How to Use Sales Intelligence to Boost Your Sales Process

Today buyers expect personalized, relevant conversations at every point of contact. Without enough information about your prospects, closing deals, nurturing leads, and moving them through the sales funnel becomes a challenge no matter how skilled your salesforce is at pitching. So when you interact with prospects, every piece of information about their company helps give you an advantage over your competitors.

However, it’s not enough to understand your target accounts and the pain points of the decision-makers at those organizations. If you don’t have the intelligence you need to determine what industry, size, age, or technologies the companies you target then you have no way to serve your targeted content and messaging to the right companies. Same story for the decision-makers you’re ultimately pitching to. If you’re not sure about their titles, roles, departments, etc. then there’s no way for you to be confident you are addressing their specific needs.

How Sales Intelligence Tools are Turning Out To Be Game-Changers

Sales intelligence helps professionals find, monitor, and understand data that provides insights into the daily business of prospects and existing customers. These insights help salespeople stay up to date about changes in your target accounts. In all its forms, sales intelligence is designed to help your sales team perform their job better. There are several ways this happens:

Higher Productivity:

Sales intelligence tools allow sales reps to automatically prioritize follow-ups, and segment leads to value-based or qualification-based groups. This approach saves them the time taken by manual sorting and the needless effort of chasing unqualified, low-interest leads. Most powerful amongst these is Buying Intent Data which allows you to identify and prioritize accounts that are actively engaged in a buying decision.

Intent Data is the set of behavioral signals that helps you to understand the intention of your prospects to purchase a product or service. Buyer Intent Data data helps you to identify those prospects who are actively engaged in a buying decision based on the type of content they are consuming.

More Rewarding Conversations: 

Talking to a sales representative who doesn’t realize their needs and trying to push a solution whose value they don’t understand is often frustrating for the prospects. The conversation revolves around the product, rather than their preferences, goals, hesitations, etc. 57% of customers feel that salespeople are underprepared for their first meeting and fail to personalize the conversation. Sales intelligence reveals the areas/topics where leads are most responsive allowing salespeople to steer the conversation to those points. In a way, sales intelligence helps you identify interests and craft the right talking points.

Shorter sales cycles:

Sales reps often chase the wrong prospects and try to sell offerings that lead to an extended buying cycle. The right sales intelligence data, especially when combined with intent data, can help salespeople identify the contacts that are ready to buy, reducing the average lead-to-close time.

Smarter Sales Strategies:

Sales Intelligence assists sales decision-makers (CFOs, CMOs, etc.) by extracting specific insights from the maze of workflows and databases that characterize their department. Sales managers can use these insights to build strategies to better engage prospects and improve their lead conversion ratio, which, of course, helps to generate more revenue.

Take Your Sales Process To The Next Level Using Sales Intelligence

1. Create a Data-Driven Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Many companies do not have a standard process for creating an ideal customer profile (ICP), or their ICP is simply based on the opinion of leadership. Not having a well-defined process for creating an ICP will mean you often miss the mark. You need to mine your own data, find commonalities across your successes and use a sales intelligence platform to shape an accurate ideal customer profile to guide your lead generation efforts.

If you ask a sales leader who they are selling to, they will often just list down a few key titles, perhaps a few industries which they ‘think’ are the right fit. They may even have a company size in mind. However, the concept of a targeted buyer persona is inconsistent, and companies often proceed based on instincts and feelings rather than data.

Sales intelligence enables you to find companies that look like your ICP and quantify the total addressable market. You can then target your marketing and sales efforts where it counts.

2. Ensure Data Accuracy Using a Sales Intelligence Tool

Poor data hygiene affects businesses in many ways. Bad data leads to wasted time and resources sending emails that bounce, calls that are unanswered, to people no longer at the role, or even at the company anymore.

Bad data can often be attributed to the data source. Inaccurate form fills, errors in manual data entry by team members, and even purchasing data from unreliable vendors. And even if your data is pristine when it comes into your system, that data decays on average at a rate of 30% per year.

Sales intelligence tools can fix bad data and even fill data gaps by enriching your records. Without complete and up to date data all of your customized messaging and segmentation will come to naught.

3. Track Buying Signals

Today, investing in a smart sales intelligence platform that monitors buying signals for you is the simplest and most effective way to prioritize your accounts who are most likely to close.

Sales intelligence tools can collect information about businesses in real-time, faster than a human team ever could. Machine learning and natural language processing work to identify companies that are actively evaluating solutions, now.. This then allows sales reps to search for companies that recently sent specific buying signals, or track when a specific event is taking place in one of your target audiences, allowing them to focus on the accounts most likely to close soonest.
For instance, if you are selling a revenue attribution SaaS product and your prospects are consuming content related to your solution on the web. You want to know not only who is consuming this content, but who is consuming the content that indicates they are closest to making a buying decision.

Consider two examples:

Case 1 – Mr. Morgan is consuming content related to the general benefits tracking the attribution of revenue for B2B Businesses.

Case 2 – Mr. Smith is digging into articles comparing specific revenue attribution SaaS solutions.

Now, in case 1, Mr. Morgan is still at the early stage of his buying process. He is just beginning to educate himself on the value of solutions. So, he might buy your SaaS product, at least not yet. Whereas, in case 2, Mr. Smith is at the last stage of the buying process and will likely be making a buying decision very soon.

Accordingly, you can approach Mr. Smith to sell your SaaS product and nurture Mr. Morgan along the buyer’s journey.

Generate Qualified Leads for Your Business

Acquiring new clients and the growth of the company are directly proportional to each other. Many businesses and organizations have teams committed to identifying potential market opportunities.

There are several different channels for lead generation-content marketing, advertisement, SEO, email promotion, cold calling, list building, hosting conferences, and attending trade shows, just to name a few. A sales intelligence tool is great for quickly finding new, quality leads, as well as nurturing them throughout the buying cycle.

Sales Intelligence tools are complementary to and help power all of these lead generation channels. Business intelligence is crucial to providing a consistent lead pipeline.

When companies want to keep their pipelines going (qualified leads in one end, market opportunities out the other), you need to have access to the best sales intelligence tools and the right details about their prospects and leads.

Make the Most of Your Lead Generation Efforts WIth SalesIntel

SalesIntel allows you to connect different data points to your current B2B data and prospecting lists. You can access the industry’s most accurate and comprehensive B2B data, including firmographic and technographic information about your ideal customer profile (ICP) along with access to buyer Intent Data.

Additionally, SalesIntel helps you to:

1. Get Advanced-Level B2B Data: Get access to millions of human-verified companies and contacts with a few clicks from our data portal to take your prospecting to the next level.

2. Get Access To Work Mobile Numbers: Work mobile numbers have a 7X higher connection rate. SalesIntel has over 48 million work mobile numbers so that you can get to a decision-maker straight away, and use that time for more important tasks than waiting on a switchboard operator or leaving a voicemail.

3. Increase Form Submissions with Fewer Fields: Fewer form fields mean more lead form submissions. If you are relying on inbound leads, just ask for the email Id and we will help you fill the additional data you need.

4. Append Existing & Incoming Leads: You can also enrich existing data with as little as an email address, and SalesIntel can automatically append the missing company and contact information you need to execute your sales and marketing campaigns.

5. Track Buying Signals: You can identify and reach out to organizations already looking for a solution to quickly jump through the buying stages and shorten your sales cycle. Uncover the buying signals of your prospects by learning what your prospects are interested in before you reach out to them.

Wrapping Up

Your targeted content and segmentation is only as effective as the data and signals that drive it. Access to data on a sales intelligence platform makes a salesperson’s 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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