CRM data integrated with sales intelligence for increased sales

 

It is hard to miss the term sales intelligence. But, just because most sales representatives do not use the sales intelligece tools sufficiently for their business. Most sales representatives don’t, and those reps that do use it usually don’t use it in the sales stages pipeline.

CRM data integrated with sales intelligence for increased sales

Modern buyers today are more inclined towards personalized interaction at every buying stage. While interacting with your prospects, every information has to be relevant. Such relevant data must increase the conversion rates and lead to closing deals. It’s just this kind of data that sales intelligence tools can offer to sales representatives.

 

Most of the business software market is adapting to the use of specialized marketing tools. Such tools are integrated into customer relationship management software and helps HR management, finance, and other strategy-centric departments.

 

Sales teams, however, is yet to adapt to the emerging technology. Unfortunately, even after almost twenty years after the analytics CRM, sales software is still not widely adopted.

analytics CRM

 

Your workforce can be quite successful at pitching. But it’s quite hard to nurture leads, move leads along the sales stages pipeline, and close the deal with wrong prospects.

 

Sales people need to find the right customers first. Sell your product, service, or solution to the appropriate buyers. Even if you think that you have the details of all personas, you may not. With so much information around us, it is tough without data analytics to get to customers. That’s why they use of analytics CRM has become popular. 

 

Unfortunately, sales representatives often do not have sufficient time search the web for information that helps closing a deal. Besides, the modern buying decision is commonly made by a buying committee. Sales reps need to do the extra work of filtering out the key stakeholders within a company. Understand the requirement of each of the stakeholders to drive a deal forward and drive sales in B2B.

 

Rapid innovations happening in information processing have given access to real-time actionable insights. Sales reps can follow the insights to promote services to their prospects. Sales intelligence has to meet three criteria in order to make the data truly actionable:

 

  1. Uses a Variety of Sources.
  2. Organized for context and accessibility.
  3. Available in real-time

 

Business leaders now understand the importance of data. They also agree that to use this data for business growth, it needs to be enriched. The data has to run through a lot of processes before it becomes fully functional.

 

However, it’s not that hard to find CRM data such as lead source and purchase records. Even details like the name, phone number, revenue, email address, employee count, job titles, and direct dials. B2B sales cycles are long and complicated. It needs more than just the names and contact details of the prospects. 

 

Both sales and marketing data are regularly updated. This type of data includes context like organizational reporting structure, decision-makers, financials, budgets, company initiatives, personnel moves, installed technologies, year-over-year growth, and predictive features.

 

Such when compared with sales intelligence tools gives you a different picture. One has to keep up with the advancements in the sales intelligence tools. CRM sales software manages every detail skillfully. 

 

Infotanks Media integrates CRM data with sales intelligence to help you close even more deals.

What Do You Mean By Sales Intelligence?

Sales intelligence includes a broad range of technology that enables a sales representative to understand, find, and monitors CRM data that gives insight into prospect and existing customer daily business. These insights allow the sales representative to stay on top of changes within the target accounts.

sales intelligence

Time is precious for all sales representative trying to achieve targets. These people do not have the time to browse through the web to find the information about every account they work on. Neither can anyone map out all the critical stakeholders inside their prospect’s company and truly understand each person’s desires and needs. The best type of customer relationship management assures detailed records of customers. Forecast of sales is essential for every marketer to make the right move. 

 

The sales intelligence tools or CRM sales software extract a company’s necessary information by indexing real-time company data from open public data sources. Also, information like their hidden traits, interests, buying signals, types of website technologies in use is known too.

Sales Intelligence Requirements

 

1). Uses Multiple Sources:

 

Most of the sales companies today are familiar with the term, intent data. A sales representative can check a lead’s activity log to gather insights about the buying cycle status. The engagement data from actions carried out by prospects on your website or campaigns is first-party data.

 

Unfortunately, most sales representatives do not sufficiently use sales intelligence tools. Sales in B2B can be increased if sales intelligence is used effectively. This means that the tools have to be used reap the maximum benefits. 

 

Sales representatives have to take note of the buying signals. Buying signals can be extracted from either online and offline:

 

The ideal type of customer relationship management has software that automatically collects data from several sources. After this, it then delivers the buying signals to a sales representative without disrupting their day-to-day routine. CRM sales software benefits representatives to know details about their customers. 

