According to Gartner sales reps have roughly 5% of customers time during the buyers journey. This makes it very difficult to for salespeople to influence the buyer as buying dynamics have changed. 

Then how can salespeople succeed in this digital age? With data. But the million-dollar question here is – which data? 

CRM data, your company’s record keeper. CRM shows you what happened but also needs to provide customer insights into why it happened.  

This is why organizations worldwide face revenue challenges due to inaccessible or incomplete data, talented sales people bogged down by data entry and siloed departments, lack of time and more. 

This is where Revenue Intelligence comes in the picture.

AI-backed data and actionable insights replace intuition and manual data analysis here.

Drumroll! The sales growth superstar—is ready to shine.

 

What is Revenue Intelligence?

A term used to describe the process of collecting sales and product usage data from leads, prospects, and current customers and analyzing it with an AI to determine trends and metrics that may be utilized to maximize revenue.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the ability to link them with other data collection applications have sparked the development of a new concept: revenue intelligence.

It takes a data-first strategy by consolidating information from several departments (such as sales, marketing, success, and support) into a single source of truth to maximize results.

When applied to a sales team, revenue intelligence reveals previously unrevealed data about potential deals. These discoveries provide sales teams superior buying signals, targeting information, and forecasting data.

Using RI tools, salespeople may rank leads, tailor their messaging, and eventually bring in more money.

Sales teams can improve their effectiveness and output because of enhanced efficiency in vetting leads and determining which ones are worth pursuing and which are wasting time.

In addition, reps can improve their interactions with the help of revenue intelligence software, which identifies which contacts are most likely to respond, and when and via which channels.

Revenue intelligence collects data from various points in the sales process, including

  • Interactions and site visits
  • Downloads of content
  • No. of emails opened, and CTAs clicked.
  • Incoming and outgoing phone calls, message retention, and callbacks
  • Conversation analysis includes data such as keyword usage, overtalk, interruptions, conversational length, and so on.
  • Deal development
  • Observance of the sales playbook
  • Forecasting and predictive analytics

It can also be used by customer success and/or support teams to efficiently and effectively identify customers

  • who can be successfully upsold, 
  • who are not fully utilizing the product, and 
  • who may churn.

What data points are required to facilitate Revenue Intelligence?

The following data points should be compiled and represented graphically:

Value Engagement

  • The primary objectives and difficulties the purchaser wishes to address
  • The proposed use cases and solutions
  • The price of doing nothing with legacy solutions and the status quo (the pain)
  • The anticipated results of the proposed solutions
  • The estimated investment amount and anticipated rate of return (ROI)
  • How well the buyer has performed on previous projects in terms of resolving obstacles, implementing use cases, and achieving expected results and ROI.

Buyer Intent

  • What percentage of prospective buyers actively research options in your market?
  • Understanding how these accounts utilize your website and community features
  • What other sites are the accounts interacting with, based on data from reputable third parties?

Sales Activity

  • What meetings were held, and who attended them?
  • Emails and phone calls to the buying group are examples of communications
  • Conversations and intelligence on what has been communicated, as well as the communication’s construct/ sentiment
  • The sale’s progression through the sales stages
  • The frequency of interactions

Content Engagement

  • The information discussed during and after meetings
  • In what ways has information been communicated throughout the journey and lifecycle?
  • Customer behavior in terms of how they consumed the content
  • How was the information disseminated to the rest of the buying committee, and who might be missing from the group?
  • How long did each stakeholder spend with the content, and with what parts of the content specifically?

Importance of Revenue Intelligence: Why it matters to businesses?

As the level of competition among businesses increases and technological advancements boost outputs, firms have every right to demand more from their sales and marketing staff.

But how it can help you become more efficient? Three explanations are as follows.

1. Restricts the information you may collect.

Without revenue intelligence, you must rely on the data that is automatically gathered by your customer relationship management system.

Obviously, this is not a lot.

Lead management is where CRMs really shine, but data extraction is where they falter.

What could possibly cause that, though?

There is no seamless integration between your customer relationship management system and your website.

A user’s or lead’s activity on your site won’t be synced with your CRM in this case.

This means you miss out on data such as

  • Lead Source
  • Pages visited on a website
  • Meetings and beyond

2. The data you collect is purely an educated guess

Although you’ll obtain some insight, will it be accurate?

There could have been a lead who spotted your PPC ad and notified your sales rep and Google.

