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How to Improve Sales Agents’ Efficiency by Overcoming Data Silos

Illustrator: Adan Augusto
data silos sales efficiency

Please note that 'Variables' are now called 'Fields' in Landbot's platform.

Please note that 'Variables' are now called 'Fields' in Landbot's platform.

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  • Outdated software: If you’re using an outdated tool, it may be that it’s not easily adaptable or compatible with newer technologies, which can hinder data sharing.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. 

Frequently Asked Questions about Landbot Pricing

What’s a Landbot chatbot template?

There are three ways to go about building a conversational app with Landbot:

1 - Do it all from scratch but still without coding

2 - Use only a few pre-made elements (bricks)

3 - Pick and customize a pre-designed template


There’s no need to reinvent a flow if our conversational experience designers already built a chatbot template for your use case. Before committing to a free sign up or a specific template, you can always use the preview function to try out the end-user experience. When you do load your chosen template, you’ll see the conversational flow all set up for you with guiding notes when needed.

All you have to do is customize the content inside the flow that’s already there. Edit the text, images, gifs, and links in the blocks so they fit your brand and product!

What’s the difference between a chat, a WhatsApp chat, and an AI chat?
  • A chat in Landbot represents a structured conversation between your bot and an end user, following a rule-based flow for web chatbots. It guides the user through specific tasks using buttons, keyword triggers, and decision trees with predetermined responses.

  • A WhatsApp chat in Landbot is a conversation between your bot and an end user on WhatsApp, following Meta’s messaging rules. When an end user messages your bot, a 24-hour window opens, allowing free responses, and the interaction counts as a WhatsApp chat in your Landbot plan. After 24 hours of inactivity, only pre-approved Message Templates can be sent, which you can manage directly in the Landbot platform.

  • AI chats incorporate AI functionalities, leveraging Landbot’s AI feature blocks or AI Assistants for lead generation, FAQs, or appointment booking. This enables the bot to understand intent and provide personalized, real-time responses instead of relying solely on predefined flows. AI chats are tracked and billed separately from regular chats and WhatsApp chats.

What is considered a “seat” in a Landbot plan?

A seat refers to a user license that grants an individual access to the Landbot platform under a specific account. Each seat allows one team member to log in, build, manage, and collaborate on chatbots. The number of seats included depends on your subscription plan, and additional seats can be purchased on all paid plans.

What subscription plans does Landbot offer?
  • Starter: Ideal for individuals and small businesses looking to create website chatbots effortlessly.

  • WhatsApp Starter: Perfect for small teams and businesses automating conversations across websites, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

  • Pro: Great for growing teams that need advanced features, automation, and integrations for website chatbots.

  • WhatsApp Pro: Best for businesses looking to scale customer interactions on WhatsApp with automation and rich messaging capabilities.

  • Business: Tailored for enterprises that require a fully customized chatbot solution with premium support and integrations for all channels.

How does the 14-day free trial work?

New sign-ups to the Landbot platform receive a 14-day free trial with access to all Landbot features and channels. After this period, the account is automatically downgraded to the Sandbox (Free) plan, which has certain limitations. You can upgrade to a paid plan should you wish to continue using Landbot’s premium features.

How is my subscription charged?

Your credit card is automatically charged at the start of each billing period. For monthly plans, the charge is processed on the first day of each new monthly cycle, while for annual plans, it occurs on the first day of the new yearly cycle.

Can I change my subscription plan later?

Yes, you can upgrade or downgrade your subscription plan anytime within the Landbot platform. Changes will be applied according to Landbot's billing policies.

How many chats are included in the Business Plan?

Our Business Plan is fully customizable to suit your needs, including the number of chats, seats, and WhatsApp Business Account numbers. Please reach out to our Sales team for a personalized quote tailored to your requirements.

What happens when I reach my plan's chats limit?

If you go over your paid plan’s chat limit, extra chats will be charged based on the chat type. Regular chats cost €0.05 per extra chat, while WhatsApp chats also cost €0.05 per chat plus Meta’s additional fee. AI chats are €0.10 per extra chat. Business plans have custom pricing for extra chats.

Are there any plans that only include WhatsApp?

No, all of our plans that include WhatsApp (WhatsApp Starter, WhatsApp Pro, and Business) also grant access to other channels, such as web, API, and Facebook Messenger. These additional channels are included in all WhatsApp plans.

Can I add more than one WhatsApp number to my account?

Yes, you can link multiple WhatsApp Business Account numbers to your Landbot account, but the number of WhatsApp Business Account numbers allowed depends on your plan.

What payment methods does Landbot accept?

We accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. Bank transfers are only available for Business plans.

What currency will I be billed in?

Subscriptions are billed in Euros (€) for most customers. However, customers in the following countries will be billed in US Dollars ($): Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Suriname, Uruguay, the USA, and Venezuela.

Does Landbot use the official WhatsApp Business API? How does the application process work?

Yes! Landbot uses WhatsApp’s official API to integrate the most popular instant messaging app. The API offered by Facebook(Meta) is under constant improvement, the reliability is fantastic and generates a frictionless experience for your users and for your team. To review which type of enterprises, businesses and brands WhatsApp accepts at the moment, please read our WhatsApp API application guide.

Landbot’s onboarding team helps you in the application process. Once you sign up for Landbot’s WhatsApp solution, our team will ask you to submit the required information and initiate the application process on your behalf. The entire process usually lasts around 1-2 weeks, regardless of which provider you work with. We take utmost care to ensure each business we collaborate with has their application approved, managing the application process at every step of the way. However, ultimately, the final approval decision rests with WhatsApp.

Can I start building my bot before my WhatsApp API access is approved?

Landbot’s special WhatsApp Test environment feature allows you to build and test your WhatsApp bot before your API application gets approved.

This is possible because the testing channel is a closed one, and only allows communication between the Landbot interface and the phone number you associated with the test account. So you can already test your WhatsApp bot with your own phone, and have it ready to be published live to your users when the access is approved by WhatsApp.

Do you offer support resources on WhatsApp bot creation?

Yes, you have access to a large collection of support resources including WhatsApp guides, documentation and academy videos to help you get the most out of the WhatsApp chatbot builder and campaign manager. Listed below are some of the resources:

- How to Create a WhatsApp Bot: Step By Step Guide
- How to Create & Test your WhatsApp Chatbot: Video Guide
- Landbot Academy: WhatsApp

What is the WhatsApp opt-in and how does it work?

WhatsApp opt-in is the active consent users have to give you before you can contact them via WhatsApp. Opt-ins need to be done via a third-party channel. You can learn more about WhatsApp opt-ins and how they work here.