Salespeople are under constant pressure to work faster, smarter, and harder than the competition while also doing less with more. An ad sales intelligence system can be the difference in these situations by removing many of the inefficiencies of manual data management and empowering salespeople with in-depth knowledge of their contacts.
But what are ad sales intelligence tools? And, in what specific ways do they benefit sales teams? Let's find out.
What Are Ad Sales Intelligence Tools?
Simply put, sales intelligence is the discipline of collecting, organizing, and using sales-related data. Today, the term sales intelligence also refers to the software or technology deployed and the actual process of gathering, organizing, and analyzing information.
Sales intelligence solutions include lead generation tools but go beyond that to help salespeople also create ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and improve the quality of their data. For example, the data points gathered can go as deep as the individual decision-makers within a business account or include past purchases and buyer behaviors.
At the same time, it ensures data is clean, verified, standardized, and usable to make it more efficient and valuable during sales.
SI's final defining feature is that it acts as a single source of truth between all marketing and sales stakeholders. Everyone can access the data to get access to the same, up-to-date information, improving collaboration. Often, sales intelligence also integrates with existing CRM systems to streamline sales with ongoing relationship management.
Five Benefits of Ad Sales Intelligence Tools
The most important benefits of using ad sales intelligence tools are:
1. Know Who Your Top Contacts Are
All ad sales intelligence systems start with practical lead-generation tools. These tools are not only about generating new leads but also allow salespeople to prospect leads to find the most valuable contacts and business opportunities.
For example, these tools help salespeople compare and verify valuable leads according to their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). This allows teams to focus their efforts and prioritize leads according to their value. For business contacts, it will help to distinguish the individual decision-makers so that salespeople can personalize their approach.
That's not all. These tools also ensure accurate and up-to-date information, especially contact information.
2. Know When is the Most Effective Time to Reach Out
When you approach a new lead or prospect can be as important as how you do it. If you send the wrong message at the wrong point in the sales journey, you could be wasting your time or distancing a lead from your brand.
Crucially, sales intelligence tools will give you the intelligence to synchronize your outreach with brand media planning, buying, or RFP (request for proposal) periods. These are times when potential buyers are most open to new proposals by sellers and will boost your chances of making progress.
By incorporating insights from media planning into your sales strategy, you can identify the best channels and timing to reach out to potential buyers, increasing the likelihood of successful conversions and maximizing your return on investment
The best SI tools will alert you in advance with customized notifications so that you can properly plan and schedule your outreach attempts.
3. Personalize Your Pitches to Hit on the Right Points
As mentioned, sales intelligence software gives salespeople on-demand access to relevant, up-to-date, and accurate information on contacts. These key data points can be used to tailor their approach, messaging, attitude, and offering to each prospect to maximize the chance of success.
There is no better opportunity to show this level of individual detail than in a sales pitch where you personally and directly engage with a potential client. Your pitch should include all-encompassing knowledge, not only of the client themselves but their competitors, industry trends, etc.
This information used to be incredibly arduous to research, compile, and organize. However, the best sales intelligence software can automate much of the data collection process and provide efficient visual dashboards for dissecting the information.
4. Make the Most of Existing Customers
The numbers don't lie. It's up to 5 times more costly to sell to new customers than existing ones. That's mainly because the success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while it's only 5-20% for new customers. A business that increases retention by just 5% can expect 25-95% higher profits.
A sales intelligence system allows you to leverage your history and past interactions with a customer to continue to nurture the relationship, as well as effectively upsell, cross-sell, and down-sell.
SI can even help you improve or get more out of existing relationships, even if the contact has not bought from you before. For example, by crafting better, more relevant, and more poignant cold outreach emails.
5. Consistently Outperform Competitors
Sales intelligence tools give you the right insights at the right time to consistently outperform the competition. You can act faster with more accuracy and preparedness in almost any situation, meaning that you'll reach customers first and make the most compelling case for your product or service possible.
Conclusion
As you can see, sales intelligence is a must-have tool to help salespeople cope with the rapidly increased pace of business, amount of data, and competition. There's a reason why nearly two-thirds, or 65%, of companies use sales analytics solutions. And the market is expected to keep growing at a CAGR of 10.5% until 2027, from an evaluation of just $2.29 billion in 2019.
Topic: Sales Intelligence Tools
