Sales reps today are expected to deliver an extremely personalized experience during every interaction potential customers have with the company. To personalize these interactions, reps need to know a lot of details about the customer, his company and the industry which can give him an advantage over his competition and increase odds of closing the deal. Sales intelligence is the process of collecting this information about the customer and market to make the customer experience more relevant and personal.
What is Sales Intelligence software
Sales intelligence software helps reps to find and understand details about prospects and customers. These tools collect data from all public sources and collate them into easily usable format making it readily available for reps. Reps can slice and dice the data to understand the market, accounts, buyer intent and changes in the organizations without spending too much time on it.
These tools give you information about
- Firmographics - Firm-level data like revenue, number of employees, growth rate, etc
- Demographics - People level data like name, age, gender, designation, etc
- Technographics - Technology level data like technologies the company is using etc
- Behavioral - User action level data like clicks, views, actions, etc
- Intent - Buyer intent level data like searches, articles read, etc
Who uses Sales Intelligence software
Sales
Sales reps have to maximize time selling and reducing time hunting data and doing research. Intelligence tools can help them do in-depth prospect research, enrich CRM data, avoid junk leads, etc in less time. They use them to understand the organization charts, key decision-makers, latest projects, and intent signals so that they can pitch at the right time increasing chances of making a sale.
Marketing
Marketing teams use intelligence tools primarily for data enrichment of their leads and segmentation/targeting helping them improve their conversion rates. For example - Marketers can design smaller forms and with just email have all the other data auto-populated or the can show certain content to a portion of the traffic they want to target by knowing their IP address etc.
Recruiters
Intelligence tools are mainly designed for salespeople, but they can also be used by recruiters for identifying new employees and filtering them based on criteria they deem fit.