If your business were a car, then revenue intelligence would be its GPS — alerting you when to make the right turns, what route is most optimal, and if any potential roadblocks lie ahead.
Like a GPS, revenue intelligence also relies on AI to collect and analyze data. Within a sales team, it can provide a new level of insights for sales opportunities, performance, and productivity.
Here, we'll define revenue intelligence and the five problems it can solve for your sales team.
What is Revenue Intelligence?
Revenue intelligence is the AI-driven process of collecting and analyzing sales data. For sales, the goal is to gain crucial insights into trends and performance to generate revenue.
Revenue intelligence is a relatively new field, catapulted by the availability of artificial intelligence solutions — and its ability to integrate with CRMs and other applications.
A data-first approach, it gathers data from multiple teams — including sales, marketing, and support —and integrates it into a single source of truth. The goal? No blind spots, no missing data, and no missed opportunities.
For instance, a marketing team can track email opens, site visits, and bounce rates to inform its strategies. Support teams can identify which customers are prime for upselling, and which are not fully utilizing the product or service.
But what can it do for sales teams? Let's dive into this below.
5 Problems that Revenue Intelligence Solves on Sales Teams
1. Missed sales opportunities.
As sales professionals, we're always looking for clarity about our leads and customers. But obsolete or inaccurate data can obscure our view. And if you're working with a limited CRM, it becomes even more difficult.
Revenue intelligence can uncover insights relating to sales opportunities — including advanced buying signals, forecasting info, and targeting data. Armed with these insights, sales reps can better personalize their communications, prioritize leads, and ultimately generate more revenue.
2. Productivity slugs.
While every sales rep has a distinct workflow, they typically share systems, processes, and data with their team —meaning revenue intelligence tools can have far-reaching effects on productivity for everyone.
For example, every day, sales reps gauge which prospects are most likely to close, and which may waste their time. With the help of a revenue intelligence tool, reps can better predict which contacts are most likely to bite, through what channels, and when.
These tools also eliminate the need for manual data entry, which frees up time and ensures accurate reporting.
3. Uncaptured data.
55% of salespeople admit that they don’t store prospect or customer data in their CRM. Of those who do, many waste countless hours per week manually entering data. As a result, teams rely on incomplete data for sales reporting and forecasting.
A revenue intelligence tool can eliminate the need for manual data entry because it automatically captures all activity in the sales process. Since the data is timely and accurate, teams can make more informed reports, forecasts, and decisions.
4. Uncoordinated teams.
Sales reps wear a lot of hats. For instance, they might be tasked with onboarding customers or offering support services. Ultimately, this pulls them away from their chief task — selling.
How can sales reps efficiently hand off clients to other departments? One way is by increasing the transparency into customer interactions.
With a revenue intelligence tool, each department — from marketing to customer service — can access and reference customer touchpoints, from calls to email interactions, in one central location. This eliminates the need to contact sales reps to get "up to speed."
This visibility can save time and decrease any friction across multiple departments.
5. Siloed data.
For companies big or small, collaboration between departments can be a challenge. Sometimes data gets stored in different locations — like a spreadsheet on someone's desktop — or isn't shared entirely.
Without a "single source of truth," a company can miss out on valuable customer insights. Revenue Intelligence can solve this problem by capturing all data across departments in real-time and pulling it into a single location that everyone can access.
The goal here is for every department to understand its contribution to the bottom line and make better company-wide decisions.
How to Implement Revenue Intelligence
Revenue intelligence sounds intimidating, but learning how to implement it can supercharge your business.
The first step is getting your sales team on the same page. They have to understand the purpose of revenue intelligence and how to incorporate it into their workflow.
Then, outline your sales processes and revenue streams. Find out where your data comes from and how large it is.
With this info, you can start researching revenue intelligence tools. Software like Gong, InsightSquared, Canopy, and RevOps can track customer activity and provide actionable intelligence. It's a good idea to take advantage of any demos or trials to see which tool fits your business.
Also keep in mind that trainings are highly recommended to help your sales team understand and leverage these tools effectively.
Final Thoughts
The future of data collection is here. Revenue intelligence can shift sales teams into high gear by connecting all parts of the business to activities that drive revenue. The only question remaining is how your business can fit revenue intelligence into its processes — and whether you can implement it at a company-wide level.