Sales Intelligence: The Smarter Way to the Prospects
By Tim Zheng, CEO & Founder, Apollo.io
Sales intelligence has transformed the B2B landscape significantly. What if one can predict which prospects can convert to customers, recognize a particular value proposition that is most likely to respond to, or even gain access to the contact details and email addresses of the prospects to directly connect with them at a specified time knowing they would be interested to engage. Thanks to sales intelligence, businesses no longer have to think about “what ifs” as they portray the reality. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the promises of sales intelligence have become an advanced methodology to convert the business development and sales process.
Sales Intelligence — What is it?
Sales intelligence refers to the use of research and technologies such as data and analytics to help businesses find new prospects. Many salespeople already have data they require to find new leads yet they do not realize they have it. Sales Intelligence is not about having special training or access to the proprietary database rather it is about having a knowledge of how to use the tools.
Sales Intelligence Data
Data is used to explain every smallest decision made in any successful business and more data is collected from these decisions in order to develop a continuous self-improvement cycle. This also means improvement across production and revenue. At its center, a sales strategy that is data-driven will leverage technologies such as data and analytics to speed up sales. Most importantly the data collected within the sales team prioritizes and uses those data to make important business decisions. A study report has shown that companies who include data in their sales process and incline towards data-driven sales are 5% to 6% more profitable.
Key points sales intelligence data allow sellers to:
* Recognize and find out the right people and not chase the wrong leads can save more time
* Infuse people with personalized information while making cold calls into a warm conversation
* Obtain information about the company such as industry, company size, revenue technologies used, location, etc and personal information such as title, job changes, etc in just one click
* Swiftly identify the pain points and needs of the prospects
* Analyze their conversion rates and track their progress
The future of customer generation is data-driven prospecting. As a matter of fact, according to a study report, organizations that are purely data-driven are 23 times more likely to gain customers and 6 times more likely to preserve those customers.
The importance of Artificial Intelligence in Sales
The ability to automate the prospecting process has great promise because in today’s time of sales automation multiple marketing and B2B sales companies are using 10–12 digital tools every day to garner more leads for new customers and clients online.
Today, with advanced analytics, mining of CRM data has led to the identification of business prospects at a global stage. This has been an added advantage in sales prospecting in the 21st century.
The commitment of AI and ML toward Sales
Advanced technology such as AI and machine learning not only saves time but also produces a better outcome when it comes to lead generation. Instead of searching for prospects and making cold calls, sending out back-to-back emails, hoping to connect with the right person at the right time, advanced technology has the potential to disrupt the complete sales process as well as free up the business development and sales team to concentrate on engaging with customers and prospects and building a relationship with them.
What sales yearns for, using AI can supply automation in that sales process. For instance, a sales team can spend hours every day going through LinkedIn, managing the leads lists received from the marketing team, or even use tools such as sales navigator and send cold emails but don’t get any positive responses. AI can help the sales team by recommending them intelligently about the accounts and leads they need to reach out to.
3 ways that AI can make an immediate impact on sales prospecting:
* It provides similar accounts that are already in the pipeline
* It can identify more people at the same company who can be the right prospect when your first attempt wasn’t successful
* Based on your CRM system, AI can forecast and recommend accounts that have a propensity to buy based on data — specifically “close-won” data
Sales Intelligence Software
How can one find in an efficient way high-quality sales leads or prospects? It is utterly time-consuming searching manually for prospects on LinkedIn with the help of a list or even worse doing Google searches. This is where sales intelligence comes as a saviour, giving multiple access to large amounts of data that can help combine with the present data in the CRM to enhance and expand the list of clients and prospects.
Originally published at https://cxotv.techplusmedia.com on July 15, 2022.