What is sales intelligence?
Sales intelligence is the process of using structured data to understand your clients and close more deals. It’s a relatively new field, but it’s quickly become essential for businesses of all sizes. Sales intelligence software collects data from a variety of sources, including social media, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, websites, or any other public records. This data is then organized and analyzed to help salespeople identify patterns and trends.
The goal of sales intelligence is to help salespeople close more deals by understanding their clients better. With sales intelligence, businesses can identify potential customers, understand their needs, and craft targeted sales pitches.
Sales intelligence is a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes. However, it’s especially valuable for small businesses, which often don’t have the resources to dedicate to market research.
Let's look at the benefits of sales intelligence and how it can help you grow your business.
Develop a sales intelligence strategy
As the global marketplace becomes more competitive, it's more important than ever for companies to have a strong sales intelligence strategy.
There are a number of different ways to collect sales intelligence, including primary research, secondary research, and social listening. Once you've gathered your data, you'll need to analyze it to see what patterns and trends emerge. Based on your findings, you can then develop a sales intelligence strategy that will help you close more deals and grow your business.
Here are a few tips to get you started:
1. Set up Google Alerts
One of the best ways to stay on top of what is happening around you. What your competition is doing, or what is new for your list of leads? Start with the setup of Google Alerts for their company name and if it's relevant, add a few key executives. This way, you'll be notified whenever they're mentioned in the news or on social media. You can then use this information to adjust your own sales strategy accordingly and especially improve the timing of your sales pitch.
2. Use social listening tools
Social media is a goldmine of information and insights, so you need to make sure you're monitoring what's being said about the prospect's brand, industry, and competition. Social listening tools can help you do this by tracking mentions and keywords across all social media channels. This way, you can quickly identify any positive or negative sentiment and address it accordingly. You can also use social listening to see what topics are trending in their industry and adapt your sales strategy accordingly.
3. Conduct primary research
If you want to really get to the bottom of what your target market wants and needs, you need to conduct primary research. This involves conducting surveys, interviews, and focus groups with your target market. This type of research can be time-consuming and expensive, but it's worth it if you want to gain a deep understanding of your market.
4. Use secondary research
If you don't have the time or a large budget for primary research, you can still gather a lot of useful information by conducting secondary research. This involves using data that has already been collected by others, such as data collected by government or industry bodies. These data are available to the general public and are a great source of information. But sometimes you'll need some time to structure data. A great example of a tool for secondary research is WeData, which focuses on mining relevant data about the company and its marketing from website.
The benefits of sales intelligence
Sales intelligence is a term that refers to the data and information that sales teams use to guide their selling efforts. It can include information about potential customers, market trends, and competitor activity. Sales intelligence can give your sales team a major advantage in the B2B market.
B2B sales are often complex, and the competition can be fierce. That's why sales intelligence is so important. It can help your sales team win more business by understanding the customer better, staying ahead of the competition, and making more informed decisions.
There are many benefits of sales intelligence, including the ability to:
Make better decisions about where to focus your selling efforts
Identify the advancement of your prospect
Generate more qualified leads
Speed up the proposal process
Improve customer onboarding and overall satisfaction
If you’re looking for ways to improve your overall performance, sales intelligence is a great place to start.
How to get started with sales intelligence in B2B
Quite a lot of information can be found on your prospect websites, their annual reports, company history, social media profiles, etc. But it makes sense to conduct advanced research. Not many people are aware, but it is possible to uncover a large part of a company's marketing activities by scanning its website. WeData is a simple solution to obtain loads of highly relevant data with an incredible level of detail. This way you can have a much better understanding of the company's digital literacy and adjust your strategy accordingly. This is beneficial whether you are tender, making a cold call, or any other sales pitch, as using such information increases the chance of being relevant to your customer.
If the digital environment or marketing is not your primary focus. There are a number of different rather general sales intelligence software platforms available such as SalesforceIQ, HubSpot Sales, and Datanyze Insider. When using such tools be cautious about data quality. A big challenge might be to find trustworthy data sources. Remember, that wrong underlying data can easily undermine your professionalism.
Conclusion
In conclusion, sales intelligence in B2B is essential for making more sales and growing your business. To get a competitive advantage, analyze your lead's website with WeData. WeData provides insights into your lead's marketing and digital presence. Having such information will help you craft a more effective sales strategy and close more deals.