What is Sales Intelligence? How Can Sales Teams Use Sales Intelligence Platforms to Sell More?
For those not in sales, selling products and services to clients sounds like an easy job. You make a few calls, reach out to potential clients, pitch your items, make some sales, and reach your targets.
How you sell matters. What your process is matters. But how your customers feel when they engage with you matters more. ~ Tiffani Bova
However, the ground reality is much different, and the story is not as linear. Modern-day buyers expect a personalized experience. To meet these demands, salespersons have to make use of every nugget of information to woo their clients at every touchpoint. As a sales rep, you are entrusted with the responsibility to build a relationship with your prospect. Sales departments don’t make a sale; they make a customer.
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The salesperson must intimately know and understand the client. Given that time is money and companies must use their resources wisely, it would not be feasible for salespeople to scour the web for information on the prospects. In place of working hard, the sales team has to work smart. This is the situation where sales intelligence steps in.
Sales intelligence tools extract the actionable bits of information that a sales professional can leverage to convert more clients. In this post, we will explore everything that you need to know about sales intelligence and how it can benefit your business.
What is Sales Intelligence?
Sales intelligence encompasses a wide array of technologies that can help salespeople identify, interpret, and track data that offers insight into the client or prospect’s behavior. These data points allow the salesperson to monitor any changes in the target client’s business and capitalize on opportunities.
At the same time, sales intelligence tools allow for the demonstration, integration, assessment, analysis, and collation of prospect data. Further, sales intelligence data needs to be reviewed regularly to maintain a clean and updated database. Using these insights, the sales team can modify and customize their approach for better results.
Apart from basic and historical information, sales intelligence platforms can also collect real-time data. Thus, the sales teams can set alerts for buying signals and interests for their target prospects and take advantage of it when the opportunity arises.
While there are large volumes of data available on various channels, sales intelligence helps you understand the key points from all the noise. It enhances an organization’s capacity to learn, reason, and understand in the following ways:
- Learn: Sales intelligence offers key data highlights that sales teams can procure and digest to learn about prospects. When sales intelligence tools are integrated with sales process tools, the actionable data and updated account records are easily accessible to learn about the target account.
- Reason: While making decisions based on your instincts may be a smart move, salespeople must primarily depend on concrete data to call the shots. Tasks like qualification and prioritization of leads could be the determining factor between making a sale and wasting your time. Hence, good decisions should be based on rational reasoning, which is facilitated through sales intelligence.
- Understand: Contextual sales intelligence, such as industry trends, competitive landscape, and company news, can help salespeople find the links between the client’s pain points and the solution offered by your product or service. Thus, it enables you to gain a granular and broad understanding of your prospect.
In a nutshell, sales intelligence is everything that your business needs to optimize the sales process.
Need for Sales Intelligence
The Sales Intelligence market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.4% by 2024. This phenomenal growth is no surprise considering that several businesses now realize the potential of sales intelligence platforms in boosting sales and revenue. The demand for sales intelligence tools has been spurred further with the advancement in technology.
Following are the various processes that call for sales intelligence adoption:
- For Sales Prospecting
The most crucial part of selling is identifying your target clientele. Sales is no longer about selling ice to an Eskimo. Sales prospecting allows you to find the right companies based on specific and predefined characteristics or triggers, making them more willing to purchase from you.
By getting maximum actionable information about your potential clients, your sales team can ask the right questions and highlight the right features of your product or service. Further, knowing about triggers can also help them create a sense of urgency.
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Sales intelligence allows the sales representative to present your product or service as an appropriate solution and to help the clients believe that they have seized a great opportunity at the best time.
- For Defining Ideal Customer Profile
- Creating an Ideal Customer Profile is the foundational step in sales. The Ideal Customer Profile is the gradation against which you can calibrate your leads to qualify them.
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To get started on creating an Ideal Customer Profile, you need to identify the common features present in your happiest and most satisfied clients. Sales intelligence platforms accept the names of your clients as inputs and reverse map their details to find the shared characteristics.
- For Tracking Real-Time Data
Sales intelligence tools work around the clock to ensure that the account details are up to date. It makes use of web indexing technologies to ensure that salespeople have constant-access to high value, rich profile information. It makes it easier for them to call the correct point of contact and pitch in a suitable tone.
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Furthermore, sales intelligence platforms can send out real-time alerts for dynamic buying signals and triggers. Needless to say, a sales rep who can contact a company just when they need a solution is more likely to bag the sale!
