Sales intelligence has been around for a while, but it is just recently gaining more traction in the world of sales.
So, if you aren’t already on the bandwagon, now is the time to familiarize yourself with sales intelligence, which will help in your overall digital transformation.
Below, you will learn all about sales intelligence, how it can help achieve your goals, and a few of the top sales intelligence tools that you will want in your arsenal.
What is Sales Intelligence?
Sales intelligence is a term used to define the collection and analysis process of customer data that has the potential to improve lead generation, increase conversions, close additional deals, and provide you with a much bigger and clear picture of the sales process.
Ultimately, the primary goal of sales intelligence is to ensure you have a better understanding of your current and potential customers.
Any data that you obtain will be entirely unique to your business.
Sales intelligence data dives much deeper than typical customer data, as you can gain customer insights regarding demand data, length of buyer journeys, source of acquisition, and enhanced customer persona profiles.
Why is Sales Intelligence Important?
Sales intelligence has the power to provide you with new ways to obtain new sales. Here are a few reasons why sales intelligence is so important for your business.
Discover Your Market Potential
You have access to so many different prospects right there within your target market.
Many companies only barrow nudge the tip of the iceberg during their conversations with their target audience.
The great news about sales intelligence is that it offers a very detailed, comprehensive overview of your market, ensuring that you don’t miss any potential opportunities now or in the foreseeable future.
Identify Your Target Audience
Wouldn’t it be nice to get rid of most (or maybe all) of that significant research you have to do to find out what your target audience is looking for?
It’s possible with sales intelligence. Static data and dynamic data are combined to make it easy for you to identify your ideal customer.
Monitor Your Competitors
Sales intelligence tools can help you in the identification of your competitors. It can also help you keep track of what they’re doing.
Sure, you probably know who some of your competitors are, but can you honestly say that you are 100% confident in knowing who ALL of them are?
Sales intelligence will help you locate each competitor and monitor their performance in the market.
Find Out Decision-Makers
When reaching out to other companies, it is imperative that you know who you need to speak to from the get-go. It makes the process easier on you, and it makes you look more professional.
Sales intelligence tools help you identify who the best point of contact is at a company.
You can search and even filter by position titles or hierarchical levels, allowing you to know who to contact directly.
This saves you time by not having to go through people who don’t have the authority to make decisions or simply aren’t interested in what you have to offer.
How to Increase Revenue with Sales Intelligence
Are you ready to learn how sales intelligence can increase your revenue?
Choose a Sales Intelligence Provider
When it comes to selecting your sales intelligence tool, you want to first identify your goals.
What are you hoping to achieve? Since these tools all work differently with different focuses, it is important to know what features you need for maximum results.
Some of the common features offered by sales intelligence providers include lead qualification, lead generation, data enrichment, and trigger data.
Build Your Ideal Customer Profile
When it comes to lead generation, qualification, and nurturing, one of the most important and earliest steps is the development of your ideal customer profile (ICP).
With this information, you are setting yourself up for success. However, due to the fact that the market is so fast-paced, the traditional ideal customer profile won’t cut it.
This is where sales intelligence comes into play.
Sales intelligence data has the potential to improve the overall accuracy of your ICP by learning more about your customers.
Some of the insights you can obtain include intent drivers, content consumed, purchase triggers, area of operations, company size, and more.
Basically, this data makes it easier for your sales team to both identify and focus on quality leads far more efficiently and begin targeting them with the most appropriate messaging that is tailored to them individually.
Enhance Sales Prospecting
One of the primary tactics with sales intelligence is getting directly into the mind of your buyers and understanding what drives their purchase decisions.
By determining their intent and being confident with your data, you can then make use of the most effective methods to approach them.
When intent data is incorporated into the sales intelligence software, you can begin to receive alerts with certain buying signals when there is a possibility of a prospect converting into a customer.
These are hot leads that your sales team can focus on exclusively and offer gentle nudges to get these prospects to convert.
For instance, let’s say that a potential customer has recently held a fundraiser and is hiring specialists within your industry.
