Sales Intelligence: A Simple Guide to closing more deals

Clients’ purchasing journey is no longer linear. Today’s buyers are more independent and digitally literate. Hence, prospects expect customization at every touchpoint of the sales cycle. 

However, customization is impossible with assumptions and inaccurate insights. 

Every 2 out of 5 salespeople name prospecting as the most difficult aspect of the sales process.

As such, contact centers must offer their conventional sales playbooks a technology boost – in the form of B2B sales intelligence – to effectively push a deal over the finish line. 

The squeezing pressure due to the colossal data ocean is already influencing sales executives to bet on cutting-edge sales technologies (like AI) to examine data and suggest the best possible steps forward.

What is Sales Intelligence?

B2B sales intelligence is a blanket term for tools and solutions that help salespeople find, gather, and understand their potential and existing clients from multiple public data sources. 

This tech-powered toolkit enables salespersons to perform focused market research on enterprises, allowing them to connect with the right buyer with the right message, and at the right time.

Did you know the global sales intelligence market size is expected to grow at 10.6% CAGR between 2021 and 2030?

The days of opening dozens, or even millions, of tabs about one potential client are gone. Besides, complex B2B sales processes go beyond just numbers and names. 

Sales AI solutions blend proactive prospect information with real-time buying patterns in a single interface, helping sales executives find well-suited clients and tailor their outreach to seal more deals.

Consequently, with such high-quality insights, forward-looking organizations can stay ahead of the ever-evolving target market and thus shine in the minefield of hungry competitors. 

Benefits of Sales Intelligence

In today’s business ecosystem, AI sales software enables sales teams to tap into unchartered territories and create a winning playbook. The following are the benefits of AI sales tools for B2B companies:

1. Gives Back Time to Sales Reps

Constantly monitoring prospects through sales AI tools make it easier to understand their sentiments and spot prospects actively involved in a purchasing decision. 

Moreover, automated sales intelligence provides all these relevant data in just a few clicks. 

Accordingly, sales reps can send automated follow-ups on multiple leads depending on their quality and value.

This method saves effort and time, which would have been wasted going after low-interest prospects. More time for sales professionals means more selling time, resulting in increased sales.

2. Data Quality Improves by Notches

Sales data quality is linearly associated with the quality of corporate decision-making. 

Tech suites and cold pitching are futile if they are not reaching the right prospect. 

Several companies fail to realize that bad data can cost them around US$ 13 Mn every year. 

While the immediate impact includes disturbed revenue pools, low-quality sales data result in an increasingly complex data ecosystem and inept decision-making over the long term. Sales monitoring systems fill the data loopholes by augmenting it with all the insights available to sales representatives. 

Companies can find out a prospect’s name, organization, designation, and the department just by his/her email address. 

In addition, marketing and sales intelligence tools collect fresh, up-to-the-moment information, which organizations can inject into their technology platforms.

3. Healthier Interactions with Prospects

More often than not, salespeople with minimal idea of prospects keep focusing on their companies’ offerings instead of clients’ aspirations, preferences, and problems. 

B2B sales intelligence platforms keep sales executives from committing such a mistake. They help salespersons determine prospects’ needs and create the correct talking points, thus, steering the conversation to a course where they receive favorable responses.

Thanks to digitization, today’s customers go through multiple information sources before making a purchase. 

Hence, salespeople must do their homework properly to make a positive first impression and tailor every interaction with prospects. This boosts client experience, response rates, and above all, the possibility of more lead conversions.

4. Well-informed Sales Script

Better the insights, the better the sales strategy. 

In general, the ideal customer profile (ICP) incorporates location, department, company size, and industry. 

This focused client profile is a product of the C-suite’s guesswork. However, as organizations flourish, this ICP becomes obscure. 

For laser-focused sales efforts, sales reps must understand the industry and buyers more.

Fortunately, B2B sales intelligence complements the ICP by accumulating business models, intent data, and ownership. With these prospects’ relevant data, sales leaders can craft better strategies to turn prospects into loyal clients.

5. Helps Spot Upselling/Cross-selling Opportunities

The sales cycle is not over after closing a deal with a prospect. 

