There are many tools available today to help sales organizations collect, analyze, and report on key data. This data is crucial for managing their pipeline, providing excellent sales interactions, and closing deals.
Unfortunately, siloed information and processes often hamper sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Diverse tools and data sprawl can make it difficult for reps to discover accurate, holistic, and actionable sales data from their CRM.
In the absence of a strong, data-driven process for gathering key sales insights, both businesses and customers are faced with significant challenges. The quality and quantity of data your teams use can determine how successful your revenue teams are.
What is Revenue Intelligence?
Revenue intelligence refers to the practice of collecting sales and product usage data across leads, prospects, and current customers and analyzing it with an artificial intelligence system to identify trends and metrics that can increase revenue.
This concept is relatively new, brought on by the availability of artificial intelligence solutions and the ability to integrate them with other tools and applications to collect data.
With revenue intelligence, data-driven insights are gathered from multiple teams, including sales, marketing, success, and support, and integrated into one source of truth so that data can be utilized together for maximum impact.
As part of a sales team, revenue intelligence provides a whole new level of insight that is directly linked to sales opportunities. Insights like these provide sales teams with advanced buying signals, targeting data, and forecasts. By using RI applications, sales reps can prioritize leads, personalize communications, and generate more revenue.
By identifying which prospects are most likely to close and which will waste time, sales teams can also increase their efficiency and productivity. Through revenue intelligence tools, reps can also predict which contacts are most likely to respond, when they will reply, and how they will respond.
The Challenges Revenue Intelligence Solve
As the art of sales continues to evolve, so do the challenges associated with running successful revenue teams. The traditional approach of identifying a customer’s need, creating a product or service to meet that need, and selling it to the customer is no longer sufficient. Today’s global marketplace is extremely competitive.
Organizations must keep up with technology innovations, customers’ ever-changing expectations, and each sales activity that affects the bottom line. For teams without the right data, this can be a complex task.
As a result, sales leaders are increasingly relying on the “art of forecasting” rather than a more scientific approach. Due to the lack of data, they often forecast incorrectly.
As a result, they must apply judgment in the form of an educated guess – based on experience – since they do not know what is occurring or what actions they can take to improve outcomes. To determine whether each deal should be included in the forecast, sellers and first-line managers must review each deal.
We must note that organizations that fail to leverage the power of data will likely fall behind as we examine the current state and future of sales. Companies that compete know there is value in the billions of data points gathered from every sales activity and interaction for both day-to-day and long-term challenges.
With revenue intelligence, you have an edge. In reality, revenue intelligence software alleviates the pain points of more than just the sales reps.
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Uncaptured data
An intelligent revenue management system captures all the contact and activity data in the sales process from the customer-facing teams and populates the CRM with the right opportunities, in the right accounts. The CRM is reliable and accurate because it eliminates manual data entry.
(Also Read: Best Revenue Management Techniques in Service Marketing)
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Siloed data
By capturing all of your data across departments and functions in real-time, a revenue intelligence system eliminates silos and serves as a single source of truth for your whole business. All employees use the same data sets to make better decisions in the enterprise with this trustworthy data.
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Outdated data
Revenue intelligence systems track and update changes in public data (email, title, phone, address) automatically so that your CRM stays up-to-date, and your marketing and sales reps know that the data in the CRM is accurate when planning campaigns and making phone calls.
Importance of Revenue Intelligence to Businesses
Keeping up with these new terms can be challenging. Nevertheless, revenue intelligence will continue to grow. You should implement revenue intelligence as soon as possible to prepare your business.
Businesses are right to expect more from their sales and marketing teams as competition between companies rises and new technologies advance outputs. But how can revenue intelligence help you become more efficient? There are three reasons:
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A lack of revenue intelligence limits your data
If you don’t have revenue intelligence, you rely on what your CRM automatically provides. This is not a great deal.
CRMs are good at managing leads, but not so great at pulling out data about them. But why should that be?
There is no direct link between your CRM and your website. Thus, actions taken by a user or lead on your website won’t be passed to your CRM.
This means you miss out on data such as:
- Lead source
- Viewed website pages
- Sessions and more
By using revenue intelligence, you can close the gaps.
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Without revenue intelligence, your data is subjective
Although you’ll get some insight, will it be accurate? There could have been a lead who saw your PPC ad, told your sales rep, and Google. Then your marketing team won’t know how their paid advertising is driving leads. Since your CRM and your website are disconnected, there is no way to solve this problem.
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Data without revenue intelligence is stale
If you’re manually entering data on your leads and opportunities, the information will be stale. A key piece of information will help your sales team close leads. In addition, marketing wants data that can be used to optimize their campaigns to drive more sales. Neither of those goals can be achieved without revenue intelligence.
Final Thoughts
Would you benefit from revenue intelligence? The short answer is yes. In addition, if you tend to see long, complex customer journeys, then yes.
Although Google Analytics can help you understand how your marketing impacts your bottom line, it doesn’t give you a full picture.
Revenue intelligence and marketing attribution help you identify the source of revenue-generating leads.
By doing so, you can easily and quickly optimize your outputs based on what you know works. Furthermore, it allows you to test new initiatives and track results quickly and accurately.
Other Useful Resources:
15 Ways Digital Banking Drives Revenue Growth | TechFunnel
3 Benefits of Omni Channel Marketing to Boost Revenue
