Align Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing have often clashed because it’s traditionally difficult to understand which specific activities are yielding results.
Marketing can feel like sales isn’t following up on the leads they’re generating, while sales might feel like the leads they’re receiving are of low quality.
With sales intelligence, both marketing and sales teams have access to the same deep insights about buyers. This naturally aligns them and removes guesswork about what messaging or campaigns might work best for any given account.
Sales intelligence makes it easy for marketing to craft highly relevant campaigns that flow naturally with sales’ efforts to engage key buyers. Instead of worrying about attribution for a deal, the teams work in lockstep to drive revenue.
Get into Deals Earlier
Too often, sellers get into deal conversations late because they had no idea an account was in-market. By the time you start a conversation, the buyer is already two-thirds of the way through their journey and has come to their own conclusions and biases about what they need to achieve their goals. At this point, you have forfeited your ability to influence decision making.
Collecting the right sales intelligence is like having a crystal ball that tells you about upcoming deals.
Intent data uncovers buyers that are just beginning their buying process. You’ll be able to shape and create demand, rather than react to it.
Pre-intent data — like the firmographics, psychographics, technographics, and market intelligence mentioned above — can reveal companies who haven’t begun a buying process, but look like they’ll be a good fit soon. That information allows your teams to build a proactive plan to shape the buyer’s thinking and build brand awareness and trust.
Improve Prioritization
Sellers waste a lot of time, money, and resources hunting down the wrong people and trying to figure out which accounts to target. Only 32% of a seller’s time is spent actually interacting with buyers.
Sales intelligence cuts through the noise to reveal which accounts should be your top priority.
Uncover the Buying Team
Modern buying teams are big. Gartner places the number at 14 to 23 people for the average buying committee. The chances of closing a deal hinge on your teams’ ability to uncover and influence as many members of the buying team as possible.
Without complete coverage across a buying committee, salespeople risk the possibility of:
- Last-minute stakeholders entering the buying process and derailing progress
- A champion for your solution leaving the buying committee, deflating the odds of a deal getting done
Sales intelligence is key to finding every buying team member and aiding in your efforts to engage them. Using a persona map, you can visualize your in-roads into any given account. This gives you answers to incredibly important questions like:
- What departments have we engaged the most?
- Which departments have we not reached yet?
- What levels of the organization are we reaching?
- Does our coverage of this account align with our typical needs to win a deal?
- What level of engagement do we have with each member of the buying committee?
Sales intelligence gives you deep insights into an account’s buying team and reveals a path for increasing your engagement level.
Reach Your Buyers at the Right Time
Over half of B2B buyers expect a personalized experience as they move along their journey. But, because of their desire to remain anonymous as long as possible, it can be difficult to deliver them personalized campaigns.
Sales intelligence sidesteps this problem by constantly building an informed dossier of your buyer, regardless if they’re filling out forms or raising their hand.
Instead of being forced to send generic campaigns to a wide audience, sales intelligence gives you the power to create highly-targeted and personalized campaigns for all of your buyers.
Examples of just-in-time messaging that’s made possible by sales intelligence includes:
- An awareness campaign with content narrowly targeted to a specific industry, company size, and the job role of the recipient
- An offer for a top-of-funnel ebook just as a buyer is beginning their journey
- A personalized experience on your website that’s relevant to the account’s interests
- A campaign advertising a custom demo for audiences at the end of their buying journey
Sales intelligence makes it much easier to deliver the personalized experiences buyers crave.
Stronger Customer Retention
Existing customers are a company’s most valuable asset. It’s much easier and cheaper to grow the value of an existing account than to acquire a new one. It can be six to seven times more expensive to land new customers than retaining them.
Retaining customers — and growing their accounts — is a crucial strategy for any business.
By applying sales intelligence to your own customers, you can spot:
- New products or services they might be interested in
- Research they’re doing about your competitors — indicating they might be in danger of churning
- Important insights about their company performance — new funding rounds, opening of new locations, etc. — that inform new campaigns
