Sales intelligence is any information businesses collect to make sales easier. It includes a range of tech solutions that help sales and marketing teams discover, analyze, present, and use B2B data to make more informed decisions. The overall purpose is to gain more insight into potential customers.
Scroll or use the menu below to discover more about the benefits of sales intelligence, the software and data that powers it, and the best platforms on the market.
What are the benefits of sales intelligence?
Sales intelligence delivers massive benefits to your sales and marketing teams by providing B2B data in an easily understandable way.
Here are five sales intelligence benefits:
1. Accurate data
Imagine how easy sales would be if you never hit a dead end and could reach the people you needed to talk to in one shot.
SaaSLeads don’t have to imagine any longer. They used Cognism’s Diamond Data® to book 80% of their demos, contributing to over £0.8 million of new business in Q1 2022.
Here’s what they said about using sales intelligence to win more deals:
“We’ve been a Cognism client since January 2022 and have a sales cycle of approximately 45 days. In Q1 2022, we closed £0.8 million. I don’t know exact figures, but many of the closed-won deals are attributable to Cognism’s premium data.”
2. Quality leads
Growing your pipeline is everything in B2B sales, but you can’t scale your pipeline without quality leads.
Localz is no stranger to using sales intelligence to grow its pipeline by 500%. This is just one of the many advantages the company experienced using Cognism.
They said:
“From October to April 2022, our outreach has grown 180%, and opportunity generation has rocketed to 500%. This is because we’re targeting the right people at the right time.”
3. Fast, predictable prospecting
Sales intelligence companies are notorious for helping teams prospect better and faster. One of the reasons is that many of them follow strict data compliance laws to ensure your teams aren’t calling anyone who has expressly asked not to be called.
Promotion prospects confidently because they use Cognism’s compliant data to book 33% of new business meetings in Southern Europe and save ten hours on administrative tasks weekly!
Here’s what they have to say about the benefits of using business intelligence for sales:
“You’ll be hard-pushed to find another platform that saves time and delivers results. It’s a lifeline for a BDR, and I couldn’t recommend it enough.”
4. Identifiable intent
Sales business intelligence lets you identify accounts actively searching for your product or service via intent data.
Using intent data, Keboola targets 20 potential customers a week. Out of those, at least two are ready to enter the sales funnel – a far cry from the lists of dead numbers they used to call.
Here’s how combining “who” with “when” changed the way Keboola sells:
“I believe Cognism is unique in providing the full package of intent data and Diamond Verified Data®. It’s a game-changer. We now have the right tools armed with the right data to make the biggest impact.”
5. Accelerated sales cycles
Sales intelligence gives you everything you need to make fewer calls, contact the most relevant people, and hit quota faster.
Drift extensively tested all the leading tools on the market before deciding on Cognism.
Why?
Because it did everything it promised, including delivering ROI in just thirty days!
They said:
“There are many data enrichment tools out there, and we’ve tried most of them. We can confidently say that Cognism has the highest coverage and most accurate data available.”
“For these reasons, we could easily sell the tool internally and get buy-in from senior management. The cost versus the value of what we are getting is very high. We couldn’t be happier with it.”
How does sales intelligence help you close more deals?
Now you know why you want to use sales intelligence for your business, how do you use it to close more deals?
Intelligence tools help boost closed-won deals in seven key ways:
1. Discover your Total Addressable Market
Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the total amount of revenue your B2B product or service can bring in.
It’s usually a revenue figure, but sometimes organizations express their TAM as the number of companies that have the potential to become customers. Businesses must know their TAM to:
Define budgets.
Forecast growth.
Segment their audience into smaller groups for marketing.
Knowing who is in your TAM keeps your sales team on track and stops them from wasting time trying to sell to people who don’t need your product.
Using the bottom-up method, sales intelligence solutions can help define accurate TAM.
Using your sales intelligence platform, you can analyze your existing client base, look for trends, and create and match buyer personas based on those trends.
2. Determine buying signals
We mentioned that one of the benefits of using sales intelligence solutions is closing deals faster. Determining buyer signals can help your SDRs achieve this by only reaching out to prospects who are ready to buy.
Sales intelligence monitors company websites, news sources, social networks, and more to identify marketing and sales trigger events that could signal that prospects are interested in buying.
For example, if a prospect has just raised a new round of funding, they may have the budget to spend. Once you have this information, your salespeople can get in touch and make a deal happen.
3. Gain real-time insights with intent data
Intent data is behavioral data on a company level. It shows when a target company researches your solution online by analyzing the websites they visit and what they do when they get there.
Like buying signals, intent data informs sales teams when prospects will be the most receptive to their messages so you can slide into their inbox before your competitors do.
4. Work smarter with CRM integrations
If you want better revenue numbers, the first step is to ensure your reps save time while being more productive.