What does this mean for you? It means that they are in need of and have the funds available to spend on the product or service you have to offer.
These insights can be used as a trigger, allowing your sales team to reach out to the most appropriate person at the company for a brief conversation.
The data you obtain from sales intelligence can help you personalize your sales messaging, communicate better with your leads, and foster long-lasting relationships with customers to increase your chance of customer retention.
Identify Cross-Selling and Up-Selling Opportunities
You can increase your overall sales by about 20% with cross-sells, which then increases your profits by 30%. You can expect roughly the same for up-sells.
Making use of both of these opportunities with your current clients can help in the build of a loyal customer base, which helps to sustain your bottom line.
Data from sales intelligence software allows you to focus on your existing customers while also helping you maintain lead generation.
Customers give off powerful buying signals, and more than likely, they already exist in your platform — you just need to use them to your advantage to ensure the user experience is improved upon each and every time.
Acquire Key Competitor Insights
While one of your business goals may be to sell a large amount or reach certain revenue goals, the fact remains that success relies on a number of factors outside of how much you sell and how much revenue you bring in.
You must keep an eye on your competition so you can remain ahead of time.
You can gain access to important information through your competitive intelligence software. One key price of intel you can obtain includes the expiration date of contracts with your competitors.
This type of information is big, as you can develop a solid strategy to lure them away from your competitor and to your brand.
You can do this by showing them the benefits of your unique selling proposition, solving their problems in a more efficient way, or simply by offering a better deal.
With the right tools, you can identify new competition in real-time, monitor their campaigns and actions, and analyze historical data of your competition so you can compare it with industry trends and market research.
4 Sales Intelligence Tools to Help You Close More Deals
Like most things, all sales intelligence tools are not created equal. They all come with different focuses.
Here is a look at a few sales intelligence tools that can help you improve your lead generation and close more deals.
#1: Clari
A revenue operations platform, Clari offers extensive information to increase your success with sales forecasting.
Input data from your CRM, emails, and call records, and Clary will inform you what you need to know about forthcoming deals.
#2: Autoklose
With this tool, you will gain access to a very large B2B company database.
At the same time, it will allow you to take care of reports, mailings, time management, customer data management, and more.
It even equips you with easy-to-use templates, which is great when you’re first getting started. In the end, this sales intelligence tool will help you save time and close more deals at a faster pace.
#3: Apollo
As a data-first sales intelligence platform, Apollo tends to cater more to prospecting and lead generation.
Because of this, it offers a wealth of information regarding companies and their decision-makers, including email addresses, contact numbers, and more.
Further, it makes it easier for data enrichment through the use of automatic alerts when changes are made to customer data.
Because it offers decision-maker information, this tool can help you create an incredible list while also ensuring that your database stays up to date.
It will even allow you to see when your emails are opened, which is a fantastic feature when prospecting.
#4: ZoomInfo
Using systematic surveys and research, ZoomInfo is a sales intelligence tool that ensures you have the most up-to-date names, numbers, and addresses, regardless of whether this is for existing clientele or new leads.
With this type of information at your disposal, your team will be able to easily locate who they need to contact, reducing the amount of time and effort wasted on the wrong or former employees.
This tool allows you to filter so you can segment contact info and create special messaging and ICPs that target them directly. It also offers real-time visibility into new hires, funding rounds, and other events.
BONUS: Using Ion to Understand the Buyer’s Journey
The buyer’s journey is always a key component of sales intelligence and your overall digital marketing campaign.
Ion provides you with the opportunity to enhance the user experience through the use of interactive content.
Ion’s Sell-Side feature gives you access to data and customer insights that can aid in your overall selling strategy.
You will learn exactly what your web visitors are interacting with and other user behaviors, allowing you to create a more efficient follow-up process.
Wrap Up
If you haven’t already been able to decipher from this information, sales intelligence is ultimately the future of your sales.
It is no longer an optional tool; sales intelligence is necessary if you want to maximize your data, leads, and sales.
Just remember that you need to be able to communicate complex data successfully and visually to your clients. Check out our guide to learn more!
