You’re probably wondering right now what sales intelligence has to do with mitigating risk in a business. As you probably know, mitigating risk is all about having the right information at the right time to help you make better, more informed decisions with a better chance of leading to good outcomes.
That’s exactly what sales intelligence is for, particularly concerning marketing and sales performance. In this article, we’ll look at the relationship between sales intelligence and mitigating risk and how you can utilize it.
Businesses that utilize big data generate up to 8% increased profits and reduce costs by up to 10%. So, while using data to improve sales is a no-brainer, marketing and sales teams often need help with the technical hurdle of collecting, managing, organizing, storing, analyzing, and using said data.
Sales intelligence refers to the methodologies and software tools for handling sales-related data. Sales intelligence does a few things:
● Captures sales data from various online sources, like lead generation tools, social media, LinkedIn, etc.
● Cleans data by organizing, validating, and standardizing it. Clean data is important so sales teams have high-quality data for efficient and accurate decision-making as well as minimizing the amount of manual work involved.
● Provides analytics and reporting tools to derive quick and accurate insights, sometimes with the help of AI and machine learning.
● Helps to personalize/customize and automate outreach campaigns and communications.
● Acts as a single source of truth with up-to-date and synchronized data for all stakeholders. Stakeholders can access this information from anywhere, even using sales intelligence apps for mobile devices.
Let’s look at the specific ways in which sales intelligence can help you mitigate risk:
As the pace of business keeps accelerating and options multiple, clients increasingly appreciate the personal touch. Managing customer relations is about more than just checking in when they are up for renewal or need technical support. It’s about fostering trust and establishing a genuine relationship that goes beyond just the service you provide.
For example, you can track important dates for the account or its key decision-makers, like birthdays or company anniversaries. Sending well wishes or simply a reminder that you’re there is important to manage and strengthen these relationships. The stronger relationships are, the more likely you are to keep customers across sales cycles, which is key for long-term growth and stability.
If a client is continually late on complying with payments, it might be a compliance issue instead of a tight budget. Sales intelligence can help you track when, why, and how clients miss payments.
With this information, sales teams can categorize clients as high or low-risk and approach these accounts appropriately in the future.
It can also point to payment terms, schedules, or package issues. Would a client be more compliant with a different payment schedule, say, monthly instead of bi-weekly? Do they need all the features/add-ons they are using? Is there a more affordable option to put them on instead of cutting them off completely? These are questions sales intelligence can help answer.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important virtual sales are to maintaining revenue generation, even in the most unlikely circumstances. Today, virtual sales are indispensable for a robust revenue-generating portfolio and for remaining competitive.
However, without the same level of personal interaction as brick-and-mortar sales, virtual selling is even more dependent on big data and analytics. You must understand your audience using key data points to model their behavior and decision-making factors. This intelligence is also indispensable in crafting personalized and effective messaging at scale.
Sales intelligence is key to developing a successful strategy for virtual selling. According to Deloitte, companies need to do the following to improve virtual sales:
● Adopt the right mindset by acting with confidence
● Find the right equipment to enhance the success
● Create contextual and tailored sales pitches with the right value statements
● Maximize the information you can capture during virtual meetings
The business landscape today is highly dynamic. Your target market and their wants, needs, pain points, and purchasing factors are constantly evolving. Winning businesses need to see and understand these trends in near real-time to make on-the-fly marketing decisions. If you’re too slow or miss the mark, you’ll lose out to competitors and fail to utilize your marketing budget fully.
Reaching the right audience and connecting with them via the right message is important, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Sales intelligence also helps marketing and sales teams identify their most valuable prospects so that they can prioritize them throughout the sales funnel.
Using sales intelligence, you can create buyer personas or profiles to help you understand leads inside and out. Using lead data and analytics, you can better predict what products to sell, how much the client will likely spend, and what your ROI for a specific account will be in the long run.
In this way, you’ll be able to identify the customers with the highest potential CLV (customer lifetime value), even at an early stage in the sales funnel.
Often marketing can feel like more of an art than a science. Sometimes, teams must make creative or intuition-based decisions without knowing whether they will pay off.
Who can forget Pepsi’s ill-advised and ultimately pulled Kylie Jenner TV spot that cost the company $5 million? Or, Gap’s unpopular $100 million redesign of its world-renown logo?
Sales intelligence is not a magic bullet to prevent these kinds of mistakes. However, it can help you understand your target market, industry, or worldwide trends and the possible impact of any changes to help avoid similar giant missteps and whether they are worth the risk.
Without accurate, up-to-date, and clean information, marketing and sales teams will be groping in the dark. That will introduce significant risk into every stage of your sales pipeline. Sales intelligence can help illuminate the way by providing teams with fast access to actionable and insightful data to prioritize, manage, and convert your business accounts. By maximizing wins, minimizing losses, and more efficiently managing clientele, you’ll mitigate risk while boosting revenue.
Topic: Sales Intelligence Strategies