Data and intelligence are everywhere these days, from marketing to sales. When it comes to sales, there’s a wide range of data available for the team to target prospects more accurately and thus close more leads in a shorter period of time. Sales intelligence can vary from customer intent to competitor analysis. The sales team can mime these datasets to get more accurate information.
Sales intelligence is the smart use of sales intelligence tools and data collection to help salespeople generate leads, create an ideal customer profile, and more. Since marketing and sales intelligence data is dynamic and constantly changing, a good sales intelligence tool is required to keep track of these changes.
The global sales intelligence market was worth $2.78 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow to $7.35 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 10.6%. So why is sales intelligence suddenly gaining rapid momentum? That is because sales intelligence combines advanced prospect data with buying signals to enable business development teams to connect with the right buyer at the right time.
As mentioned before, a sales team can use several data sets. However, there are four most important categories of sales intelligence data resources that every sales team can mine to boost revenues. Let’s take a detailed look.
Website Analytics Data
Your business website is a gold mine of customer intent data and purchase behavior. Since the website is the primary point of interaction between a business and its customers, everything from the pages they browse to content downloads paints a picture of customer intent.
Customer flow is one of the most important data sets that the sales team needs to review to identify the approach they should take with a particular prospect. Customer flow data includes the pages they land on, time spent on a page, where did they go from there, and more.
This data can be used to pinpoint a high bounce rate or a low number of visits, which indicates that there could be potential problems with the website and products. If such an issue exists, the sales team can work with the marketing department to pinpoint the issue and work on it. Once the solution has been figured out and applied, teams can perform split tests to measure its effectiveness.
Customer Lifecycle Data
It’s common knowledge that successful sales leads require the team to have spot-on knowledge about their target audience’s behavior and intent. The sales team must know the talking points when interacting with a prospect, from the preferred product features to their pain points.
Customer lifecycle data comes in handy in such scenarios. It helps the sales team understand what went right for successful deals in the past. Signals like which pain points are solved by the product and how existing customers use the product to solve them. Questions raised by the customers in the past and feedback help the sales team field questions from the new prospects effectively.
Honing in on individual prospects by presenting the right offer and pre-emoting their issues with helpful content is made easier with the customer lifecycle data. Aside from this, this data set also helps the sales team to identify seasonal trends in sales and profitable markets.
Armed with this knowledge, the sales team can then decide how to allocate resources, develop customer lifetime value metrics, and more.
Customer Journey Data
A large company will always have a huge user base that’s classified into audience segments. These audience segments have different customer journeys, and the sales team should know what the customer journey for each segment looks like. To illustrate, one segment might need just one decision-maker, and another may involve several stakeholders.
This data needs to be collected through various means, such as chatbots, surveys, lead capture forms, and quiz maker tools. These tools will help the sales team better understand the prospects’ issues. However, the answers provided by the prospects correlate to the analytics data to determine if they are reliable.
Customers’ journey is also affected by the first point of contact with the sales team. By measuring this data, the sales team can gather insights into which touchpoints assist their prospects better and make the journey fruitful.
Last but not least, event-related data sets are also very crucial for the sales team. Audience engagement and post-event follow-ups after webinars and online events are helpful data sources for the sales team. Event engagement also helps the sales and marketing team figure out where they fell short and plan the next event accordingly.
These are important data sets that help the sales teams better understand their prospects and curate a better experience for their audience. In turn, the data sets help them convert more leads and generate more revenue. Smart sales data are also helpful in creating more effective KPIs that can achieve business goals quickly and efficiently.
