How to Choose the Right Sales Intelligence Tool for Your Business

According to a CSO Insights report, only 9.7% of firms have provided access to sales information for sales reps while 90.35% agree that salespeople must demonstrate a level of dedication before being given access to sales data.

The percentage of companies that do not assist salespeople in organizing fruitful conversations with prospects is startling. Sales managers want their sales staff to be at their best when they reach out, but there isn’t enough knowledge available to them.

Sales representatives must have access to information to make contact and spend less time hunting for information and more time selling. For a company that anticipates and forecasts sales growth, Sales Intelligence is an essential investment.

What is Sales Intelligence?

Sales Intelligence typically refers to a set of technologies that assist sales and marketing in locating, collecting, analyzing, and evaluating data on potential consumers. Furthermore, Sales Intelligence assists you in lead generation and offers you up-to-date information about your potential customers. Sales Intelligence accomplishes this by utilizing information that has already been published on the internet — on websites, social media, and so on. Such technologies are frequently employed in the B2B industry, where they can save a significant amount of research time.

Sales Intelligence is similar to an energy drink for selling. It provides an extra boost of everything you need to successfully win over your market, target audience, and desired customer – particularly in B2B.

Do You Really Need a Sales Intelligence Tool?

It is important to have your goal in mind – using software aimlessly has never helped anyone. Still, some sales reps use Sales Intelligence but don’t know what their goal is and what they want to achieve with it.

Here are some of the areas where Sales Intelligence tools can simplify the sales process for you:

List builder and filters: List builders, in conjunction with deep filters, assist you in narrowing down the targets from a large list of data to the most relevant ones.

Lead scoring: As Sales Intelligence tools provide complete information about the clients/prospects, it is simple to score the leads based on the ICP of rep selected metrics to prioritize the leads, allowing reps to go after the most important accounts first and increase the chances of closing.

Data cleansing: Data cleansing includes discovering inaccuracies in data, rectifying them, normalizing data, de-duping it, and keeping the data up to date.

Alerts: One of the most useful aspects of intelligence tools comes in when someone is just starting on their purchasing trip, and the rep receives an alert, allowing you to snag the user early on. Or if a user stops utilizing a tool, the salesperson is immediately notified. You can set alerts for whatever move the buyer takes, major events that occur, and market trends that shift so that sales staff are ready to capitalize on the new development.

Choosing the Right Sales Intelligence Tool Checklist

Data – a lot of data – is at the heart of Sales Intelligence. When you want to keep your sales pipelines going (qualified leads in one end, market opportunities out the other), you need to have access to the best Sales Intelligence tools. Here are the three most crucial components you need to consider while choosing the right Sales Intelligence tool.

Coverage and Accuracy of Data

These are the two most significant advantages and disadvantages of an intelligence instrument. What is the database’s breadth and depth, as well as the quality and freshness of its data? This alone has the potential to sway the purchasing decision in favor of the vendor. This is a major issue because 30% of data decays each year. As a result, the rate at which a company updates its data becomes extremely important.

The majority of data is gathered through tech scrapping and must be checked by humans to guarantee high accuracy. As a result, the percentage of data that has been human-verified is an important parameter to consider when evaluating these tools.

Many data providers promote their platform as having the largest database, but the data quality level with machine-processed data is low, and there may be a lack of meaningful insights. As a result, you may wind up making bad decisions. Quality is more important than quantity.

How do you want to use the tool?

What data do you need to close more sales? Does the Sales Intelligence tool have all the required data to boost the sales process? It is important to understand the type of features you should look for. So, what type of data or features should you focus on when buying? Along with the contact details of the decision-makers, here is what you must have in your Sales Intelligence tool:

Firmographic Data: Firmographic data contains important company details that help you categorize accounts (companies) suitable for you.

Technographic Data: Technolographic data contains technologies that are used by the target accounts/companies.

Direct Work Mobile Dials: Work mobile numbers directly impact the amount of time it takes to identify and reach decision-makers. They help you reach the decision-maker directly especially when you are a step away from closing the deal.

Buyer Intent Data: Buyer Intent Data data helps you to identify prospects who are actively engaged in a buying decision based on the type of content they are consuming.

Data Enrichment: Data enrichment is the method of integrating raw data from your internal resources with data from other internal or external data sets. After integration, your data is complete and accurate.

These are basic data and features that can help you gain a competitive edge in the modern business environment.

Integrations

To update and enrich lead information, intelligence tools must interface with your CRM. They must also power your prospects’ email engagement initiatives. As a result, it’s vital to look for solutions that integrate well with both CRM and engagement systems.

Let’s say your Sales Intelligence tool is not integrated with your CRM. You have identified a list of potential prospects in the tool, and now you want that list in your CRM. You will have to either export the list, match/modify the list based on the format supported by your CRM or enter each one by one. In both cases, there are higher chances of human errors.

To avoid human errors, SalesIntel has integrations with the most popular CRMs. You can export directly to your CRM and enrich the data to avoid incomplete and inaccurate data. Following are some of the popular integrations:

Get Your Sales Process Up and Running

When AI meets Sales, there is growth. If you use it wisely, you can take your sales performance to the next level.

Until now, B2B firms thought of data as a method to execute (contact data) and then understand how to increase performance. Sales Intelligence nullifies the “wait and see approach.”

Your ABM strategy, content, and segmentation are only effective if you have the access to the right data to reach the right audience. Access to data on a Sales Intelligence platform makes a salesperson more productive. Providing a strong Sales Intelligence platform to power your sales and marketing processes can yield huge rewards for sales teams.

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