Sales Intelligence: What It Is & Why It Is Important in 2024
iovox insights, sales intelligence, conversational ai,
Curious to know how sales intelligence can boost your sales and drive revenue?
We can help!
Sales intelligence is a remarkable piece of technology that can help your sales team optimize its sales process, boost efficiency, and achieve goals faster.
Read on to learn how a sales intelligence tool works, its benefits, and how to choose the right one for your business.
Further Reading
- Discover the power of AI lead generation in action and learn how it can transform your sales outreach.
- Find out how to improve your lead response time to gain an edge over competitors and boost conversions.
This Article Contains:
- What Is Sales Intelligence?
- 4 Sources for Gathering Sales Intelligence Data
- 4 Key Sales Intelligence Data Points
- 6 Compelling Benefits of Sales Intelligence
- How to Choose the Right Sales Intelligence Tool for Your Business
- Turbocharge Your Sales Strategy with iovox
- What Is the Future of Sales Intelligence?
- 2 FAQs about Sales Intelligence
What Is Sales Intelligence?
Sales intelligence involves using business intelligence tools, practices, and techniques to help your sales professionals better understand their target customers, growth opportunities, market trends, and industry landscape.
Sales intelligence software platforms collect and analyze data from multiple sources, thus reducing the manual efforts and guesswork your sales rep typically uses in their outreach strategies. As such, a sales rep can channel their focus, time, and energy into engaging with a potential customer and closing deals.
With a robust sales intelligence platform like iovox, you can analyze data from your customer interactions to enhance sales enablement, improve lead qualification, find upsell/cross-sell opportunities, and more.
These tools can help simplify and streamline the job functions of all sales team members, including sales development representatives (SDRs), business development representatives (BDRs), and account executives.
So, where does a sales intelligence tool source this data from?
Let’s find out.
4 Sources for Gathering Sales Intelligence Data
A specialized sales intelligence solution can leverage data from a variety of internal and external sources, such as:
Note: Not all sales intelligence solutions can access all four data sources — some are limited to internal sources such as company records and customer feedback.
Company’s Internal Records
The software taps into your organization’s internal records, including customer data from CRM, CPQ (configure, price, quote), service usage logs, billing records, a sales engagement tool, and more.
Public Records
Public sources such as industry trends, market reports, economic indicators, social media posts, surveys, and focus groups are valuable data sources for sales intelligence software.
Customer Feedback
Conversations with customer service reps and survey responses help better understand customers’ experiences with your products and services.
For instance, you can use conversational AI to spot trends in customer conversations and identify the products or features your customers are most interested in, any challenges they face with the product, and so on.
Competitive Landscape Research
A sales intelligence solution gathers competitor information, such as product pricing, features, strategies, and new offerings (from the company website, etc.), to help you better gauge your market position.
Together, these sources offer an in-depth look at your overall sales positioning and where it should be—but only if you know what data you should be mining.
Let’s examine some of these sought-after data points and how to make the most of them.
4 Key Sales Intelligence Data Points
Here’s an overview of the important information a sales intelligence platform leverages to generate actionable insight for your team:
Updated Contact Information
You must maintain updated records of your client’s contact information to ensure maximum data accuracy. Sales intelligence software uses real-time contact data to keep its database updated, whether your prospect switches jobs or gets promoted.
Demographic & Firmographic Data
A sales intelligence tool helps maintain updated client records such as age, gender, geographical location, and company, as well as account data such as company size, industry, revenue, and number of employees. This data is useful for a sales leader to research potential customers, evaluate the total addressable market, and segment the audience.
Intent Data
The tool analyzes target accounts’ or individuals’ research and content consumption behavior to determine if they are actively looking for a product or service. You can leverage this intent data to identify prospects most receptive to your sales pitches and get your foot in the door before your competitors.
For instance, knowing the source of a call can help you determine the caller’s intent to some extent. Advanced call tracking features like Dynamic Numbers and Dedicated Numbers can help you track the call’s origins and identify opportunities associated with repeat callers.
Technographic Data
Sales intelligence tools also help a sales leader identify a target audience by gathering information about the tech solutions they are currently using. You can use this data to identify the gaps in their current workflows and pitch solutions that could help improve their processes.
The cumulative impact of these data points can be ground-breaking for your business.
Curious to find out how?
Keep reading to learn more.
6 Compelling Benefits of Sales Intelligence
Here’s an overview of the major benefits of sales intelligence.
Helps Create Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Leveraging sales intelligence makes it easier for sales and marketing teams to identify their niche in the market and build an ICP they want to target.
You can use your sales intelligence tool’s customer data to assess your current customer base and research prospects (individuals and organizations) that fit your ICP.
Identifies High-Value Qualified Opportunities
Sales intelligence tools use predictive analytics to evaluate real-time data and identify high-value opportunities that might be easy to convert.
Your SDRs can use this data to engage and qualify leads. This ensures they don’t waste time on leads that aren’t promising or ready.
