Takeaways:
- Your next growth strategy may already be sitting in your own sales records.
- Before you pay for new research, mine the data you already own.
- Start with two questions: who are your most profitable customers (and which lookalikes could join that tier), and which customers stopped buying?
- Pull at least five years of clean sales history (customer transaction data) so you can tell a pattern from a fluke.
- Totals can hide the story. Break your numbers down by product, region and type of customer.
If your company has been invoicing customers for a few years, you’re sitting on a lot of sales history: invoices, order histories, customer records. It’s easy to treat all of it as an accounting record. It’s also research you’ve already paid for.
Start With the Research You Already Own
My book, The B2B Marketing Revolution®: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes, is organized around twelve mindset shifts I call the 12 Battles™ Framework. Battle 3, “You Champion Market Research as a Do-or-Die Investment,” is where you stop treating research as an optional expense and start treating it as an investment in your company’s future. One part of that research uses data you already have: customer transaction analysis, a hard, honest look at your own sales records.
What Your Sales Records Are Telling You
Surveys and interviews tell you what customers say. Your sales records show what they actually did. In the book, I list ten things this analysis should uncover:
- Your most profitable products or services.
- The profile and buying patterns of your most profitable customers, plus lookalikes with the potential to join that tier.
- How buying trends for your products and services vary by region or type of customer.
- Any seasonality in your business, and how it varies by region and type of customer.
- The growth path of every product or service, by region and type of customer.
- How the size of your average sale has changed over time.
- Which groups of customers have delivered for you in the past, and which have misfired.
- Which types of customers are spending more or less with you than in previous years.
- Your largest group of dormant customers: the accounts that used to buy from you and stopped.
- What percent of your business comes from repeat buyers, and whether that number is climbing or sliding.
You don’t need new software to start. You need someone who treats your sales and accounting systems as a source of insight instead of a billing record, ideally a skilled analyst, who keeps asking: What’s actually changing here, and why didn’t we notice sooner?
Two on that list are worth starting with. Try answering both from memory. Who are your most profitable customers, what are their buying patterns, and which lookalikes have the potential to join that tier? Which accounts stopped ordering two or three years ago, and what did they used to buy? If you’d be guessing, your sales records can answer both.
Why Customers Who Stopped Buying Deserve a Second Look
A customer who bought from you for years already knows your product, already knows your team and already had a reason to choose you. Reopening that conversation starts from a very different place than a cold introduction to a stranger.
The numbers show what can be at stake. Among the middle-market B2B companies that responded to our 2024 RedRover U.S. Middle-Market B2B Marketing Performance Study, the average customer relationship lasted five years, with average annual spend of $59,704. That’s $298,520 in revenue over the life of the relationship, before any costs. Your own figures will be different, which is exactly why it’s worth running them. When one customer relationship can carry that much revenue, it pays to know which ones have gone quiet.
Do It Right or Don’t Bother
Before you trust any conclusion, the data underneath it has to be sound. Three habits separate an analysis that produces insight from one that just produces noise.
Clean the Data First
Duplicate records, missing fields, the same customer spelled three different ways by three different reps. None of it jumps out at first glance, but all of it skews every conclusion you build on top of it. Cleaning the data isn’t glamorous. Skip it, and every insight that follows rests on bad numbers.
Pull at Least Five Years
One year of sales data tells you what happened. Five years helps you tell a pattern from a fluke. Seasonal swings, buying cycles, a slow decline in a group of customers nobody flagged: those are hard to see clearly in twelve months of numbers.
Break It Down Before You Draw Conclusions
Totals can hide what matters. Break the same numbers down by product, region and type of customer, and you may see patterns the total conceals: a high-margin product struggling in one territory while it thrives in another, or a group of customers that looks flat overall but is really two groups moving in opposite directions.
What Breaking It Down Looks Like
Here’s a simple example. Say you distribute air conditioning components. Your busy season is the warm months, but warm months don’t arrive at the same time everywhere. In the Deep South, your season may begin in May. In the Northeast, it may not start until July. Look only at your national totals, and you might plan one campaign for one season. Break your sales down by region, and you’ll know when to show up in each market, and when you’d just be spending money too early.
The same thinking applies well beyond air conditioning. Your sales history can show you which customers to call first, which products deserve more of your budget and which regions need a different plan. As I put it in the book, some of your biggest opportunities for growth will likely come from this data.
Champion the Data You Already Own
You don’t need a new research budget to start. You just need an analyst willing to pull five years of clean sales history, break it down properly and sit with what it says instead of filing it away once the quarter is done. If you’ve been invoicing for years, the data is likely already in your customer database and accounting system. What it takes is the habit of looking.
Champion market research as a do-or-die investment, starting with the research you’ve already paid for and may never have opened. Your sales records aren’t just a record of what happened. They’re a map of where your next round of growth is hiding.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing Revolution®: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
The above insights are part of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing Revolution®: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 Battles™ Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing Revolution® is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts, and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started.
