Sorry, that’s not Sales Intelligence
Terms like “sales intelligence” and “actionable insights” get tossed around a lot, and frankly, most of it is BS.
There are some big, respected data companies claiming that they offer sales intelligence to power account-based sales campaigns.
Just query their database and like magic they’ll show you a list of people who have a certain job title in a certain kind of company. They’ll include a lot of “insights” like a feed of articles about the company, scraped LinkedIn profiles, info about their tech stack, and firmographic data.
They may even share the unicorn-like holy grail of sales – buying intent. As in, the prospect downloaded 3 white papers on something broadly relevant to what you sell in the past 6 months.
Well, I might as well raise my forecast right now with that kind of predictive power. /sarcasm
Seriously, it’s not that the data is bad, it’s just data. It’s a collection of stand-alone information that you must parse and interpret to figure out if they are likely to respond to a pitch for your particular IoT application platform.
Once you’ve parsed, interpreted and reached defensible conclusions about what all that data means for what you’re trying to sell, we can safely call it “sales intelligence”.
A feed of press releases is not intelligence. A categorized list of technologies used by IT is not intelligence. A dump of all open positions at a company is not intelligence. A search result from Sales Navigator of people with “IoT” or “Blockchain” in their titles is not intelligence.
However, what if I look deeper and see
- Press releases by a Global 2000 consumer electronics manufacturer trumpeting an innovation center of excellence focused on improving quality and reducing costs
- Individuals whose roles are to evaluate vendors even though they don’t have traditional operations or IoT titles.
- Open positions for manufacturing engineers familiar with Blockchain in support of a current project focused on unified factory wide communications via RFID.
- A recently opened, highly-automated manufacturing plant which would require predictive maintenance and distributed security.
This looks like a real opportunity for my IoT secure analytics platform. THAT is sales intelligence.
Sales Intelligence examples for an HRIS vendor
Signals:
- There is no HR practice in the company or dedicated HR leader.
- Company is struggling with high turnover in each department
- Focused on mass hiring
- Has engaged 3 agencies to deliver on recruitment targets.
- Current employees are complaining of lack of growth opportunities.
- Hired recruitment manager 2 months back
Sales Intelligence:
- As there’s no internal HR, CEO and COO are spending time and attention on HR issues
- Needs a consultant to define both a recruiting strategy and an employee engagement strategy
- Company has clear pain points that can be solved with ATS and employee engagement platforms
- Vendor should focus on the lack of time and high growth in sales causing the expectations misalignment, so some on-boarding and professional services should be budgeted into the pitch.
If your BDRs are producing this level of sales intelligence, congratulations! If they aren’t, they’ll need to be trained and closely mentored to develop the ability to turn signals into sales intelligence. BuyerForesight can produce sales intelligence for you, and format it for upload into your CRM.
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