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Ever wondered how the top sales teams are consistently hitting their targets? Sales intelligence is the answer.
Sales intelligence includes collecting and analyzing data about customers and prospects to improve sales performance and strategies.
65% of businesses use sales intelligence software to get customers' data and boost their sales performance.
If you also want to improve your sales approach in 2024, it’s important to understand sales intelligence.
That’s exactly why we have created this guide that will introduce you to the concept of sales intelligence and how it will help you improve close deals.
Why is Sales Intelligence Important?
B2B sales intelligence gives sales teams data-driven insights that will help them build a sales pipeline, generate quality leads, and close more deals. It also helps them understand potential customers' demographics, pain points, and personas so they can target them in ways that drive more consistent results.
So, it is that numbers game to some extent. But these numbers stack up a lot nicer from this side of the fence.
Key Data Points in Sales Intelligence
1. Contact Details
Accurate contact details are important to connect with leads across different marketing touchpoints. This information changes over time as leads shift jobs or get promoted. But intelligent sales platforms update contact information in real-time, so you can always target and reach the right audience.
2. Demographics
Important demographic information about your target audience includes:
Location, industry, size, and years in business are important demographic information from a company standpoint. The more information you have about your target audience, the better you can personalize your outreach and improve sales forecasts.
3. Company Data
Company data will help you understand the business you are targeting by providing insights into their:
Having enough information about your target businesses will help you forecast more accurately. As a result, you will be able to craft more successful sales strategies to move in the right direction.
4. Purchase Habits
Your target audience’s online purchase habits will tell you a lot about their preferences. You can offer personalized recommendations by tracking purchase history.
Purchase history also lets you make accurate sales forecasts by behavior purchase patterns.
5. Intent Data
In sales, your target audience's intent matters a lot as it helps you under where your target customer is in their journey.
For instance, if some potential customers are consuming helpful content about your product, pitching your product as the best solution isn’t the best strategy in this scenario.
Instead, your sales reps should make a pitch when the potential customer is likely to make the purchase. Ensure that you also slide into their DMs before the competitor. Revenue intelligence platforms help you collect intent data to inform your outreach.
6. Technographic Data
Technographic intelligence includes finding the technology that your target audience uses, such as their:
This also offers details about when the business purchased specific technologies. The benefits of technographic data are:
Sales event triggers tell you that there’s a conversion opportunity. A buyer intent signal helps to convert a specific lead on time. Thus, having access to these data helps businesses make profitable sales decisions.
Where to Gather Sales Intelligence Data From?
Sales intelligence data can come from various sources. It can be collected from the company’s internal records, the Internet, public resources, customers, or competitive research.
1. Internal Records
One of the most reliable sources of sales intelligence data is internal records since the information comes directly from your company itself. This includes product or service usage logs, customer data from CRM platforms, billing records, and CPQ and sales engagement software data. These data points help analyze your business's performance and the success of its services or products.
2. Competitive Research
The internet is a great, valuable source for sales intelligence data. It provides access to a wealth of information, like product features and competitors’ pricing. You should look into your competitors' strategies and stay up-to-date on any new offerings that arise in the marketplace or changes they make to their products or services. This will help you remain competitive in market share and also give you an edge over your rivals.
3. Public Resources
Public resources include industry trends, market reports, and economic indicators. These data will help assess the market conditions of your company’s products or services. Additionally, you can understand customers' preferences and feelings toward your products or services by monitoring public opinion through focus groups, surveys, or social media posts.
4. Customer Feedback
Customer feedback provides direct insight into customers' experiences with your product or service. Therefore, companies should actively listen to their customers’ comments through conversations with customer service representatives or surveys to continually refine and improve their offerings and customer experience based on customer feedback.
How Does Sales Intelligence Work with CRMs?
Sales intelligence helps to maximize your CRM data’s value. As buyers change roles and companies and businesses branch out to other regions or get acquired, contact and account data in your CRM decays quickly.
You must keep it up-to-date to keep it usable. Regularly enrich the contact data you have collected and fill in the gaps in your CRM records. This way, your sales reps won’t waste time chasing dead leads.
When selecting a sales intelligence software, ensure it integrates with your CRM. With sales intelligence integrated as a CRM plug-in, there's no need to manually synchronize programs or switch windows. This simplified setup keeps your workflows smooth and your data integrated.
Common Features of Sales Intelligence Platforms
Your budget, needs, and processes will differ depending on whether you are a well-established enterprise, a fast-growing startup, or a small business. Regardless, all these companies will have sales tool requirements. Here’s a checklist of must-have features for your next sales intelligence solution:
1. Data quality and coverage
Prioritize data quality and coverage. Ensure the platform offers reliable, up-to-date data to ensure your outreach efforts target the right people. Look for depth in the data provided, including demographic (individual lead information), firmographic (company details), and technographic (technology used) data. A tool aggregating data from a wider range of sources, such as business directories, public records, and social media, will give you a more comprehensive view of your prospects.