For instance, conversational AI helps identify keywords in customer calls that help determine where the customer is in the buyer journey. You can use AI to identify if the caller is a hot lead and personalize your conversation to provide exactly what they want.
In a nutshell, sales intelligence helps improve sales enablement, enhance lead qualification, boost conversion rates, and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage for your business.
Helps You Shorten the Sales Cycle
Your sales reps can use B2B sales intelligence to skip gatekeepers and contact the decision-makers directly with fewer calls.
How?
The tool provides the intelligence you need to expedite multithreading across stakeholders and shorten your B2C and B2B sales cycle. This is especially important when dealing with larger enterprises that require multiple sign-offs on any new purchase.
Ultimately, this will help them close deals quickly and achieve their quota faster.
Cleanses Your Customer Records
Companies get acquired, and people take up new jobs. In this dynamic landscape, businesses must focus on maintaining the freshness of their records.
Some sales intelligence tools use data enrichment functionalities to ensure the freshness of your existing and new sales data so you don’t waste time engaging with dead leads. This means no duplicate or cluttered records and more time savings on manual tasks.
It also uncovers new insights, such as new funding rounds, to help your sales reps approach the opportunity from a new angle.
Additionally, certain sales intelligence software such as iovox provides seamless CRM integrations with your existing database.
Aids in Building Relevant Marketing Campaigns
You can use your sales intelligence data to build personalized marketing campaigns and optimize your lead-nurturing strategies to maximize results.
How?
Sales intelligence tools analyze large data sets, including customer profiles, purchase history, interests, etc., to generate actionable insight for your marketing team. Your marketing team can use it to target the right prospect with the right messaging at the right time to maximize conversions.
For instance, if you notice a customer purchases a tent from you, you might want to send them targeted recommendations for other camping gear, such as sleeping bags, cooking equipment, and outdoor clothing.
Provides Guidance for Product Development
The tool helps analyze customer feedback on the most well-received product features, competitor performance, and market potential for new product offerings.
For example, you might notice that your customers are skipping a certain payment tier when subscribing to your product/service, indicating that those features are not providing enough to them.
You can use this information to make informed decisions regarding product development and allocate resources accordingly.
Based on customer feedback and competitive analysis, consider adjusting the pricing and features of the skipped tier to make the tier more attractive to customers.
Such game-changing benefits make a solid use case for investing in a sales intelligence software solution for the long term.
But with an important and expensive investment like this, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sea of options available in the market.
Time to give your research team some rest. We can help you zero in on the perfect sales intelligence tool in three steps.
How to Choose the Right Sales Intelligence Tool for Your Business
Here’s a mini guide to help you select the right solution for your unique needs:
Identify Your Needs and Goals
You can start by assessing what you want to achieve with a sales intelligence tool and consider the features that would be most beneficial to you.
For instance, if your goal is to improve lead generation, a feature like iovox Dedicated Numbers can be very helpful. It enables you to automatically route calls to the relevant sales rep or contact center. This minimizes the risk of turning away your potential leads due to endless call transfers and response delays and helps enhance your lead generation capabilities.
On the other hand, if you aim to achieve better targeting and qualification, look for a feature like iovox Dynamic Numbers, which helps identify the sales channels generating the most sales. This data can help you focus your sales efforts on channels with the highest conversion potential.
Investigate the Coverage and Accuracy of Data
Sales intelligence tools gather a major chunk of their data through scraping online sources. Since roughly 30% of data decays annually, this data must be authenticated by humans for accuracy.
Moreover, you must ensure that your choice of tool updates it regularly for accuracy.
Some service providers claim to have a massive database on their platform. However, the quality of that data might be questionable if it is machine-processed. As such, you should focus on purchasing a tool that offers a higher percentage of human-verified accurate data.
Look for the Ease of Integration with Your Existing Tools
The sales intelligence tool of your choice must seamlessly integrate with tools like your CRM system to provide you with full functionality.
Why?
Deep integration between the tools saves you time manually entering and exporting data into and from your CRM and eliminates the chances of human error.
For instance, the iovox CRM integration allows you to link your existing CRM platforms (through APIs), such as Salesforce, Hubspot, or Zoho CRM, and capture all sales data in the same location.
Any calls originating from the iovox call tracking platform are automatically added to your CRM for better visibility, accurate sales forecasting, improved ROI analysis, and more sales.
Is there a sales intelligence tool that offers you all the above and more?
Let’s introduce you to the industry-leading AI-powered solution that ticks all the boxes.
Turbocharge Your Sales Strategy with iovox
iovox is a revolutionary conversational AI and call-tracking solution that helps boost your sales and marketing strategy.
It gathers valuable data from your client interactions and helps you identify new opportunities, improve lead conversion, enhance sales training, and maximize outreach.
Here’s how it can help you boost the efficacy of your B2C and B2B sales strategy:
Gather Customer Insights to Identify High-Value Opportunities
Features like Call Transcription and Conversational AI help track and analyze customer interactions to uncover call trends, high-value opportunities, and call outcomes at scale.