Sales intelligence supports this by integrating with your existing tech stack and providing all the information your sales team needs in one place.
The result?
No more duplications, better organisation and less time spent on manual, repetitive tasks.
For example, your sales intelligence solution should integrate with most CRMs, so you never have to switch screens to use any of your different sales tools.
Secondly, you can set up software like Cognism to enrich your contact database automatically. This way, your team is always prospecting to the right people with the correct numbers.
5. Enrich your existing data
The more you know about a prospect, the easier it is to sell to them. Detailed information can help you find the right angle to craft a message that resonates with their pain points.
However, most CRMs aren’t kept up to date with complete and accurate data. B2B is constantly changing. People get new jobs, and companies merge and change ownership.
If your CRM isn’t up to date, you could miss important opportunities to reach out and close deals.
A sales intelligence platform fills these gaps and ensures all your contact information is up-to-date. It also gives you a new dimension of information, including financial insights, such as funding rounds and company news. So your sales team can grab new opportunities to get in contact and sell.
6. Improve your sales strategy
Successful sales teams plan for the future and allocate their resources in a way that maximises revenue. Sales intelligence can be an integral part of this, giving sales leaders the ability to forecast more accurately, formulate more effective strategies and drive more growth.
Sales intelligence excels in helping sales leaders better understand their prospects and customers, who they are, and how and why they buy. It provides the data that allows sales leaders to shorten the sales cycle and close more deals.
7. Enhance the customer experience
Forcing modern B2B buyers to engage with salespeople a certain way won’t win you any leads. Instead, buyers want to do their own research and then meet with a company when they decide what they need.
Today’s B2B salespeople need to be just as good with video, email and social media as they are on the phone. As a result, companies that provide the best B2B customer experience often win the deals over their competitors.
Sales intelligence can help you meet your prospects’ expectations and lead them to become customers. The more you know about your prospect, the easier it is to craft a message that resonates with them – and sales intelligence gives you all the information you need to connect with them on a meaningful level.
With sales triggers and intent data, sales intelligence helps you pick the moment when the prospect may be excited that you called. Then, all you have to do is demonstrate that you can solve their problem.
How does sales intelligence software work?
Sales intelligence software works by continuously crawling millions of publicly available websites, gathering relevant data, and matching it to profiles in its database.
Simple-to-use platforms allow salespeople to search, analyze and evaluate sales data.
When you bring sales intelligence into your B2B sales team, it helps you deliver numerous tasks more effectively, such as:
- Generating sales and marketing leads – With sales intelligence software, you can use data to create lists of individuals that match your ideal customer profile (ICP). You can also create lists of profiles that are similar to your existing customer base. It’s lead-generation gold.
- Setting up sales trigger alerts – Sales intelligence provides real-time data on your prospects. If an event happens that you need to know about, it’ll notify you.
- Enriching and cleaning your existing customer data – Sales intelligence refreshes your historical customer data and fills in any missing gaps.
- Personalizing your sales strategy – The more you know about a prospect, the more you can tailor how you sell to them. A personalized sales approach often yields higher-quality leads and more conversions.
- Conducting market research and gaining insights – Knowing how many potential leads are out there, you can forecast and allocate resources more accurately. You can also keep an eye on your competitors.
How does sales intelligence work with your CRM?
Your customer relationship management (CRM) system plays a valuable role in maximising the value of your sales intelligence software.
To get the most from the detailed, accurate data that sales intelligence solutions produce, you need somewhere to store it.
Your CRM is the digital filing cabinet that makes this possible.
Once it’s stored and available to access and edit, you can use it to identify new business and reach your prospects when they’re ready to buy.
You might be wondering, what’s the difference between sales intelligence, CRM software and business intelligence? Let’s clear that up:
What’s the difference between sales intelligence and CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps businesses log and administrate customer interactions.
Sales intelligence helps sales and marketing teams discover, analyse, and utilise data relating to prospects and customers.
So while the two work hand in hand, they are distinct from one another.
When choosing a sales intelligence solution, ensure it integrates with your CRM. You shouldn’t need to synchronise the two programs manually, and your sales intelligence may work as a plug-in inside your CRM without switching windows.
Once your sales intelligence software and CRM are talking to each other, you should be able to import and locate the new data in your CRM. For example, you could use sales intelligence to create a list of leads that match your ICP in a particular sector and then transfer it to your CRM.
Your CRM’s data points will vary depending on your selected sales intelligence solution. But you should find the following basic information:
– Name and contact info.
– Job title and level of seniority.
– Company information (size, location)
Sales intelligence can also show you better, more helpful information, including:
– Sales triggers – opportunity alerts signalling prospects might be ready to buy.
– Intent data – prospective buyers currently searching for your product and ready to enter your sales funnel.
Source: cognism.com