Jaxson KhanThe best sales professionals today act as trusted advisors for their customers and prospects, which requires a ton of data and information. That’s why they use sales intelligence tools to help them manage everything they need to understand their accounts, competitors, and industry, and all the activities they do every day.
They view sales intelligence tools as just that – a tool that will help them in their roles, not replace them. They use sales intelligence tools to stay on top of all the sites, industry resources, people, and internal data available to them; everything that gives them a more efficient competitive advantage as they navigate deals towards close.
Let’s look at 5 ways a sales professional can use sales intelligence to enhance their roles.
1. Manage the deluge of information
There’s just so much information out there today that a person couldn’t possibly read it all consistently. Sales intelligence AI helps sales people develop a wider view of their industry and customers, allowing them to place important information into business context and have relevant conversations with customers and colleagues more efficiently. Sales pros need better ways to quickly acquire and digest key information on customers and prospects, which becomes time-consuming without a sales intelligence tool.
2. Understand contact intent
Sales pros are often looking for account-level insights, such as finding out which company has multiple contact points with their content online through website cookie data or tags on IT devices. But at a certain point they’ll need to engage with the people at these companies, and so they need to uncover the contact-level intent of these companies. Sales intelligence can help harness this information from social media channels, which is free. The tools can monitor the channels in real-time, connect people’s social profiles to their professional identities, and provide real-time insights into the topics and products they’re interested in.
3. Identify buying signals
Buying signals can come from numerous places online, like websites, press releases, articles in industry publications, video and webinar views, email newsletter clicks, report downloads, and product trial signups. Sales intelligence tools automatically gather all of this data and deliver it to sales pros without interrupting their daily routine. It helps them surface the accounts that will be receptive to their outreach efforts and gives them a reason to reach out.
4. Organize sales engagement activities
By integrating sales intelligence with sales engagement tools or CRMs, sales leaders can drive more meaningful actions within their teams. According to recent stats, only 77% of leaders see the value of this, yet only 25% of them are doing it. A documented data strategy will help sales leaders with this, as they’ll know what data and tools are available, who owns the data, who’s responsible for keeping it valid, and how to integrate it all.
5. Provide relevant reporting and analytics
Access to relevant reporting and analytics is important for both sales pros and their leaders. Sales pros want to know how they’re doing in comparison to themselves, their colleagues, and team benchmarks. Leaders take the reports and analytics to a higher level, using them to understand how sales is contributing to overall business outcomes and benchmarks. Additionally, they’ll use the numbers to identify gaps and other areas of opportunities for sales that might not be obvious otherwise. For example, using customer support call reports to identify topics that aren’t being adequately covered during sales discovery calls.
Final thoughts
Sales intelligence is significantly impacting the profession as a whole right now and will continue to do so in the future, but it won’t entirely replace the human element in sales. It’s a tool that will enhance a sales professional’s work, helping them sell better, more efficiently, and easily. Through sales intelligence, they’ll have better access to accounts, be able to position their solutions against the pain points of their prospects, and navigate a deal towards close more efficiently.
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