Why sales intelligence and intent data: The buyer is changing.

Unifying sales and marketing

To combat this change, sales and marketing teams are having to adjust. Account Based Marketing strategies scaled to allow for customer centric sales and marketing approaches which resulted in more personalised relevent nurturing, contracts closing faster and higher average contract values.

The rise of account based marketing saw sales and marketing teams come together from identification right through to renewal. This in turn has led to a change in the structure of sales and marketing. The revenue or go to market team now consists of marketers and sales development working together to build near term nurturing programmes which are co-ordinated more closely to a buyer's needs.

Brent Adamson, Gartner discusses the challenges of this and expands with a case study here.

What is sales intelligence?

Sales Intelligence provides enterprise sales teams with the tools to identify who to speak to next and about what.

Sales Intelligence aids the sales team in building relationships ready for when an opportunity arises as well as who is in market today. It will also nudge when a prospect who went cold, is active again.

The major benefits of sales intelligence is to improve call connection, reduce email/social media response times and reduce the total time spent researching.

Impact of Sales Intelligence on your go to market approach

With buyers less likely to engage until they are ready, the number of calls and emails required to make contact increases. Research from Woodpecker shows that today, sales generation activities require 4-7 emails to increase average response by 3x (from 9% to 27%), while Velocify research shows you need 6 call attempts to reach 95% of converted leads.

Buyers also have higher expectations. Generic emails or conversations no longer work. Research from Forrester suggests 90% of buyers expect the seller to understand their industry or market, prove a return on their investments and tell an authentic story. Sellers therefore need:

• Better quality data. Wading through dirty data means wasted calls and wasted time.
• Faster insight. Knowing who to call is good. But knowing what to say when you speak to them means a higher value conversations.
• The right time. Buyers spend less time with sellers today. When they are willing to entertain a conversation, being ready allows you to start building a relationship so you are on the front foot when they are ready to buy.

To get started with sales intelligence data you need two key things:

• An ideal customer profile: Knowing which companies are the best fit (and why) allows platforms to laser focus on the right companies. Removing noise.
• Themes or Topics: Knowing the different problems that you solve and how clients research them allows for both tailored content and identification of which problem a particular company has. Allowing sales to start on the right page from day one.