Your sales representatives’ success largely depends on the customer information they have access to. So what happens when that information is scattered across different teams and platforms, creating data silos that not all of them can access?

Data silos can hinder your sales team’s efficiency, and keep agents from doing their best work in converting leads into customers. 

Overcoming these barriers to data accessibility is very important to make sure your sales team is as productive as it can be, and addressing them involves a combination of technological solutions and cultural changes in how different departments collaborate. 

Keep on reading to learn more about data silos and how they come to be, and about the best ways to overcome them. 

What are Data Silos and How Do They Happen?

In a business and sales environment, a data silo is a set of information that only certain groups or teams can access. It happens when information is stored in different places because each department uses a specific software, platform, or tool to handle its data.

However, using different software solutions across departments is just one of the reasons data remains isolated and data silos end up appearing. There are other common reasons for them, which you need to understand before you can address the problem. 

• Lack of integration: Even if different teams use similar tools, the lack of integration between these tools can create silos. When systems don't communicate properly, data may not flow across the organization in an effective way.
• Data ownership & security concerns: In an effort to maintain data security, businesses may implement strict data access controls. This can unintentionally lead to data silos if access permissions are too restrictive, preventing certain teams from accessing the information they need. 
• Manual data entry: Relying on manual data entry leaves room for human error and delays, and it can create data silos as information is not input correctly or timely across systems.
• Outdated software: If you’re using an outdated tool, it may be that it’s not easily adaptable or compatible with newer technologies, which can hinder data sharing. 
• Communication barriers: A lack of interdepartmental communication can contribute to data silos if there’s a tendency for teams to not share information with each other. 

How Data Silos Impact Sales

Data silos can impact your business, and your sales team especially, in various ways: 

• Inaccurate data: When information is not synchronized across systems, it's more likely to become outdated or contain errors. Inaccurate data can lead to misguided business decisions, sales strategies, and, ultimately, a lack of trust in the information provided. If you keep working on these data silos, the quality of your data will only keep going down, because they make it difficult to assemble the fragmented pieces of information from all their different sources. 
• Incomplete customer profiles: When customer information is scattered across various systems and departments, sales agents may struggle to get a comprehensive view of each customer. This can result in missed upsell or cross-sell opportunities and a poor customer experience.
• Reduced collaboration: For the same reason, different teams might not have access to the same information. This can lead to miscommunication, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities for effective cross-departmental collaboration. 
• Delayed response times: Finding information across multiple data silos takes time. This can result in slow response times to potential customers, which in turn can negatively impact your sales team’s conversion rates. 
• Inefficient workflows: When they have to work with data silos, sales representatives often spend a significant amount of time manually inputting and updating customer data in various systems, which can be a drain on their productivity.
• Inaccurate forecasting: Without access to an up-to-date dataset, sales teams may struggle with forecasting. Data silos can lead to incomplete or outdated information, making it difficult to predict sales trends and identify opportunities.
• Missed cross-selling/upselling opportunities: Without a clear overview and understanding of customer behavior and preferences, data silos may prevent sales representatives from identifying cross-selling or upselling opportunities.

Even though they might not seem like a big deal at first, data silos can have a significant impact on the efficiency of your sales team. 

But don’t worry, not everything is bad news. There are several ways in which you can break down data silos and improve your team’s productivity. 

Solutions for Overcoming Data Silos

Now that we've discussed the causes and effects of data silos, let's explore solutions to overcome them and enhance sales agents' efficiency and conversion rates.

Integrated CRM Systems

Implementing an integrated CRM system serves as a powerful solution to combat data silos within an organization. 

A centralized CRM acts as a single source of truth for customer-related information, consolidating data from various departments, like marketing and customer support. This gives sales teams access to a comprehensive and real-time view of customer interactions, purchase history, and preferences. Additionally, such a CRM promotes communication and collaboration between teams, which further contributes to good customer relationship management.

Ideally, you’d want to use the same CRM across teams, but if that’s not possible, you can invest in software that integrates disparate systems. 

Guidelines for Data Ownership

We previously mentioned data ownership as a factor that can lead to data silos in the first place. So how can it also be a solution for overcoming them?

The key lies in establishing clear guidelines on how data is managed, accessed and shared across your business’s different teams. Defining data ownership ensures accountability for specific datasets, and helps empower individuals or teams to take responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of the information under their wing. 

By implementing these guidelines, businesses create a framework for standardizing data definitions, formats, and quality standards, which ensures data consistency and facilitates data sharing between teams. All this, as you may have guessed, contributes to overcoming data silos, or even preventing them from forming in the first place. 

Conversational AI

Conversational AI can be quite the game-changer in fighting data silos and improving sales teams’ efficiency. The main advantage is that it allows you to automate routine tasks, which not only can lead to human error, but also waste a lot of your sales representatives’ time.

AI-based chatbots can automate any routine tasks that involve data entry and processing. For instance, they can process data from various sources and customer touchpoints like chats, emails, and social media, all in real-time, and make this data instantly available to sales agents by integrating with the CRM they use, whether that’s Salesforce, Pipedrive, or something else. 

At the same time, thanks to their integration capabilities, they can also automatically update customer profiles as they collect new data. This ensures that sales representatives have access to the latest, up-to-date information.

But conversational AI doesn’t just have the ability to collect and automatically store data in your CRM. It can also analyze and interpret the interactions it has with customers, providing sales teams with a more comprehensive view of each individual customer’s journey. This way, sales representatives can tailor how they approach new prospects and address their needs, leading to a better customer experience. 

WhatsApp Automation

WhatsApp has been a key player in how sales representatives interact with prospective customers. 

It’s a very effective channel because it’s accessible — it has over 2 billion users worldwide — and familiar to people, it allows for real-time communication, and it has multimedia capabilities that come in handy to share product images, videos, or brochures with leads. 

If you take it one step further with the WhatsApp Business API, then it becomes an even more powerful tool that can also help in reducing data silos. 

By integrating the WhatsApp Business API into your sales strategy, you’ll be able to add a layer of automation to communications on that channel. This way, similar to conversational AI solutions, you can integrate WhatsApp with your CRM to ensure it is updated in real-time with interactions that happen on the messaging app as well. 

Not only that, but the Business API allows businesses to associate multiple WhatsApp numbers to their official account and manage all those numbers, as well as the conversations associated with them, under one roof. This is an invaluable tool because it gives sales agents the ability to access conversations anyone has had with prospects and gain access to much more customer data, than if they used their own personal WhatsApp for communications. 

By using the WhatsApp Business API, sales teams can have all communications with prospects stored in one place, which provides a clearer overview of the interactions between them and your sales representatives. This, in turn, helps overcome data silos as well as helps teams make more informed decisions about the sales process. 

Conclusion

As we have seen, data silos can significantly impact sales agents’ efficiency and productivity. Even though they can cause a bit of a headache at the beginning, there are ways to overcome them and make sure your sales team is at its best productive self. 

It’s important to make changes in how different departments collaborate and communicate, especially those that are customer-facing, like marketing, customer service, and, of course, sales. But while that might take a bit longer to put into practice, technological solutions like conversational AI and WhatsApp automation can help speed up a significant part of the process, boost productivity, and help grow your business.