Account-Based Experience Sales Effectiveness

5 Ways Sales Intelligence Feeds Sales Acceleration

June 3, 2022 —

3 min

As you look to grow company revenue, one of the key variables is the length of your sales cycle. The faster your sales team can close deals, the more bandwidth it has to pursue additional opportunities.

Sales intelligence (SI) is the practice of using data and analytics to provide your sales team with customer insights, including:

Which products and services they’re most interested in
Their pain points
Which competitors they may be researching
Customer contact history
How they have interacted with your owned platforms (website content, chatbots, digital ads, email marketing, etc.)
Firmographics and technographics
Likelihood to purchase, and
Projected deal size

With this data, your sales team can:

Create more effective sales pitches
Target marketing dollars more efficiently
Ultimately close more deals

When you combine better audience intelligence with more targeted marketing and specific sales pitches, you can close more deals, more quickly, for higher values. For instance, within the first year of implementing — which detects, identifies, and analyzes the sales intelligence data mentioned above — customers report that 6sense-prioritized accounts generate on average:

2x the deal value
10% higher win rate
25% fewer days to close

Here are four ways sales intelligence feeds sales acceleration.

1. Know Who Is In-Market

Many revenue teams build their pipelines through brute force. After defining their Target Addressable Market (TAM), they market to as many of them as possible — and also cold call as many of them as possible.

This is usually a huge waste of time and money.

Instead, you can use intent data to identify which of your ideal customers are currently searching for solutions. One of the biggest reasons that 6sense Qualified Accounts (6QAs) close faster is because those accounts were already primed to buy. We gather third-party intent data based on:

Keywords buying teams are searching
Third-party websites where they are searching for solutions
Third-party websites where they are researching competitors
Anonymous activity happened on your own web properties
Which companies are growing, and likely have budget to spend
And more

We then match this data to specific accounts, allowing you to see where you should target your efforts. This enables you to focus marketing dollars and sales rep outreach on the accounts that are most likely to buy.

2. Know What People Want and Need

By capturing which accounts are searching and what they’re researching, you can set up sophisticated marketing campaigns and email cadences.

Instead of using generic top-of-funnel digital ads to reach your entire TAM, you can target in-market accounts and segment them into different campaigns based on the keywords they have searched and other company characteristics.

For sales reps, the insights empower you to highlight the value propositions that matter when reaching out to prospects. This also helps you better serve customers, since you’re entering conversations with a better idea of their concerns.

3. Own the Conversation

When you know which accounts are in-market, you can prioritize outreach to increase your chances of being the first sales rep to speak with a potential customer.

This first-in-line position allows you to shape expectations for what the customer may need, and gives you a huge advantage when competing for the customer.

4. Sharpen Your Competitive Positioning

There’s a good chance your potential account is evaluating multiple solutions — or will soon. Since intent data can give you insights into who your customer is already researching, you’ll have a chance to highlight the superior areas of your product.

You can also highlight weaknesses in competing products so that, if your customer researches competitors, they will have a better idea about how to find potential deficiencies.

5. Know Who’s Likely to Bring the Most Revenue

Sales intelligence extends beyond the advantages of intent data. AI-driven pipeline analytics can spot which activities were common among past deals, and then compare that to the activities of current prospects.

This AI-alternative to traditional Lead Scoring removes the guesswork from figuring out which prospects are most likely to close. AI can also analyze the value of past deals and predict how much revenue a prospect is likely to generate once they become a customer.

This allows you to prioritize not only the accounts that are most likely to buy, but also the ones that are likely to be most valuable.

Conclusion

Looking for an edge over your competition? With the help of sales intelligence solutions and 6sense, you can access timely and accurate sales data and insights. Using this critical information, you’ll arm your sales reps with the necessary knowledge to: