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:
- Identify new leads
- Understand their competition
- Win more deals to help you stay ahead
Book a demo with 6sense today and see how you can:
- Track prospects of interests
- Get ideal prospect recommendations that match your customer profile
- Leverage buyer insights and use filters to target the best prospects
