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2022-08-15Hi1.0

With increasingly more buying information available online, buyers today conduct the majority of their purchase research on their own, long before they ever reach out to a salesperson.

For salespeople, this means their data-collection capabilities and priorities need to advance, as well. It's no longer enough for sales reps or SDRs to gather only the easy-to-access phone numbers and email addresses — they need to find ways to dig under the surface and find the kind of prospect data that helps move the needle.

This is where sales intelligence software comes in. Sales intelligence helps marketing and sales teams gather and curate accurate, actionable, and deeply insightful information about their prospects.

In this article, we'll go over everything you need to know about sales intelligence, including why it's quickly becoming a non-negotiable for sales and marketing, which data makes the most impact on the sales process, and how to leverage your sales intelligence resources to close more deals.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is Sales Intelligence Software?

Sales intelligence software provides salespeople with clean, up-to-date contact information about both individual prospects and their respective companies.

Sales intelligence software makes easy work of collecting and organizing data like phone numbers, email addresses, and basic organizational structure.

Importantly, though, it also goes further than that. Sales intelligence software also provides marketers and salespeople relevant and timely information about purchasing context and behavior.

Sales intelligence platforms continuously crawl prospects' websites, publishments, social media profiles, and web mentions to synthesize hard-to-find data like:

Organizational decision-makers and reporting structure
Financial positioning and budgetary needs
Revenue metrics, including year-over-year growth
Company initiatives
Tech stack details

Sales intelligence software also provides information about buyer intent by gathering and analyzing data on prospects' buying signals.

The main goal of sales intelligence is to provide everyone involved in the sales process a better, more complete understanding of their potential customers. This understanding helps salespeople provide a more intuitive and personalized buying experience to the prospect.

Marketers and sales reps leverage sales intelligence data to help them with:

Lead generation and nurture campaigns
Lead qualification and nurture campaigns
Up- and cross-sell opportunities

Sales intelligence can also help businesses develop a robust ideal customer profile (ICP).

While most companies can easily make an ICP based on demographic and firmographic data, sales intelligence can help them make a more complete profile by adding data about buying intent and technographic details.

The best sales intelligence software easily integrates with existing software solutions; sales intelligence software is designed to enhance the capabilities of your tech stack.

Tip: Check out our free ebook for building a successful tech stack for your business.

Benefits of Sales Intelligence

The shift to an increasingly digital sales process has made sales intelligence transform from a nice-to-have platform to one that is non-negotiable.

Not only will a sales intelligence solution help keep sellers proactive and competitive, it can also considerably grow their business opportunities — companies that implemented a marketing intelligence solution reported 35% more leads in their pipeline and 45% higher quality leads.

Let's have a closer look at some of the other major benefits to implementing a sales intelligence solution.

Cleaner Data

Sales intelligence software platforms provide salespeople with clean, up-to-date data. Many intelligence tools will also delete duplicate or inaccurate data points, and integrate the data into existing CRM and/or sales acceleration platforms.

Don't underestimate the power of clean data — sellers can save tons of time and shorten the sales cycle by simply having the right contact information at their fingertips.

Higher Productivity

Few things are more frustrating for a salesperson than picking up the phone, enthusiastically preparing to engage a prospect, and finding that they had the wrong number.

Sales intelligence helps salespeople stay motivated to meet their quotas by providing them an accurate and complete profile of the prospects they contact.

It also boosts productivity by delivering more high-quality leads into the pipeline and making the qualification process fast and easy for sellers.

Better Decision-Making

Sales intelligence software doesn't just find clean data; it also organizes and curates it in a way that makes decision-making easy.

Sales intelligence software can analyze and pinpoint specific buying signals that give insights to salespeople about how and when to best reach out to prospects. Data like this helps teams connect with the right buyer at the right time.

Improved Forecasting

With a better idea of the type and quantity of prospects coming into the pipeline, sales managers can create more accurate sales forecasts. Accuracy in anticipated revenue is an important metric, especially for small businesses hoping to entice investors with solid, predictable growth plans.

What Data Is Needed for Sales Intelligence?

Sales intelligence platforms analyze and collect a number of data types to give salespeople the insights they need to work the pipeline. They get their data from a wide variety of trusted and verifiable sources. The software can also cross-check multiple data points for validity.

Sales development reps (SDRs), business development reps (BDRs), and account executives (AEs) all need different datasets in order to meet the needs of the client at their given stage of the sales funnel.

Demographic Data

Sales intelligence platforms can provide demographic data on the interested prospect. This kind of data is often used to create or enhance the buyer persona profile.

Sales intelligence platforms can analyze data from both existing customers and prospects to build this kind of profile.

Firmographic Data

Firmographic data tells salespeople more about the overall company.

Sales intelligence platforms can easily pull this kind of data from publicly-available websites and records. They can also search deep in the corners of the web to find harder-to-find details. Some are even capable of determining financial data.

Technographic Data

Many sales intelligence platforms are powerful enough to determine specifics about the kind of technology a prospect company uses. This is called technographic data.

It goes without saying, but this is extremely valuable insight. Technographic data can help sellers know how to position themselves among a prospect's existing tech stack.

Intent Data

Perhaps its most powerful capability, sales intelligence platforms are able to predict a buyer's intent and timeline based on specific buying signals. This is often called intent data and helps sellers know exactly how and when to approach prospects.

Intent data helps salespeople optimize the funnel and close more deals.

How to Use Sales Intelligence to Close More Deals

While the "day job" of a sales intelligence platform is to collect data, the implications of this work cannot be understated. In the bigger picture, sales intelligence software helps salespeople close more deals, faster.

Find and Qualify New Accounts More Quickly

Sales intelligence platforms automate the process of finding new leads. Powerful intelligence software can instantly find countless leads with zero effort from salespeople. Most can also populate the CRM with the relevant data, making it extremely easy for salespeople to tackle each new opportunity.

Reach the Decision-Makers

Many sales intelligence platforms can use the data they find to build an organization chart for prospect companies. This helps create a bigger and more complete picture about how potential client companies make buying decisions and gives salespeople insight on who to talk to and when.

Personalize the Customer Experience

Sales intelligence provides data on the specific characteristics, needs, and challenges that your buyer persona and ICP experience. This kind of insight helps marketers and salespeople personalize their strategies and make better connections throughout the funnel.

How Yesware Can Enhance Sales Intelligence

Yesware works hand-in-hand with sales intelligence platforms to free up more time for salespeople so they can focus on revenue-generating sales activities.

With sales intelligence making easy work of populating the top of the funnel, Yesware can help salespeople design and deliver automated, personalized campaigns complete with calls and social touches.

The data teams can glean from sales intelligence will help them design each sequence according to specific buying signals.

Yesware also makes the follow-up fast and easy. Save winning emails into templates that are ready to distribute as soon as a prospect exhibits a known buying signal.

Our email tracking features allow salespeople to cross-check their efforts in real-time. Get up-to-the-minute updates about which emails are opened and which content resonates most.

These insights live right inside your Gmail or Outlook inbox.

Yesware's automation features complement sales intelligence for a powerful and capable sales experience.

Do you use sales intelligence in your sales process? How much time could your team save with this kind of tool at your disposal?

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