13/12/2019

In the current fast-paced business climate, it is essential for salespeople to quickly and effectively identify prospects and collect relevant data about these potential leads. As personalisation is increasingly important in sales outreach, sales prospecting requires more extensive prospect data and faster prospect search, and this is where sales intelligence comes in.

What is Sales Intelligence?

Sales intelligence is a term which covers a variety of technologies that enable salespeople to obtain, analyse, collect and evaluate data on prospects and their associated accounts. In other words, sales intelligence tools are used for searching and gathering information on potential targets. These are sales activities that would normally be done manually, but that are automated through sales intelligence. Due to this element of automation, sales intelligence can enable continuous updates on prospect data through online data collection. With the manual and fixed prospect lists of the past, constantly searching for new information on past prospects would have been unfeasible. Moreover, the depth of the company and contact data that sales intelligence tools can find is much more extensive than what can be realistically obtained manually, especially over a longer period of time.

Sales intelligence is able to obtain data in real-time from a variety of data sources to ensure maximum data quality and information cross-checking. The type of data that is gathered can range from job titles, financial details, account data, intent data to industry-specific data sources such as real estate data, credit ratings or vehicle information. Insights can go even deeper, into personnel moves, spending initiatives, expansions, buy-out sand other newsworthy events among many other things. It is also important to note that new types of datasets are constantly emerging and sales intelligence can ensure that your company stays up to date with these new information categories. As sales intelligence is a relatively new field, it is a fragmented market full of new players and consistently novel solutions worth looking out for. In addition, sales intelligence offers a certain degree of customizability versus typical sales information solutions, enabling a team to obtain the industry-relevant data that is most helpful for their particular product or service.

Sales intelligence in Europe versus other contients?

While there is an increasing amount of specialised sales and marketing tools available, their uses are typically homogenous over geographical regions. However, with sales intelligence, locality is an important factor to consider. This means that there are different implications when considering sales intelligence in Europe versus other areas of the world. For example, due to GDPR legislation in Europe, it can be more difficult to obtain relevant contact information, meaning that sales intelligence in Europe is different than in Asia. Furthermore, with GDPR laws contacting prospects through their individual email or phone number without an opt-in is not allowed, meaning that the type of information that can actually be used differs in Europe.

How can your organisation benefit from Sales Intelligence?

There are a variety of ways that your organisation can benefit from sales intelligence, no matter whether you’re employing sales intelligence in Europe or somewhere else. These are listed below so that you can think about implementing it into your marketing and sales process.

Personalised Outreach

As aforementioned, both in marketing and sales, personalised outreach is becoming increasingly essential. However, to individualise sales contact beyond using someone’s first name, relevant and up to date information is crucial. Sales intelligence enables your sales team to efficiently obtain said information and use it in how they approach prospects. Especially within social selling, a salesperson will be able to use intent or buying signal data to enhance their outreach by reaching the right customer with the right message at the right time. Conjointly, as most organisations employ account-based marketing practices personalised approaches are necessary to maximise the benefits of account mapping.

ICP and Segmentation

The ideal customer profile is one of the most basic but important concepts in sales prospecting. This profile is typically including key factors such as department, seniority level, function, job title, industry, company size and location. However, for many sales teams, and especially as a company undergoes significant growth, the ICP can become unclear and difficult to maintain. Sales intelligence can ensure that relevant information is easily and quickly accessible to keep a within the defined boundaries of what your ICP actually is.

Upselling and Cross-Selling

Existing contact data can also be obtained more effectively through sales intelligence. This can lead to your sales team identifying more opportunities for upselling through more specific intent data points that could represent additional needs. These, for example, could be personnel changes or new budget investments.

Account-Based Marketing and Account Mapping

Account-based marketing is becoming the standard approach to sales within most sales-focused organisations. Especially within long or complicated sales cycles, understanding all the key decision makers and relationships within a company is consequential in increasing sales. Sales intelligence can help improve and facilitate account mapping through more accurate and in-depth data as well as real-time updates.

Content

With marketing and sales alignment practices being implemented within the sales operations of most organisations, sales teams are increasingly encouraged to use content provided by the marketing team. However, to enable an effective use of this type of marketing material, it needs to be relevant to the prospects in question. Sales intelligence can provide aggregated data to the marketing team to understand what type of content will resonate the most with the specific industry and functions of the prospect.