2. Lead generation and prospecting
Choose a platform with advanced search and filtering capabilities. The platform should provide filters to narrow down your search criteria by location, job title, industry, and other relevant criteria to identify high-quality leads. Look for lead-scoring features that help prioritize prospects based on their fit and conversion potential. This will help your sales reps to focus on the most promising opportunities. Ensure the tool includes sales triggers to detect buying signals, such as website visits or white paper downloads, so you can target prospects with strong purchase intent.
3. Personalization and outreach
When it comes to personalization and outreach, a sales intelligence tool should provide verified contact information of key decision-makers, such as their email addresses and phone numbers. Insights from a prospect's recent news mentions or social media activity are important for creating personalized outreach and building rapport. Smooth integration with CRM and email platforms will allow for effortless data transfer and simplify communication workflows.
4. Analytics and Reporting
A reliable sales intelligence tool should support sales pipeline management by tracking deal progress and identifying potential roadblocks to optimize the sales process. It should also offer performance measurement features to evaluate sales team activity and outcomes to measure ROI and pinpoint areas for improvement. Customizable dashboards are important for visualizing key sales metrics and KPIs for better decision-making and ongoing performance monitoring.
How to Choose the Right Sales Intelligence Platform for Your Business?
Now that you are convinced that sales intelligence is a must-have for your team, are you sure you know how to choose the right tool?
Here are six key considerations when assessing different options. Let’s explore each of these six facets in detail.
1. Robustness of prospect intelligence
If you are going to access prospect data, you want it to be accurate and up-to-date. Otherwise, what's the point of storing that data in your CRM? Actually, scratch that. Incorrect data will indeed cause more harm than having no data at all.
So, your first port of call should be to understand where the sales data comes from and how accurate it is.
2. Integration with your current sales software
Your sales intelligence software isn't going to be the only tool you are playing with.
You are probably already using:
And that's just the minimum. An average company uses as many as 10 tools in its sales tech stack.
You want all of your tools to work nicely together to make life easy.
So, when eyeing up sales intelligence software, ask yourself: Does it have a native integration with other sales tools I already use?
3. Pricing model
Now, we are talking about two things:
How much does the sales intelligence tool cost? And how is the company charging for it?
Obviously, the tool should be affordable for you.
Ask:
4. Tech stack data
Does the sales intelligence tool that you are assessing offer tech stack data?
This is a crucial question because many tools focus more on firmographic data. If you need tech stack data, specify this in your sales conversations.
5. Real-time updates and alerts
Speed is everything in the B2B sales world.
To be fair, accuracy is more important than speed. However, speed is a pretty close second.
When it comes to sales intelligence platforms, you not only want the right data but the most accurate data.
You also need real-time updates and alerts from your tool. For example, if you sell to CMOs, you need to know immediately if a target account hires a new CMO.
That new CMO will be hungry to create an impact, and your product or service will help them do it.
6. Purchase intent data
Similar to real-time information, there is a need for purchase intent data.
Put simply, does the sales intelligence tool you are looking at offer this? If not, it might still be a good fit, but you won't receive the alerts you need for ABM-style sales approaches.
How to Leverage B2B Sales Intelligence Data?
If you haven’t used any Sales Intelligence software in the past or want to make the most out of your existing platform, here’s a brief overview to steer you in the right direction:
1. Smart Prospecting
Prospecting is the toughest part of the sales process, as it includes uncertainty and unproductive hours. There’s no guarantee that an hour spent working will give an hour of results.
Your team will spend hours researching a business, finding the right POC, as well as their contact information, only to later realize that they don’t use the specific technology with which your product is compatible.
Worse still, if your contact list data is poor, your team will spend hours failing to connect with ideal prospects. Sales reps will be drained, and sales leaders will struggle to predict revenue growth.
But, with sales intelligence, you get multiple reliable tools that help your sales rep be more successful at prospecting by bringing all relevant data points to their fingertips. What used to take hours will now be done in a couple of minutes.
Some of the key highlights include:
2. Lead Generation
Precision targeting helps you find the right opportunities. Since sales intelligence drives smart prospecting, sales reps always look for the best-fit prospects and talk to the right decision-makers, resulting in higher revenue.
Sales intelligence helps marketing teams create highly targeted lists that can be used across every channel, including content, social media, and email.
Sales intelligence is also an important part of the ABM process for those using it. From identification and outreach to branding and engagement, Sales intelligence is instrumental in each ABM stage.
3. Lead Qualification
Not all leads are qualified, but all of them come with an opportunity cost. Going after bad-fit leads not only costs time and productivity but also risks losing good-fit leads. As the volume of your sales leads grows, you must have a system that directs your sales reps toward qualified leads.
Such a system is baked into its core with Sales Intelligence. Using intent data or buying signals, sales reps readily identify prospects' buying intent and use lead-scoring models to qualify them.