 

Many data enrichment companies enable sales companies to find which accounts may be good targets and know their interest topic. These companies help in the forecast of sales. Data can be collected in two ways:

 

  • Analyzing the content consumption of prospects on particular websites
  • Scrutinizing social networks and websites to find critical events that may indicate buying interest from individual companies.

 

For example, some data companies can easily crawl news sources like financial filings, news websites, and public pages on social media networks. All this is done to search for buying signals like rounds of funding, new offices, product launches, and executive hires. Sales representatives can gather account information from their buying signals. 

 

Other data providers can deliver a list of accounts showing an increasing interest within the product category of a sales representative. Data providers utilize tags on devices or cookie data on websites in order to find out which IP addresses are hitting specific web pages. They scan the web pages’ content to identify the crux matter of every content. Then, use the reverse-IP lookup to identify the source organization of the IP address.

 

Besides, these data providers have come up with algorithms to determine when an organization shows more interest in a particular product category or topic.

 

The account-level insights can smoothen the sales process’s wheels. However, the sales representatives have to engage with contacts included in these accounts. It is here that contact-level intent data comes into play.

 

Contact-level intent data can come from three primary areas:

 

  • A website that asks visitors for compulsory registration in order to view in-depth content. This content can be on a certain technology or business-oriented topic. Here you can get strong buying signals. But, the volume usually is low as visitors must register once they on the website.

 

  • The prospects that engage with website visits, opening emails, or downloading your content. But many buyers don’t find themselves or submit their contact information during the initial buying stages.

 

  • The social networking websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Quora. This is where buyers engage with various brands and share content from industry influencers. They also talk about different professional events and conferences.

 

There are some advantages of extracting intent data from social networking websites. This intent data is a public data, which means that you can collect buying signals on wider audience. 

 

The technologies available today can quickly analyze social media activities. They also offer engaging insights and connect people’s social profiles to their professional identities. All this can be stored in customer relationship management software. 

 

The actions taken on social media that shine a light on a prospect’s pain points, and interests include:

 

  • Follows and replies to your competition
  • Engagement or mentions of influencers 
  • Replies to Twitter handles of your company, executives, or salespeople
  • Mentions of specific topics or pain points
  • Hashtags for upcoming conferences in your industry

 

2) Organized for accessibility and context

 

Only 34% of the sales leader can seamlessly prioritize the seller’s engagement activities in a more data-driven way.

 

Drive meaningful actions with sales engagement platform. Though 25% of sales leaders use a sales engagement platform, 77% witness a significant value in having a single platform for prioritizing activities, automating communication, surfacing insights, and capturing data. All this within CRM sales software can be beneficial in multiple ways.

 

Provide context to make sales intelligence highly useful for sales representatives. Intent data should be categorized on the basis of the buyer’s journey stage. Sales representatives should be provided with the resources or script to engage with prospects irrespective of their actions.

 

3) Available in real-time

 

Many times the first sales representative that contacts a lead is the one that wins the deal. Company requirements can change any time. But a lead may not need anything for few months at a stretch. Suddenly, there can be an urgency for a solution that solves an issue. This requires the data to be in real-time for sales intelligence to be beneficial.

 

The buying signals acquired from social networking websites tend to be extremely timely. Sales people can take actions by integrating the intent-based insights from social networks into a CRM sales software solution or sales engagement platform. This takes them closer to generating leads. 

 

Sales take time. Sales representatives work with different leads daily, follow up with them over multiple weeks or months. That’s why sales intelligence tools never stop collecting insights. These tools must always help find opportunities and help in driving sales ahead.

 

Gathering data from the social networks and web insights to help out sales representatives at the correct time, improves productivity and help them engage with relevant prospects and close even more deals.

 

When coupled with technology

When sales intelligence is combined with advanced technologies, it provides companies with more in-depth visibility into their sales cycle and refines the overall sales process. It helps in gathering and organizing the prospects data and facilitates the quantity and quality of the data for better sales opportunities. Such tools’ core goal is to move leads from all the stages of the sales pipeline and turn them into customers.

 

The sales intelligence software also familiarizes the sales representative with the prospects’ interest and prioritizes the follow-up activities. The software offers valuable analytics and revenue centric view of sales opportunities. This increases conversions and streamlines sales.

 

According to a study, sales intelligence solution users have experienced 56% more conversion rates than non-users. The same survey also found that 46% of sales professionals completed their sales quota as compared to 26% who did not avail the solution.

