How much time are you and your operations team using up trying to deal with data – especially web data? And importantly, how much of that time is spent on tasks being done mainly by hand?

If you’re like most companies, the answers are probably “A lot” and “Too much”.

Luckily, as the saying goes, the first step to a solution is acknowledging that there’s a problem. 

As an insider, you can likely see how those troubling tasks are turning into gigantic headaches as your company scales up. And you know that in the best case scenario, they’re significantly slowing your growth; in the worst case scenario, they’re capable of slowing your operations down so much that growth ends.

But let’s not get stuck on the problems.

You can absolutely turn those troubling data issues around, boosting growth thanks to data automation. And you can do it fast thanks to Captain Data.

Why are we so convinced that data automation is a critical part of solving your operations teams’ data problems? 

• First, because we hear firsthand about how Captain Data positively impacts our clients’ businesses. 
  

• Second, because we’ve observed some reasons that explain why effective data automation is a huge step forward in facilitating a growing company’s daily processes.

💡 What is data automation? read this article to discover how to increase sales productivity with data automation: What is Data Automation & How It’ll Help Hit Sales Targets

Discover the five ways data automation can solve your main data operations problems now.

1. Automate your data process to scale

Data automation is the process of sourcing, transforming, and storing data using automated tools rather than doing it manually. 

In the early days of a company, when you’re looking for the first 10 real clients, finding and tracking the data you need is usually done by hand - just like pretty much every other task.

But as a company grows, you’ll win over 100 clients, then 1000, then hopefully 10,000 and beyond. That’s exponential growth, and you can’t simply add on another 10,000 employees to keep doing things like you did at the beginning.

To achieve exponential growth, a company needs to automate as much as possible. Because data, and especially web data, is growing exponentially, your data processes are one of the first things that need to be handled properly.

💡If you want to learn more about 5 signs to look for when scaling data operations, you can deep dive into this topic: Are data operations becoming a problem at your company?

2. Set-up a lead generation machine

As the company grows, you’ll have more people needing data to carry out their daily tasks. That’s especially true for your sales teams, since every salesperson wants to spend their time actually selling, not hunting down leads.

If your sales team is tasked with researching and qualifying leads, they’re going to end up spending a lot of time copying and pasting. That’s not just a waste of hours every week, it’s a great recipe for growing frustration.

Data automation can mean having your sales team show up to work, open their computers, and immediately start working a list of qualified prospects. Captain Data has clients that, thanks to their automated data processes, can generate “unlimited” qualified leads for their teams. That’s what we call a machine.

3. Use quality and up-to-date enriched data, stored in the format you need

Subscribing to a blackbox solution that pushes data into your CRM is a fast way to access a lot of data. The problem is that you don’t have any idea of whether the data is particularly up-to-date (and it certainly won’t be up-to-the-minute, which is often what you need).

Coding scripts to pull data to your CRM via APIs is a solution that takes a lot of technical know-how and time. It also has to contend with the fact that web data is largely unstructured, stored in a unique schema for each individual site.

That’s why Captain Data has no-code, ready-made workflows designed to extract and enrich information from the most useful web data sources. These will get the data you need, when you need it, and send it to you in the format that lets you use it immediately. We also have (very) low-code tools that let you build your own bots for more specialized sites, guaranteeing that your teams are accessing the data they need every day. 

💡Discover the ins and outs of workflow automation and how each stage of your sales process can benefit from it: Workflow Automation: Examples & Templates for a Highly Efficient Sales Pipeline

4. Target the right buying intents

When you were struggling to find product-market fit, you were dreaming of the day when you’d have a well-defined, known Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Once you found it and started to grow, it’s easy to check that box and think “Ok, let’s go target those people.”

But even better than an ICP is an ICP sending out signals, whether weak or strong, that they’re ready to buy. With good data automation, you can hunt for those buying signals.

How? It will depend on your specific situation, but for example you could have your data machine looking for:

• Changes in leadership/management at a given set of companies
• Company recruiting/hiring information
• Fundraising or M&A activity
• Office openings (or, given the current context, closings)
• Use of SaaS tools that you know have a link to your own solution

The right data automation process will let you define all of the necessary sources and semantics associated with these signals. And a no-code/low-code tool like Captain Data lets you maintain complete control over your system, quickly adjusting it as your strategies change over time.

5. Focus on value-adding tasks

Setting up great automated data processes has a giant benefit for you and your teammates: you’re freeing up time. 

That’s time that you can spend better understanding your clients and finding new ways to convert them. It’s time that your marketing team can spend optimizing communications. It’s time that your salespeople can spend closing deals.

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So, if you’re feeling these needs… What are you waiting for? 🤗

Try our demo to discover how data automation can unlock exponential growth for your business.

To help you master the subject and discover how to leverage data-driven operations to stay ahead of the curve, we’ve written a full white paper on “The Rise of Operators”, which you can access by clicking here.

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