Does Your Company Use Sales Intelligence? Learn How

Sales Intelligence: Companies must go beyond focusing on customer prospecting methodologies, strategies, and processes. Of course, these aspects are essential to generate qualified leads and closing deals.

But, it is necessary to incorporate greater sales intelligence in all activities related to the commercial sector to achieve better results and excellent performance.

This intelligence in the commercial area can and should be implemented in the various processes carried out, involving:

• Study of the ideal customer profile and analysis of the competition;
• Lead generation operations through Big Data and artificial intelligence;
• Creation of prospecting lists;
• Lead qualification;
• Elaboration of automated and personalized cadence flows, with points of contact by email, telephone, and LinkedIn;
• Telephone sales pitch;
• Team performance indicators, both productivity and results delivered;
• Achieving goals;
• Leads generated, conversion rate, deals closed, and revenue generated;
• Sales pipeline analysis and sales projection.

Therefore, sales intelligence is essential to evaluate commercial strategies and their results, optimizing and improving processes and operations to generate better performance.

But What Is This Sales Intelligence?

In a simple and summarized way, sales intelligence encompasses all the intelligence generated through the analysis of information from the market, from the company itself, from current and potential customers, in addition to the internal processes of the commercial sector, prospecting strategies, and sellers’ performance.

Thus, based on such evaluations, it is possible to have solid, reliable, and structured data to identify bottlenecks and problems in the commercial sector, as well as to visualize opportunities to be explored by your business and behavior patterns of prospected leads.

That is, in the end, the intelligence promoted by the data and numbers of the operation guarantees insights for sales managers to facilitate decision-making regarding:

• Definition of the ideal customer profile ;
• Planning of commercial actions;
• Changes and redirection of commercial strategies;
• Differences in objectives and targets;
• Better allocation of resources;
• Hiring new employees in the retail sector, such as prospectors and salespeople;
• Among other decisions.

How Sales Intelligence Works In Practice

Sales intelligence is reflected in business processes, the team’s action plans, the salespeople’s actions in relation to leads and potential customers, and closing sales.

To be implemented in practice, it is necessary to adopt good practices in data analysis and technologies and tools to collect, measure and monitor information and performance indicators.

It is good to remember that this intelligence acts on four pillars. Let’s go to them:

• Planning: structuring and defining commercial actions based on studying information from potential customers, the market, and competitors.
• Data analysis: gathering data on prospecting strategies and commercial operations according to business objectives and selected sales KPIs.
• Assessment: with all the data and numbers collected, measured, and presented, it is possible to correctly assess the scenario of the company’s commercial area and make decisions based on these insights.
• Disclosure: in this cycle of intelligence in pursuit of high sales performance, it is essential to disseminate data and results on current strategies and processes, showing why changes, new actions, redirections, and other decisions were taken.

What Are The Main Benefits Of Sales Intelligence In Business?

We have already seen the importance of using sales intelligence focusing on sales performance. But what are the main points that are positively impacted by this strategy? Check out:

Gather Lead Data

The first very beneficial point of using intelligence is the collection of data on the customer’s profile, their challenges, pains and difficulties, purchasing habits, communication channels used, and the history of interactions and relationships with the company, among others. Details.

All this helps to discover which stage of the sales funnel the lead is in, creating more assertive approaches to evolve in the buying journey and identifying the customers most likely to buy.

Assist In Closing Deals

The intelligence process allows gathering a series of information about leads to help sales representatives, making prospecting more effective and facilitating the generation of value for leaders. Consequently, it is possible to increase sales and improve the conversion rate.

Optimize The Role Of The Sales Team

Imagine the sales rep running around with different activities and processes to try to hit targets. It is a waste of productivity and will not generate the expected results. 

Therefore, sales intelligence helps a lot, as it makes the team’s performance more efficient, with detailed knowledge about leads, and can improve its approach, which allows you to achieve better closing rates.

Improve Prioritization Of Business Activities

By creating histories of interactions and relationships with leads during cadence flows, it is possible to store a volume of data and results about these contacts. From there, management can visualize what type of interaction, at what time, and through which channel was most successful.

With all these patterns of behavior mapped and identified, managers can establish procedures for the team to achieve better results. For example, what’s the next step if a lead opens a prospecting email twice? Should the salesperson call, send another email, or schedule a follow-up? 

With all the previous studies mentioned, the sales representative will know precisely what to do and will be able to evolve with this lead.

Facilitate Sales Forecast Management

Sellers and managers can only sometimes look at the sales pipeline and predict which leads are most likely to close. That is, they need to determine the future sales projection.

However, with sales intelligence tools, it is possible to estimate which leads have the highest profile, need, opportunity, and budget to close a deal. In addition, you can also check the urgency of the information to complete the purchase.

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