For cloud service providers, in particular, upsell, cross-sell, and renewal is crucial to garnering revenue. 

Cross-sells boost businesses’ sales by 20%, while upsells do nearly the same – increasing revenue by 10-30%.

B2B sales AI software helps understand buyer journeys by mapping out customer foot traffic data. The location-aware insights enable sales reps to pinpoint the product campaigns that drive buyers into their companies’ online stores. 

As such, they can mark the products/services that gather the most eyeballs. Based on this information, sales teams can upsell a premium version of an offering to those buyers.

Access to a constant flux of actionable sales insights helps ramp up average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV), thereby sustaining revenue growth.

How Does Sales Intelligence Software Work?

Generally, sales intelligence software aggregates relevant data from millions of publicly available websites, social media profiles, publications/reports/evaluations, and visitor cookies. It then matches the data to the profiles in its database.

The process includes prospecting native and third-party tools to gather news, trends, demographic information, and insights from previous interactions between buyers and sellers.

The result allows sales reps to gain in-depth information about each prospect or existing client in a single user-friendly platform without having to conduct hours of research.

Most sales intelligence software work alongside your CRM and focuses on the following:

• Cleaning and enriching your customer data to keep your CRM up-to-date
• Identifying the best prospects and generating solid leads
• Gathering critical information to personalize your sales strategy

How Does Sales Intelligence Boost the B2B Sales Process?

Sales intelligence boosts your B2B sales by focusing on these three main areas of sales operations.

Creating an Ideal Customer Profile

To nail the B2B sale, your sales and marketing team must work together to shape an ideal customer profile (ICP) for your niche.

A sales intelligence tool will help you create a data-driven customer profile instead of just relying on the opinions of leadership. It will analyze your current customer base to find commonalities and capture new data points to figure out companies that match your ICP.

For instance, if your ICP is a manager of call centers with less than a hundred employees, the sales intelligence tool will create a list of prospects that fits the bill. You can then direct your sales and marketing efforts to them, i.e., where it counts.

Qualifying and Scoring Leads

Once your ICP is on point, sales intelligence tools will help you qualify and rank leads to maximize your efforts on the most promising prospects.

They do so by tracking prospects’ behavior and responses, such as the pages they visit, the keywords they search for, and whether they open your mail and download additional content. Then the intelligent tools use this data to score leads, telling your sales rep who they should prioritize.

Knowing your leads’ behavior also helps determine when to stop chasing them. With KPIs like average time-to-revenue and average sales cycle, you can decide whether the prospect needs a nudge, de-prioritizing, or counting them as closed-lost.

Personalizing Your Outreach

With sales intelligence tools, you will have a clear picture of the needs and interests of your prospect and what content they’ve interacted with. This will enable your sales team to tailor their conversations more effectively.

For instance, let’s say that you have the intelligence that your prospect has read a blog post on your product feature and educated himself on the subject. So while dealing with such leads, you can dive deeper into the lesser-known details of your product and how it benefits them.

Such nurturing will move you closer to closing the deal.

ICP for Sales Intelligence

We’ve mentioned how sales intelligence tools help you define your ideal customer profile, enabling you to boost your B2B sales. Let’s dig deeper into the concept of ICP and why you need it.

What is an ICP?

An ICP, or Ideal Customer Profile, is an in-depth description of your perfect buyer. Your ICP should have the paint points, budget, and qualities that make it the ideal fit for your product or service.

Why would businesses buy your product or services? Primarily to increase their income, reduce costs or improve efficiency. A company that can maximize these goals with your product while rewarding you with steady revenue would be your ideal ICP.

What is the Need for ICP?

An ICP enables your team to channel their efforts in the right place. Without it, they would be shooting the arrow in the dark.

Here are some departments that can benefit from ICP:

Sales

With ICP, your sales team can generate targeted leads and personalize outreach with a message that answers their queries or solve their problem. The result is greater productivity, more conversions, and higher revenue.

Marketing

Having ICP in marketing helps you select the right channel at the right time to reach prospects. You can create targeted campaigns throughout the marketing funnel with content that resonates with potential buyers.

Other Departments

Having a clear idea of your customer can benefit departments other than sales and marketing. For instance, your product development team can add helpful new features, or your leadership can refrain from making decisions that can turn the customers away.

How to Create Your Sales intelligence ICP?

You can create your sales intelligence ICP by following the 5 steps mentioned below.

Step 1: Identify Your Current Best Customers

You are most likely to find an ICP from your current client base. Identify businesses that have a long-standing relationship with you and derive the most value from your solution.

Also, look for organizations that have expanded the contract with you. Learn about these customers and the characteristics they share.

Step 2: Reach Out to Your Super-Users

Once you’ve prepared the list of best customers, talk to them about what they love most about your product or service. Ask them how they found you, why they chose you, and what pain points your solution has helped them solve.

Step 3: Research Common Attributes

With enough data, you can start researching them to find common attributes that your best customers share.

Perhaps they belong to the same industry or location or have similar funding/valuations or employee size. Maybe your most frequent customers are businesses looking to grow fast.

Identifying such recurring patterns and trends will help you repeat your success.

Step 4: Create Your ICP Template

After completing the research, it’s time to build an ICP template.

Ensure that the template contains critical criteria such as industry, location, budget, company size, business goals, paint points, current technology used, and the buying process.

The more specific your template, the better you’ll be able to target leads.

Step 5: Monitor and Adjust Your ICP

Creating an ICP is not a one-time job. As your business grows and evolves, so must your ICP.

It involves updating the ICP based on new trends, changing market scenarios, and customer feedback.

Continually improving your ICP will ensure that it always stays relevant and effective.

Sales Intelligence Vs. Business Intelligence: Is There Any Difference?

From all that you’ve gathered about sales intelligence till now, it may seem like business intelligence. But though these two overlap in some areas, they are two very distinct concepts.

Definition

Sales Intelligence

Sales intelligence refers to a wide range of tools and tech solutions that provide high-quality data on prospects to the sales and marketing team.

The teams use these data to focus on targeted prospects and personalize their marketing and sales campaigns throughout the buyer’s journey to increase their chance of converting.

Business Intelligence

On the other hand, business intelligence(BI) is software and tech tools that gather, store, and analyze data produced by the business.

They allow easy interpretation of complex business data, enabling enterprises to make better short-term and long-term decisions.

The Difference

Here are five significant factors that differentiate sales intelligence from business intelligence:

• SI is primarily for sales and marketing teams, whereas BI insights may be helpful for the entire organization, especially enterprise analysts.
• BI covers market insights like news, research, finance, and economic trends. SI is limited to data, events, and trends related to current and prospective customers.
• BI mainly draws insight from historical data, while SI provides real-time buying signals.
• BI mainly deals with what business events took place and how they occurred. SI focuses on the ‘why’ of these events.
• BI helps companies identify new market opportunities, analyze the demand for their product or service in the new market, and the impact of their marketing efforts. SI, on the other hand, helps managers streamline their marketing and sales strategy for optimum success.

The Similarities

Now that we’ve understood the difference between the two, let’s look at some areas where they are similar.

Firstly, both BI and SI deal with data, just different kinds. Your leadership can use both these intelligence to make impactful decisions.

Secondly, BI and SI can cooperate on a strategic level. While you can use BI tools to understand how your business operates, SI tools will help you analyze why it performs that way. Combining the two insights will help companies make their operation more cost-effective.

Finally, using both SI and BI in strategy-making will help your business perform better.

For instance, you found from your BI tools that your prospect is expanding operation. You can then use the SI tools to understand their pain points, needs, and behavior and use the contact information provided by the tool to reach out to them.

Combined Use of SI and BI

Here are some areas where combining BI and SI will give you a competitive advantage.

 Content Creation

Use BI to create relevant content that resonates with your customers. Analyze their response, such as open rates, shares, etc., using SI tools to decide what kind of content works best.

Lead Scoring

Leverage your business data to create your ICP. Use SI tools to reach them with a personalized message.

Striking at the Right Time

Stay updated on the latest industry news, trends, and challenges with BI tools. Use SI tools to understand who might currently benefit from your product/service and reach out to them.

