Three Best Practices for Data-Driven Sales OrganizationsBased on his years of experience in sales and marketing, Carden recommends three best practices for running a data-driven sales organization: 1. Get all the data you can in one place. It's a drag for sales reps if they have to spend time searching for data online or in various databases. For salespeople to do their jobs well, they need to make things easy. 2. Prioritize the orders that are most likely to be made. Just as Netflix knows what movie to recommend next, a modern CRM system should be able to recommend to sales reps what to do next. Of course, sales reps can do this manually, but reliable predictions based on a large number of different information sources are best made algorithmically. The right system will be able to analyze massive amounts of information, including the target industry, the source (e.g., a web conference or a specific website), social behaviors, time spent on a specific product page, and a number of other pieces of information, to make a prediction about how a particular deal should be closed.3. Integrate into the sales rep's workflow. A number of large technology and retail companies have built and operated their own internal tools for "smart selling" purposes. They have designed systems to capture different sources of information about a prospect, give sales reps access to that data, and use it to predict the likelihood of closing a deal. However, how to put this information together is only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is how to operationalize that data in a way that can be integrated into every sales rep's workflow. If there's one thing sales reps don't like, it's spending time on things other than sales, Carden said. And predictive CRM could be a solution.