the service department, providing a better business lens for almost every other line of business. If understanding the customer is key for both sales and marketing, then surely, they should have access to the customer usage data of the equipment they’ve purchased.

Beyond IT and Field Service

Historically, asset and service data are often limited to the IT and field service department, but it holds useful insights far beyond the service department. This is highlighted in the recent Asset and Service Data Gravity Report from Vanson Bourne & ServiceMax, where eighty-four percent of the IT and field service decision-makers questioned agreed that successful utilization of asset data can positively impact all areas of the business.

Sales and marketing teams should be taking the lead here to obtain and exploit asset and service data, as it offers huge potential for better targeting customers and creating new revenue opportunities.

[See: How to Use Service Marketing to Grow Service Revenue]

Offering salespeople proper visibility into service and asset data means they can do their job more effectively and drive revenue for the organization. Seeing which customers don’t have attached service contracts, which customers are up for renewal, if assets are nearing end of life, if assets are highly utilized: all this information lets salespeople identify any potential upsell, cross sell, renewal and upgrade opportunities. And arming them with this data helps them make the sale.

However, to make this scenario possible, organizations require connected systems that enable relevant asset and service data to be visible to those in sales and marketing roles, not just to IT and service teams. Innovation in field service software such as ServiceMax’s Asset 360 solution is helping make this possible.

This is especially important for employees like salespeople who aren’t data experts by training. They need a single system to use that is trustworthy and up to date, rather than multiple applications that duplicate data, and contain different and often outdated versions of key customer and asset information. The one-stop-shop approach means they can rely on the data being presented to them and be confident in pursuing sales opportunities. And confidence is still a vital element of the salesperson, even in this digital era.

Impact of Connecting Sales and Marketing with Service

Offering a combined CRM and asset data system can lead to big returns for organizations. Take the example of an industrial manufacturing/building services supplier that was struggling with upsell opportunities. This was due to its reliance on siloed systems that made it costly and slow to pull service data. After implementing ServiceMax, Pitney Bowes achieved a ten percent increase in its contract renewal rate, with $7 million in new leads.

Meanwhile, a large food and beverage manufacturing organization made $18 million in revenue from contract management upsell opportunities after implementing ServiceMax.

These impressive returns are made possible simply by opening asset and service data to more teams in the business. When quoting and justifying the price of new service contracts, salespeople can use asset data to understand the true cost of service—this lets them demonstrate how much money a company has saved as a result of their service contract preventing unplanned downtime, making the sell that much easier.

Like sales, marketing teams can access customer usage data to target the right customers and greatly improve the impact of their campaigns.

In this data-driven era, organizations have a wealth of information available to them that can help boost revenue and improve performance. Taking steps now to make asset and service data visible to salespeople and marketing teams will reap rewards for those businesses, and ensure they never miss a sale.

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ABOUT Joe Kenny

Avatar photoJoe Kenny is the vice president of global customer transformation & customer success at ServiceMax. His career spans over 30 years of leadership positions in Operations, Sales, Product Development, Product Marketing, and Field Service. Beginning his field service experience with the U.S. Naval Security Group Command (NSGC) as a mainframe computer technician, Joe subsequently lived and worked in Asia, the U.S., and Europe. Joe has focused on customer relationship management, using clearly defined and mutually agreed to measurements of success, and driving to continually exceed customer expectations, allowing for exponential business growth and client retention.