If that’s the case, your marketing team won’t be able to track the effectiveness of their paid advertising.

Since your CRM and your website are unconnected, there is no way to remedy this problem.

3. Data is obsolete

If you manually enter information about your leads and opportunities, the data will be outdated.

A crucial piece of knowledge will aid your sales team in closing leads.

Additionally, marketing desires data that can be utilized to optimize their efforts and increase sales.

The benefits of Revenue Intelligence

  1. Capture all interactions for complete visibility.

All discussions should be recorded, transcribed, and saved. Understand where your sales engagement efforts are going and where you need to improve right away.

2. Detailed analytics can assist you in understanding the “why” and “how.”

Discovers trends over hundreds of chats, which a human would be unable to perform at scale. This can be accomplished through the use of personalized dashboards and automatic reporting.

3. Machine learning eliminates bias and reports the truth.

Meeting projections is crucial for every sales leader’s long-term success. Even in this data-driven world, teams rely too heavily on human judgment to judge funnel quality. Revenue intelligence tools assist you in preparing for the boardroom by leveraging your existing data. Of course, this is only the beginning. Machine learning can provide a forecast based on historical trends, along with expected ranges of outcomes for each.

4. Instant analytics for fast-paced businesses

Revenue intelligence becomes your sales team’s single source of truth. There is no longer a need to combine massive amounts of data, allowing sales leaders to make data-driven decisions without wasting critical time collecting the numbers.

5. Automation boosts productivity

Data entry can only be organized methodically with the help of revenue intelligence. The collected information is guaranteed to be accurate and transparent. Sales representatives can now focus on more vital activities and less on data entry software and reporting. Revenue intelligence platforms allow for two-way synchronization between your CRM and the platforms themselves with the help of automation.

6. Data transcends sales to fuel overall company growth

Revenue information can help more than simply sales teams. Understanding your client’s objectives and needs, as well as the triggers that lead them to purchase your product or service, is extremely helpful for marketing and customer success teams. Based on the reality of your customer’s needs, this data may be easily shared amongst teams, fostering collaboration and integrating your business.

7. Sharing data fosters a coaching culture

Appreciate what ‘success’ means in your business, share winning moments, and better understand setbacks. If you want to expand your business, you must first understand why it is operating the way it is in order to change it. Revenue intelligence tools assist you in understanding how your deals are won or lost, how it drives your growth, and how these aspects affect sales over time. This data is accessible throughout the organization, allowing people to see firsthand where they may improve without the need for micromanagement.

How does revenue intelligence work?

Revenue intelligence transforms all of the raw data received by your data collection technologies into insights that drive revenue. With these insights, you can enhance the health of your organization, decrease pipeline risk, and accurately estimate future sales.

You can utilize revenue intelligence in a variety of ways. The procedure might unfold as follows: First, you explain to your sales staff why they need to incorporate revenue intelligence into their workflow.

In light of this information, you and your team choose the best course of action moving forward. Utilizing the appropriate metrics is essential for tracking the process to measure and enhance revenue.

The following metrics should be monitored:

  • Lifetime value, also known as customer lifetime value, is a measurement of the profit your customers make for your business throughout the course of their relationship with your company and product.
  • MRR stands for monthly recurring revenue and is a measurement of a company’s predictable monthly revenue.
  • Average revenue per user (ARPU) is the average amount of revenue generated by each active user over a certain time period.

The key to the efficacy of revenue intelligence is a platform that enables you to evaluate all your data from a single location and get the data required from a single dashboard.

This allows you to rapidly and simply optimize and maximize the growth of your campaigns depending on your insights. In addition, it entails experimenting with novel approaches and rapidly evaluating their outcomes.

The Bottomline…

When optimizing opportunity outcomes, forecasting, and revenue growth, much data is unavailable or underused. Unfortunately, many firms use CRM insights or sales rep comments after client encounters. These insights are important, but intuition and voodoo instead of data science and intelligence prevent accuracy, optimization, and predictability.

Revenue teams can now have a more complete and holistic view of the full opportunity and account, as well as the deal pipeline and projection, thanks to digital selling and the amount of new sales tech that has been deployed in all facets of selling.

Revenue intelligence in your sales tech stack may prioritize selling activities to make your sales team more productive, improve coaching and recommendations to optimize sales leadership, and improve forecasting to promote more predictable revenue growth.