This should be done at the prospecting stage to get a list of high-intent accounts for outbound efforts. For inbound efforts, it should be done after lead generation but before outreach.
4. Productive Cold Calling
If one of your sales reps has ever phoned a business and requested to speak with the manager, they have already made a mistake. It looks poor and shows that you haven’t bothered to conduct your research if you don’t know the point of contact’s name and position within the organization.
Your sales reps should learn as much as possible about the target client’s business and any prospective needs before picking up the phone. Going into calls unprepared is the biggest blunder your sales team can commit. Here is where sales intelligence software help you refine your cold calling to make it more productive.
5. Data Enrichment & Maintenance
The most important factor differentiating modern sales reps from their predecessors is the quality and scale of data. Without CRM data, even the most skilled sales reps will only marginally perform slightly better than any telemarketing reps 30 years ago. However, they will perform worse if the CRM data is incorrect.
Maintaining accurate data is also one of the primary use cases of Sales Intelligence - constantly enriching and fixing CRM data so sales reps can do their best. Your CRM contact data decays by around 30% yearly, so maintaining original data accuracy is a constant race against time and hence requires the expertise of Sales Intelligence tools.
Furthermore, they enrich the data with additional information to help sales reps better understand their prospects. For instance, if a sales rep gets only a name and phone number from an event, they can use data enrichment to get all other information like email address, tech stack, company size, revenue, and more.
Who Should Use Sales Intelligence?
Sales intelligence isn’t reserved for closers; it’s a versatile tool for various roles across a sales organization. From frontline sales reps to strategic decision-makers, the insights obtained from these tools will change how your sales teams operate and drive results.
1. Sales managers
Sales intelligence tools give sales managers a high-level view of their pipeline health and team's performance. They can use this data to better allocate resources, identify coaching opportunities, and optimize sales strategies.
2. Sales development reps
Sales intelligence is a goldmine for sales development teams. It helps them identify and prioritize high-potential leads, personalize their outreach with relevant insights, increase response rates, and set more qualified meetings for account executives.
3. Lead generation specialists
Sales intelligence improves lead generation by providing the data needed to build highly targeted prospect lists. It helps identify businesses that align with your ideal customer profiles and shows buying intent to improve the quality and conversion potential of leads.
4. Revenue ops teams
Revenue operations teams use sales intelligence to optimize processes and improve cross-functional alignment. These tools help pinpoint sales process bottlenecks, optimize territory planning, and ensure all revenue-focused teams work only with the most accurate, consistent data.
Sales Intelligence vs. Sales Enablement
Sales intelligence and sales enablement are different yet complementary roles. Sales intelligence gathers and analyzes data to provide actionable insights about markets, trends, and prospects. In contrast, sales enablement provides sales reps with the content, tools, and training required to better engage with buyers.
For instance, while a B2B sales intelligence tool reveals that a prospect is expanding into a new market, sales enablement will ensure that your reps have the right product knowledge and pitch deck to capitalize on this opportunity.
Businesses can create an excellent feedback loop by aligning sales intelligence data with sales enablement resources. Such a feedback loop will continuously improve strategic decision-making and frontline execution.
What Does a Sales Intelligence Analyst Do?
A Sales Intelligence Analyst specializes in analyzing sales data to extract insights that shape and improve a company's sales strategies. They accomplish this by:
1. Analyzing Sales Data to Identify Trends
Sales analysts review sales reports to identify patterns and areas for improvement. Insights from monthly, quarterly, and annual data help optimize performance and highlight opportunities. For example, identifying consistently top-selling products will guide efforts to replicate their success across other offerings.
2. Developing Accurate Sales Forecasts
Using historical data and market trends, Sales Intelligence Analysts create forecasts to guide strategic decisions. These projections influence critical areas like budgets, hiring, and product development. For instance, if a sales analyst predicts a 15% revenue increase for the next quarter, executives can think about expanding the sales team to meet the growing demand.
3. Communicating Insights to Leadership
Translating complex data into actionable insights is important. Analysts prepare clear reports and presentations for leadership and stakeholders to ensure findings are accessible and impactful. This even helps non-technical stakeholders to make informed, strategic decisions.
4. Providing Strategic Recommendations
Beyond analysis, sales intelligence analysts offer practical suggestions to improve sales, such as refining sales territories to tap into new opportunities or revising compensation plans to boost motivation. Their data-driven expertise helps sales teams continuously improve their performance.
Can Sales Intelligence Help to Close More Deals?
Sales intelligence will help in closing a deal in the following ways:
What Does Sales Intelligence Look Like in 2024?
The future of sales intelligence is driven by advanced automation and AI. Sophisticated machine learning helps with accurate predictions of market trends, customer behavior, and deal outcomes.
Predictive analytics is evolving to offer not just data but prescriptive recommendations to guide your sales teams on the best next steps to take for each prospect.
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