Empowering Your Reps

With BI and SI tools, your reps will have all the necessary information at their fingertips while dealing with their clients. It will better enable them to position your product as the solution.

Forecasting

Using BI and SI can help you foresee shifts in demand, changing customer habits, buying behavior, etc.

How Does Sales intelligence Improve the Customer Experience?

B2B buyers require a different marketing approach than retail buyers. They often prefer to do their own research instead of being fed information by the sales rep through forceful conversations.

This is why today’s B2B salespeople must be very effective with email, video, and social media marketing, other than cold calls. Moreover, they should try to meet their customers exactly where they are in the buying funnel.

A sales intelligence tool will help you meet these goals. It will provide you with enough information about your prospect enabling you to warm them up with personalized messaging that resonates with them, keeping in account their prior knowledge and behavior.

What’s more, with real-time sales trigger alerts and intent data, you can reach out to them at the right time when they will value your call. It will enable you to provide a better B2B experience and win deals over your competitors.

5 Best Sales Intelligence Tools

Sales intelligence tools could be the difference between you closing or losing deals. Make the former happen with these five powerful sales intelligence platforms.

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn sales navigator is a sales intelligence tool that helps sales rep to tap into LinkedIn’s extensive network.

The premium LinkedIn feature provides leads information, contact details, and other insights to improve social selling on the platform.

The plan ranges from $79.99 to $131.25 monthly.

2. Clearbit

Clearbit offers two excellent features: Prospector and enrichment.

Prospector helps you pinpoint the target account, get their contact information and create a detailed customer profile. Enrichment, on the other hand, helps update the existing leads in your CRM.

They offer customized pricing, ranging from $99 to $199 monthly.

3. HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub is a complete package with CRM and analytics to supercharge your sales.

Its email templates and automation features will quickly expand your outreach.

It also has interaction and engagement tracking features to track buyers’ journeys and follow up with accurate messaging.

The pricing starts from $45 per month.

4. Prospect.io

This sales intelligence software fits seamlessly into your CRM and uncomplicates your life.

Features such as chrome extension help you find prospects with a click and send multi-channel outbound campaigns at a scale.

You can manage your entire pipeline, track performance, and close deals through a single app.

The pricing ranges from $39 to $499 per month.

5. Demandbase Sales Intelligence Cloud

The software puts real-time sales intelligence into your daily workflow.

They help you target the right account based on the company’s firmographics, technology profiles, and other connection points.

Further, their social insights and intent data enable you to contact prospects at the right time with the right messaging.

They offer customized pricing based on the number of users.

Conversation Intelligence & Sales Intelligence: A Match Made in Heaven

Sales intelligence and conversation intelligence are two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle – a puzzle that helps organizations boost their profit margins. 

As discussed earlier, B2B sales intelligence software offers sales reps critical insights into potential clients gathered from various open sources to learn the exact concerns of prospects and always stay ahead in conversations.

Conversation intelligence, on the other hand, combines the adaptive powers of AI and natural language processing (NLP) to automatically record and assess critical themes in routine sales conversations so that sales professionals can focus more on listening. 

Conversational software understands buyers’ intent, sentiments (emotional intelligence), and meaning (text or speech). The software then returns those sales conversation insights to the salespeople in an easy-to-use format that they can employ in their cold pitching.

Both these intelligent platforms are a cure to having to go through thousands of data tabs manually and recorded calls, toiling to find and jot down vital points. 

Using the best of both worlds will help contact centers stay on top of buyers’ behavior trends before, during, and after the conversations. 

Moreover, combining all these datasets will help businesses paint a complete picture of their potential clients and deliver better experiences. The outcome is more conversions and higher revenues.

JustCall IQ is a popular conversation intelligence solution that packs advanced features like real-time transcription, AI scoring, moment analysis, sentiment analysis, coaching insights, and live agent assist. It comes bundled with JustCall’s premium plan.

JustCall is a leading cloud phone system used by 6,000+ businesses worldwide.

Schedule your free demo today and learn from experts what conversation intelligence can do for your B2B sales. Or simply sign up and get started right away.