Editor’s note

For many companies, understanding the commercial customer journey is a challenge where digital sales are involved. Often, parts of that journey might even be visionary, but each step is optimised separately and usually owned by different functional departments. To run digital sales, it’s essential to have shared goals and a common thread to follow. That thread is data.

The question is, how can we stitch together a set of winning digital commerce capabilities through consolidated data?

We’ve had discussions with more than a hundred companies in the Nordics, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, and it’s clear what the current number one topic is for every digital commerce leader and practitioner: how to better utilise data to grow sales revenue in digital and traditional channels. And more specifically, how to use data holistically over the entire customer journey rather than optimising individual channels and touchpoints.

This handbook aims to help business, sales, marketing, IT and ecommerce leaders formulate an overall understanding of various essential themes that can help turn data into concrete business impact.

Through interviews with thought leaders conducted by Columbia Road's general manager Eero Martela, along with our own insights, we cover aspects of commercial data strategies, transformational data projects, technical data capabilities, the utilisation of data for automating customer-facing activities and using data science and engineering to build more commercially lucrative algorithms.

I hope that these explorations of data in digital sales and marketing help you to better understand relationships and dependencies, formulate a mental map of opportunities and gain insight and inspiration for the key decisions you must make, both now and in the future.