Increase Your Revenue with Sales Intelligence

 

Sales intelligence is a powerful element in your overall marketing campaign. It offers you the data needed to win your audience over, especially when it comes to the B2B market.

For most of modern history, the art of selling has been primarily reactive.

While salespeople can be proactive about reaching out to customers, they must learn more about the person before they can customize a new sales offer.

However, just because that’s how sales have always been done doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.

Sales intelligence is a relatively new field that allows businesses of all sizes to capture customer information and utilize that data for a better sales experience.

Best of all, when done correctly, leads don’t even know they’re providing valuable insight, meaning they’re often more receptive to your customized sales pitch.

What is sales intelligence exactly, and how can you incorporate it into your business? Let’s find out.

What Is Sales Intelligence?

Sales intelligence is a term used to define the collection and analysis process of customer data.

It 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.

The primary goal of sales intelligence is to ensure you have a better understanding of your current and potential customers.

The more data you can collect about an individual, the easier it is to pitch products or services to them because you can understand their needs and the challenges they face.

Overall, when your sales team can open interactions with detailed reports about a prospect, they’re far more likely to engage with the person and nurture them until they close a final deal.

Sales intelligence is vital for B2B and B2C businesses, but it really shines for B2B brands that need to interact with multiple people before they can craft a proposal.

Why Is Sales Intelligence Important?

First and foremost, sales intelligence is important because it positions your sales team ahead of the competition.

Since your reps know more about prospective customers, they can address specific issues and curate unique proposals before interacting with them.

There are a few compelling reasons to invest more in sales intelligence.

Discover your market potential

With the right sales intelligence tools, you can interact with a broader selection of people from different demographics.

Then, as you gather details from each group, you can determine whether there are opportunities within more niches.

For example, you may be focused on catering to single mothers, but your products or services may also appeal to parents with three or more children.

By gathering as much data as possible from more people, it’s easier to develop customized content and sales materials to reach each group.

From there, expansion is virtually guaranteed as you find exciting ways to appeal to these new groups.

Best of all, sales intelligence allows you to go from one group to the next. So, while gathering information about one demographic, you may discover overlapping interests from a different set of customers, and so on.

Identify your target audience

Part of modern digital marketing is creating customer personas or avatars.

However, there may be a disconnect between what you expect from this persona and what you get from them in real life.

With sales intelligence tools, you can bridge the gap and eliminate any disconnect.

This process allows your sales reps to understand more about an individual’s (or group’s) motivations, obstacles, and goals.

From there, you can create customized promotions that appeal to your actual customers, not who you think you’re appealing to with your marketing.

Sync marketing and sales departments

For some reason, the marketing and sales departments are rarely on the same page about anything.

Typically, marketers will promise the moon, and it’s up to sales reps to temper customers’ expectations accordingly.

When there’s no communication between these departments, that can lead to chaos for both clients and workers behind the scenes.

Fortunately, sales intelligence offers a quick and easy way to synchronize these departments. Marketers can use a sales intelligence tool like Ion to create promotional content, such as quizzes or surveys.

Sales reps can collect the information gathered from the marketing team and make more strategic decisions about what to promote to different customers.

Since all the data is collected and stored within the same system, and since that system is synced with a CRM program, there should be no disconnect between departments.

Imagine your marketing and sales teams working collectively to improve your brand’s bottom line!

Reduce nurturing time to close deals faster (new)

Another primary advantage of sales intelligence is that reps can get the ball rolling from the first interaction.

Now, instead of using the first touchpoint to segment each lead, individuals can simply interact with the program and segment themselves based on their responses.

So, sales reps should already know what to discuss and how to position products or services to alleviate any problems the lead may be having.

In best-case scenarios, a rep may be able to close a lead from a single touchpoint rather than the usual eight.

 

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 Autoklose, 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.

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 identify and focus on quality leads far more efficiently and begin targeting them with the most appropriate messaging.

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 you incorporate intent data 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 serve 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 building 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 improve the user experience each 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 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.

Using Ion to Understand the Buyer’s Journey

The best way to ensure your leads provide as many details as possible is to create interactive content. Examples of interactive content can include quizzes, surveys, and even games.

Best of all, programs like Ion make it easy for your brand to develop sales intelligence tools to qualify leads faster and close more deals in the same amount of time.

Here are a few ways Ion helps you understand the buyer’s journey.

Centralized data

Even if a customer interacts with multiple touchpoints (i.e., a quiz, a survey, and a short promotional game), all the data collected is stored on a single dashboard.

Journey visualization

Seeing raw data can feel a bit abstract, but Ion will helpfully map the customer’s journey from start to finish, including the stops they made along the way. Seeing this roadmap lets you pinpoint high-conversion interactions to streamline the entire sales process.

Seamless transitioning

By merging marketing and sales departments, sales reps can see where the customer is on their journey and how they’ve interacted with the brand already.

This way, reps are up to speed and can deliver a personalized pitch based on those interactions. From the customer’s perspective, everything is synced, leading to less friction and better overall momentum.

App integration

You’re likely already using CRM and other sales software, which can be tricky if your team has to log in to multiple accounts daily.

Ion can integrate with most CRM programs, so reps can access data from different pieces without having to leave the site.