so what exactly is it?. Well Peter Coffee (VP and Head of Platform
research of Salesforce) describes sales intelligence using this
metaphor: “Without sales intelligence, you’re driving with dirty
windows. With it? GPS with real-time traffic/weather feed”.
This statement refers to if your sales team is consistently making
cold calls with low returns, having a hard time finding the right
decision makers, or only have enough time to find out the most basic
information about potential buyers, that probably means you need better
sales intelligence.
What is Sales Intelligence?
There is nothing particularly revolutionary about sales intelligence,
it is simply any information that can be useful to improve sales
effectiveness. This can mean researching a prospect, their target
market, their industry, their company, who the big decision makers are,
or the most recent news about their business. Anything you can work with
to make a sale more likely to happen. This arms sales teams with better
insights into who exactly they are engaging with and enables them to
strategize their approach in order to increase favorable results. Better
sales intelligence can give you the strategic vision to uncover better
sales opportunities. Just think of a prepared sales person as the
classic cocktail party hero – better prepared to interact with everyone
effectively.
Peter Ostrow of the Aberdeen Group says “You need to know a lot about
that customer, not just their name, their email address, their URL,
that’s almost commoditized information. None of this information
necessarily opens up a chance to have a conversation that will lead to a
sale. True sales intelligence gives your reps information they need to
advance a conversation that potentially leads to a close.” For example,
it may be advantageous to figure out why a particular prospect would
want to buy from you. What business problems are they struggling with
and how can your product or service be the solution?
A Big Issue with Sales Intelligence
Ever since the economic downturn of 2008’s global financial crisis,
companies have been forced to cut spending and sales people have faced
more and more pressure to meet quotas. This has meant that sales
professionals have less time to properly research individual leads in a
world where in-depth information has never been as important and
advantageous for business. This hardly seems fair!
The rise of the internet has presented sales people with an
unimaginable wealth of data to research potential clients. But this
information can often be difficult to acquire because of the vast body
of unfiltered and unorganized internet data.
Researching a prospect in today’s digital world can be tedious and
take up an unnecessary amount of a sales person’s time. Time that could
be spent on the phones selling. Internet data about an
individual lead is not well organized or focused on the needs of a sales
professional who’s about to walk into a meeting with a client. Did they
walk in there having thoroughly researched that potential client’s
business? Did they discover a recent investment made by that company?
Did they even find common interests/hobbies from their social media
accounts to perhaps break the ice with? Or did they go in with the bare
minimum of information, hoping for the best, simply because there wasn’t
enough time to sift through all the internet data when quotas still
need to be met? Sure, companies have a great wealth of information, but
it’s usually not accessible to the members of the sales team in the way
they need it. “Typically, there is a lot of knowledge out there,” says
John Aiello, CEO of SAVO, “The gap is that people can’t find it.”
Ease of discovery is a key metric for sales-intelligence success.
Unless the information sales teams need is simple to find, it will
probably be left untapped. According to an Accenture study in the US and
UK, almost 60% of sales managers have to use numerous sources in order
to collect all the relevant information needed to be successful in their
job. A similar number claimed that this information was poorly
distributed across the organization.
It is “shocking” how few companies truly help their salespeople
prepare to have meaningful conversations, says CSO Insights authors Jim
Dickie and Barry Trailer. “We may want them to do it. We may even demand
they do it. But precious few of us give salespeople access to the sales
intelligence to actually do it.” Only 9.7% of businesses said they had
implemented programs to facilitate easy access to sales intelligence.
The remaining 90.3% admitted that obtaining sales intelligence “required
some hunting, a lot of hunting, or was not available at all.”
It is clear that 90.3% of businesses would benefit from changing
their current method of sales intelligence acquisition. They need a
solution. But how?
Sales Intelligence Services
The top performing firms have invested in sales intelligence
services. The Aberdeen Group recently discovered that over 60% of B2B
sales professionals said that sales intelligence helped them get more
sales leads and better quality sales leads.
Sales intelligence services save your sales team the time and effort
by finding verified leads for them based on your prospect criteria and
compiles quality, detailed sales intelligence on each of them.
For example, not only does Connectors Marketplace consistently
provide your team with a comprehensive list of relevant prospects, their
phone numbers, and email, they also give you the latest news about the
current company your prospect works for, as well as a link to their
LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ account. With easy access to their social
media, social selling becomes a lot easier. It also allows your sales
reps to learn more about the person or engage with them online to
establish a stronger relationship.
The right sales intelligence can let your salespeople know which
companies are the best fit for your solution, and help them find leads
that are most likely to buy from you. It gives your sales people
detailed strategies for how to approach each company or each type of
decision maker, and it gives your sales team a better understanding of
your customer. There’s always a learning curve with finding a new
customer. Better sales intelligence makes that learning curve less
steep.
Having the most relevant data at your fingertips ensures that your
sales people are selling to prospects and current customers as
effectively as possible. They can spend more time selling and less time
doing the legwork and research involved with tracking down data and
finding phone numbers. It’s never been easier and faster for salespeople
to do their jobs with these services, and arms them with information
they need to have better-informed, more productive, more credible
conversations with clients.
Key Benefits of Sales Intelligence
Let me outline the key benefits your sales team will experience with a sales intelligence service:
• Find the most relevant and influential contacts much faster.
• Have a better insight on competitors, the buying habits of potential
buyers, and your potential buyer’s position in the marketplace.
• Automate and centralize data on both cold call contacts and established contacts.
• Improve sales efforts when engaging with prospects that are more prepared to buy.
• Increase the number of sales with increased automation and data accuracy.
When it comes to sales intelligence services, it’s not about how to
get your sales people to do more, it’s about facilitating them so they
can do better. Better quality sales leads, better-informed
conversations, and better relationships with potential clients are
ultimately going to lead to better success in selling. With the current
problems facing businesses today, better sales intelligence is an issue
that all companies will inevitably have to address at some point. Given
the increasingly competitive nature of today’s market, it’s better to
deal with this sooner – not later.
What is Sales Intelligence? | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News
No comments:
Post a Comment