Yes, we still use the same tools – calls, emails, events, etc. – but how we use them has changed. Today’s salesperson researches their ideal customers and creates highly targeted lists, rather than buying a bulk list of contacts and then targeting them. That’s smart selling.
What is Sales Intelligence?
True, Sales Intelligence is a new term that encompasses many tools and techniques used by revenue teams to find and win new customers. It’s about selling.
Among the key differences between traditional selling and sales intelligence are:
- High call-to-connect ratio
- Shorter sales cycles
- High conversation rates
- Low bouncing rates
- Pipeline vigor
Sales Intelligence contributes to each of these markers, resulting in a cohesive, targeted, and effective sales process. Many B2B Sales Intelligence platforms currently support these processes to varying degrees.
How to Use Sales Intelligence?
If you’ve never used a Sales Intelligence tool or want to make the most of your current one, here’s a quick primer:
1. Smart Prospecting
Prospecting is the most difficult part of the sales process due to uncertainty and wasted time. An hour of work does not guarantee an hour of results.
You might spend hours researching an account, finding the right POC and their contact information, only to find out they don’t use the technology your product supports.
A bad contact list can cause you to waste hours trying to connect with ideal prospects. A tired sales force struggles to forecast revenue growth.
With Sales Intelligence, salespeople can prospect more effectively by having all relevant data at their fingertips. What used to take hours now takes minutes.
Among the highlights are:
- Firmographic filters: These help salespeople sort accounts by size, location, revenue, and industry.
- Technographic filters: This allows you to find and filter accounts based on their tech stack.
- Org charts: Find the right decision-makers within any account.
- Company insights and updates: A current understanding of the company’s activities helps identify targets and serves as a conversation starter after the outreach.
- Intent data: Companies that are already searching for topics related to your product or service can be found.
2. Lead Generation
Precision-targeting finds the right chances. Sales reps are always going after best-fit accounts and talking to the right decision-makers because Sales Intelligence enables smart prospecting.
Inbound marketing teams can use Sales Intelligence to create highly targeted lists that can be used across all channels, including content, email, and social. Also, Sales Intelligence is an important part of ABM. From identification and outreach to engagement and branding, Sales Intelligence is essential.
3. Qualifying Lead
While no two leads are alike, each has an opportunity cost. Going after bad-fit leads costs time and money, but it also risks losing good-fit leads. As your lead volume grows, you need a system to direct your sales reps to qualified leads.
Sales Intelligence has that system built in. Using intent data, sales reps can quickly identify an account’s buying intent and use lead scoring models to qualify it.
This is done to generate a list of high-intent accounts for outbound efforts. After lead generation but before outreach for inbound efforts.
4. Data Enhancement & Upkeep
Finally, the quality and quantity of data available to modern salespeople sets them apart from their predecessors. Salespeople will perform no better than telemarketers did 30 years ago without CRM data. They will perform worse if the CRM data is wrong.
Sales Intelligence is used to constantly fix and enrich CRM data so sales reps can do what they do best. Contact data in CRM decays by around 30% annually, so even maintaining original data accuracy is a race against time and requires Sales Intelligence platform expertise.
They can also add more information and insights to the data to help sales reps better understand their accounts and prospects. To get more information from an event, a sales rep can use data enrichment to get more than just the name and email address.
Final Words
Overall, Sales Intelligence is the most potent tool in the modern salesperson’s arsenal. You can still sell without it, but you will always be competing with those who do. Those with better tools win more often, as expected.