How is Sales Intelligence helpful for small businesses?

The sales team of a company is responsible in generating the maximum sales out of clients. A sales intelligence solution is required to improve sales performance.

 

Let’s find out how sales intelligence can be helpful;

 

Saves time

saving time

The sales representatives spend their time between disparate data sources and administrative tasks. Sales team can organize and pull-in data, segment deals into a qualification or value-based groups, and effortlessly prioritize follow-ups with sales intelligence. It enhances their productivity and simultaneously saves time that get wasted on low-interest deals.

Enhances interaction with buyers

Prospects lose patience when the sales representatives don’t understand their needs and only boast about their product, services, and business goals. The sales representatives need to have knowledge about what they offer to their prospects through a solution. Many times sales representatives are not even prepared. As a result, they are not able to personalize the conversation. Sales intelligence enables sales representatives to identify the areas where the prospects will be most responsive. It helps a sales representative find the correct talking points for having a valuable conversation with the potential prospect.

Reduces deal to close time

The total length of a sales cycle is based on the sales representatives; when they follow the wrong leads, they will have to face a long sales cycle. And with sales intelligence data, the sales representatives can find which leads are more likely to make a purchase and are genuinely interested in your offering. It offers a better understanding of the lead so that the sales representatives can identify the deals with high closing possibilities in much less time.

Better sales decisions

Sales intelligence helps you to drill into details to make smarter sales decisions more quickly. And with the necessary data at your reach, you can strategize your sales and take the correct action to improve your conversion ratio.

 

These things get much better when sales technology like CRM has an in-built sales intelligence feature.

Sales Intelligence- an in-built feature of your CRM

A sales intelligence solution doesn’t necessarily have to be an individual tool; it can also be an in-built feature of a CRM. A CRM that has a sales intelligence feature can be an additional benefit for your sales team. CRM in sales means that sales representatives can utilize the advantages of both. 

 

Using the sales intelligence feature, you can get a 360-degree view of each sales deal and focus more on high-profit leads.

 

Let’s explore how a CRM in sales intelligence feature can power your sales;

Reporting

The customer relationship management features included in sales intelligence enable you to develop insightful reports for viewing the sales cycle status and scrutinizing data. A sales pipeline report helps in tracking the movement of the deals in the sales process. It offers clear visibility of the sales pipeline showing how many deals are in movement, which ones are stalled, and how long a sales deal will take to close. Leveraging the reports, you can easily predict the business revenue and understand the sales pipeline’s strengths and weaknesses. 

Sales forecasting

It helps in informed sales forecasting to anticipate future business opportunities. And depending on the past interaction with the prospects, it offers you a tentative idea about the closing possibilities of a particular sales deal. It also enables you to identify the weak areas and the areas of growth opportunities in the sales pipeline. With accurate data, it is quite simple to be prepared and plan the activities for getting positive results.

Practical steps to increase your sales intelligence

Get briefed

 

Use a tool to curate and filter the latest relevant articles for your sales teams to give them the maximum opportunity to build sales intelligence.

 

You can use several tools for this purpose, and you can filter the entire web to pull out the relevant articles. Example;

 

  • Set a keyword filter to see all the latest articles on specific clients or topics, show only those from certain trusted industry websites you want. Example; latest articles on startups from the top 40 sites.

 

  • Set a domain filter for your competitors to see all the new content they publish. Example; recent articles on Marketo.

 

  • Enter the Twitter handles of clients and industry experts to see the articles they are sharing daily. Example; recent content on SEO from top Twitter experts.

 

Add value

Share your insight depending on what you have learned so far. Anyone can share an article or click on a link. Take sufficient time to personalize it with your questions, comments, and reflections. Customer relationship management features include every possibility to have a deeper understanding of customers. 

 

Developing sales intelligence needs time to learn, understand, and reason. You can be even more productive using filters and tools to bring the latest relevant content to your sales team’s attention and working as a team to make more sense of sharing and latest trends to add more value for your customers.

 

Conclusion

Sales Intelligence is the smart way to sell; it shortens the sales cycle and gives the sales rep access to insightful data for rapidly driving the deal to the closing stage. Things get even easier for the sales representatives when their sales CRM has an in-built sales intelligence feature that focuses on more sales. It cuts down their additional tasks and provides them with a better understanding of the leads for creating a better relationship and increasing their sales. There are some other similar excellent sales software solutions in the market.

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