For example, you can identify keywords and phrases like "interested in upgrading," "looking for more features," or "might need financing" that signal a customer’s readiness (buying signal) to explore higher-value offerings or additional services.
Enhance Lead Scoring
Lead scoring entails assigning a numerical value to each new lead to reflect their potential.
iovox offers insights that can enhance your lead-scoring process and help businesses prioritize and qualify new leads more effectively.
iovox Conversational AI provides detailed call analytics, including call duration, caller demographics, call sources, and more. By analyzing this data, businesses can identify patterns and behaviors associated with high-quality leads and refine their scoring system.
For example, calls from certain geographic regions or marketing campaigns may more likely convert into qualified leads. This data can help you build more effective lead qualification campaigns.
Build Personalized Marketing Campaigns
iovox can help you determine how your customers perceive your marketing efforts and make informed decisions.
With iovox Conversational AI, you can gather B2C and B2B data to understand whether your marketing campaigns, messaging, and other tactics are well received. You can spot trends in client calls to determine the key factors driving purchase decisions and create messaging that encourages a favorable response.
With iovox on your side, you can prepare yourself for every kind of challenge.
But it’s not just the present we’re talking about. The power of sales intelligence is poised to take the business world by storm in the future, too.
Let’s glance at some of the top trends you can look forward to in this technology.
What Is the Future of Sales Intelligence?
If you want to gain an edge over your competitors, you must stay abreast of the latest advancements in the sales intelligence market. Since predicting the future of any technology accurately is difficult, it is best to stay prepared for whatever comes your way.
Here’s an overview of the direction experts believe the sales intelligence market is headed toward:
Focus on Account-based Sales
Businesses might continue to increase their focus on large-scale outreach by targeting entire accounts(account-based marketing or ABM) rather than engaging with individual contacts.
To achieve this, they need a robust sales intelligence tool that provides a more comprehensive insight into account landscapes such as company trends, budget restrictions, and key decision-makers.
For instance, the iovox CRM integration lets you capture every call and enhance your CRM entries with additional data. This integration enables your sales professionals to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior, facilitating personalized engagement at the account level.
Deeper Integrations with Artificial Intelligence
As with most existing technologies, sales intelligence, too, might continue to harness artificial intelligence and machine learning to stay competitive.
AI integration can help automate repetitive tasks such as data entry and analysis and enhance your team’s sales performance.
With iovox Conversational AI, you can benefit from call transcription and enhance lead qualification. You can identify keywords influencing purchases and leverage trigger-based alerts to prioritize hot leads for faster conversion. Essentially, the tool helps your sales reps qualify leads more accurately and save time converting them into prospects.
More Focus on Data Visualization
Sales intelligence tools of the future might offer a more comprehensive visualization of extensive data sets to help your revenue team quickly identify key patterns and trends.
They will likely be designed to provide more insights for your sales team to better understand the ever-increasing amount of data available.
With the iovox Analytics Dashboard, you can gather real-time visibility into sales conversations to spot trends early, take quicker actions, and eliminate the guessing game with solid sales performance data by your side.
Having glimpsed into the future of sales intelligence, let’s now address some other questions you might have about the technology.
2 FAQs about Sales Intelligence
Here are the answers to common sales intelligence queries:
What Are the Different Types of Sales Intelligence Tools?
Sales intelligence tools are categorized based on whether they provide account-level or lead-level information. These are the differences between the two:
- Lead-based sales intelligence tools: These tools collect individual contact information such as a list of names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. However, this information does not provide you with a clear picture of whether the lead’s organization intends to make a purchase.
- Account-based sales intelligence tools: On the other hand, account-based tools help you identify high-quality leads by directly providing information about the relevant companies first. These solutions enable you to conduct granular searches of the businesses that match your ICP and then identify people within those companies with whom you can get in touch.
What Is the Difference Between Sales Intelligence and CRM?
While a sales intelligence tool helps you gather and analyze customer data, your CRM software typically enables you to enact your sales processes.
A robust sales intelligence tool enriches your CRM system with fresh data insights to improve sales forecasting and help your salespeople close more deals faster.
In Summary
Sales intelligence is a powerful piece of technology that can help you maximize your sales and marketing efforts, enhance lead qualification, and drive revenue growth.
The best sales intelligence tools can help you gain a better understanding of your sales process, analyze customer behavior, address customer pain points, and build relevant marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience.
Not convinced?
Let us show you how iovox can help you achieve all that and more!
To connect, click the call button below, and we’ll contact you shortly. You can also email us at hello@iovox.com or call us toll-free from within the US at +1 888 369 9519.
From outside the US, please reach us at one of these numbers:
London, UK +44 (0)20 7099 1070
Sydney, Australia +61 (0)2 8520 3530
Paris, France +33 (0)1 84 88 46 40