To better identify qualified leads, build stronger business relationships and identify high potential B2B buyers, it is very crucial for sales teams to have the right sales intelligence at their disposal. Sales reps, who often have to spend hours prospecting and scheduling meetings may not always have the time to curate this information and they need the right technology to enable this intelligence feed.
To have a strong Sales intelligence flow fed into sales processes, sales leaders need to improve how they collect information on prospects while also reevaluating the kind of insights they use to prioritize leads.
Sales intelligence is meant to help sales teams understand their customers and prospects so that they can use the right sales processes to boost conversions based on the customer behavior.
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Seasoned sales leaders with strong sales intelligence systems will in most cases use multiple channels from which to gain insights on their prospects and customers; these could include:
- Identifying what made current customers convert in their journey (when, why, what was the trigger)
- Breaking down the purchase intent and buying intent signals throughout the buying journey
- The challenges and needs of past and present prospects
- Challenges faced by the ideal buyer persona of a product / service
The data that sales teams can collect on their prospects can share a lot of crucial details about the health of a company’s sales strategies. Based on this sales intelligence, sales leaders can effectively realign sales plans and targets based on market behaviors, forecasts and relevant buying signals, to capitalize on the right opportunities.
Here Are A Few Important Aspects To Keep In Mind When Gathering Sales Intelligence To Drive Better B2B Sales:
In a Digital-only Multichannel Selling World, You need Multiple Sources of Sales Intelligence
B2B sales teams are familiar with using intent data to breakdown prospect buying behavior. Marketing and sales teams in most technology companies look at a prospect’s online activity to identify their interest in a product by breaking down website behavior, seeing what kind of content prospects interacted with and studying their reactions on marketing and sales campaigns (email opens, bounce rate, etc).
But these are just some of the common sources that marketing and sales teams have grown accustomed to.
In an online selling world, there are several other sources of sales intelligence that sales teams now need to capitalize on.
For instance; evaluating industry specific online conferences and events (are your prospects and target accounts attending, what sessions are they interested in), how much are they interacting with your or other brands and product innovators on social media and other channels, are they actively interested in reading about certain kinds of topics or content online…
As today’s B2B sales environment evolves with the changing economic and business dynamics, the shift in trends from in-person to virtual meetings, from physical to online conferences have changed the prospecting marketplace. Besides this, when most of today’s B2B buyers and sellers are always online, limiting how you identify what they are interested in by only studying a few sources of intelligence will not give you a complete overview of their buying interest or intent.
Once you Know which Sources to Double-down on, You need the Right Sales Intelligence Tools
Marketing and sales plans have to be specific to each business goal and product. What works for one may need to be revamped before it is implemented in another use case. This also means that it is the imperative of the sales leaders in a team to identify which out of the many online sources of available sales intelligence to double down on. Enterprise teams with manpower ability can use enterprise sales intelligence software to automate the collection of data and insights across an array of channels very easily.
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There are different ways of gathering relevant data and sales intelligence. Sales intelligence tools can help sales teams automatically crawl several social media channels and websites to identify buying intent of prospects, sales intelligence software can be used to help analyze content consumption patterns of prospects (are they more interested in video content about new tech products, or do they enjoy reading short blogs on key industry updates), Cookie data can be used to gather relevant navigation behavior. Sales intelligence algorithms can be used to identify when a prospect is showing more interest in a particular type of product or category.
Once sales leaders are clear on what information they want to gather and how, it is easier for sales teams to use all the data that has then been collected to identify prospects and accounts that are more likely to continue a conversation with them based on the above.
Sales Intelligence Goes Into a Unified CRM or CDP
Without proper integration of sales intelligence data, sales enablement platforms and customer data, no marketing or sales team will be able to draw meaningful insights or capitalize on the right opportunities effectively.
Gathering sales intelligence is one crucial part of the B2B sales activity today, but the other important step lies in organizing all the data and future prospecting plans and conversations into a unified CRM. A unified platform that helps the sales team automate sales communications, manage and track contacts behavior and how they are interacting with sales emails will allow the team to function as one unit.
In a Digital Sales World, Real-time Insights Matter Most
Customer behaviors are constantly changing as are today’s business dynamics. Not only do sales and marketing teams need timely sales intelligence to fuel their sales strategies, their sales automation systems have to be updated quickly to build new and relevant sales conversations based on real-time prospect behavior into their cadence.
Without creating this constant feedback loop between real-time insights and constantly updating the CRM and sales automation, sales teams are going to miss out on the newest opportunities.
There is no dearth of sales technologies today that can offer sales and marketing teams valuable sales intelligence and account insights, with this data, sales reps can easily determine what prospects are best to go after. With tools like SalesHub, 6Sense, InsideView Sales, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and several others, sales teams can now easily enrich their prospecting strategies to fuel better sales outcomes.
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