Every potential customer is on their own buyer’s journey, meaning they’re consuming unique content and researching different topics before making a purchase. To have the most success selling a specific product or service, a sales professional needs data surrounding what their prospects read, watch, and care about.
Sales intelligence tools are responsible for discovering and sharing this information, often called purchase intent data. But, some intent providers don’t have all the necessary information about what prospects are consuming and why. That’s why it’s vital that sales professionals choose a sales intelligence platform that will deliver the most valuable data with insights that help close deals.
Continue reading to learn more about how sales intelligence works, why it’s important to sales outreach success, and how to find the right tool to meet your sales goals.
What Is Sales Intelligence?
Sales intelligence is the information revenue leaders and sales reps use to make informed decisions about who is in the market and what to say to them when prospecting. This data is aggregated by sales intelligence tools — systems that monitor millions of data points like a qualified lead’s reading material, buying intent, and level of interest in a particular product or service.
These intelligence platforms strive to identify content topics being consumed by prospects on the web to determine what they may be in the market to purchase. However, many of these intelligence and intent players don’t know a lot about the content itself. For example, if the intelligence could show a prospect consuming product-specific materials like a case study – and show you the actual case study consumed – the sales rep can determine that this prospect is likely in a decision making stage and can glean the types of challenges they are trying to solve based on the case study.
Once this sales intelligence data based on content consumption is made available to sales professionals, they’re able to better understand and personalize follow-up messaging and conversations — ultimately, with the goal to push their prospects further down the sales pipeline.
Why It’s Important
Without sales intelligence, sales professionals are mostly at a loss for who they should reach out to, what messaging is effective, and what challenges prospects are trying to solve. By using a tool that supplies useful, specific guidance on content marketing tactics, a sales professional can be certain that they’re capturing prospects with strong buying intent.
How Do Sales Intelligence Tools Work?
Although every sales intelligence solution is different, most allow sales reps to search, analyze, and evaluate data about accounts that may be in the market. However, most of them don’t provide any details about what to do next.
Here’s how the average tool works:
- Prospects engage with content: As people research topics by reading and watching different types of content, an ideal sales intelligence tool identifies noticeable trends and patterns. Transparent content consumption data is critical for effective messaging outreach. If you know the exact documents being read, you’re better able to cater follow-up messaging to each prospect by understanding the problem they’re trying to solve.
- People are identified: In addition to content consumption intelligence, great sales intelligence solutions provide contact data and persona information about the prospects themselves so you know what they’re responsible for within their organization, including their department, role, and function. This data sheds light on their authority for making decisions or influencing others, as well as what messaging they might want to see.
- Content marketing strategy is set: After you know who the target audience is and what they’ve consumed, you’re better able to personalize your messaging approach to grab their attention. Sales intelligence software can help cater the right messaging to these users to further push engagement and eventually help them solve their problems by making a purchase.
Using Data Collection for Better Follow-Up Results
Sales professionals should see better results with high-quality sales intelligence data at their fingertips. By taking the guesswork out of content marketing, sales doesn’t have to wonder who is ready to make a purchase and what to say to them. They’ll be more certain who they’re prospecting and the messaging they use to address the problems prospects are attempting to solve.
Unfortunately, when sales teams use sales and content intelligence tools that don’t have any information about the content being consumed, it’s harder to determine follow-up strategies. Sales shouldn’t have to worry about whether their intelligence software is pulling accurate information or not. Vague information often results in broad, fruitless outreach to the wrong audience.
An open and honest sales intelligence tool will drive better results for several tasks in your sales strategy, including:
Generating Sales and Marketing Leads
Use the collected data to identify the individuals that match your potential customer behavior profile. Knowing what content to send to whom is half the battle in sales, so gaining valuable insight into who would benefit from specific messaging is lead-generation gold. High-quality data will disclose the exact content pieces each person consumed, what job they have, what other contacts from the account are researching, and what the most powerful follow-up messaging must include.
Filling In Missing Data Gaps
Without a sales intelligence solution, it’s hard to find nitty gritty details surrounding specific target audiences. Refresh your outreach tactics by having the full picture of what challenges they’re trying to solve. For example, if your target audience is attempting to secure their cloud-based assets, they’ll read case studies about services that can help. A high-quality sales and content intelligence tool should be able to pinpoint the content they used for their research and inform you who this person is, what role they hold in their company, as well as provide contact information for you to easily reach them with appropriate messaging. More data is always better when talking about successful sales outreach.
Personalizing Your Messaging
Sales intelligence provides real-time data on your prospects. This allows you to tailor your messaging explicitly for them. And, customized messaging will have a better chance of catching your target audience’s attention and, ultimately, help you close more deals. In fact, McKinsey found that 71% percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, so the importance of this piece can not be overstated.
Conducting Market Research
With the data provided by your intelligence software, you can better grasp how many qualified lead options are available and allocate your time accordingly. When budgets are tight, it’s even more crucial to spend your money in ways that will maximize the investment and boost sales performance. If you have a strategy built on trusted data and intelligence, you’ll waste less funds and close more business.
CIP: The Ultimate Sales Intelligence Tool
Steer clear of sales intelligence tools that will leave you with indistinct details and a vague understanding of your target audience. Instead, choose a platform that will deliver the information and messaging success you’re looking for.
Content Indication Platform (CIP), powered by CONTENTgine, surpasses our competitors’ current purchase intent marketing capabilities by offering an intelligence platform that utilizes millions of first-party audience engagements with B2B vendor content. This data is extremely transparent, showing who is engaging with specific content to set up more personalized, focused responses. All of our engagements either happen through email or from a registered user on Contentree — the world’s largest B2B content library. In both cases, we know exactly which individual reads pieces of content and how their company is engaging overall.
With this information, we help sales professionals know how to have the most impact with their messaging by producing account and contact-level intent — as well as valuable insight — to inform their follow-up messaging strategy based on the challenge prospects are trying to solve.
Want to see CIP in action for yourself and determine if it’s the right sales intelligence tool for you? Schedule a demo of our platform today.