Sales intelligence to improve sales performance?

Customer data is the equivalent of gold nuggets in the early days of the Wild West:

"It's very valuable, and you only have to bend down to pick it up!"

As I said in the previous article, artificial intelligence can increase the efficiency of your sales organization tenfold in a very short space of time.

Today, I'm going to explain how data can boost your knowledge of prospects and accelerate your sales cycles.

How?

Thanks to salesintelligence... aka your new passion.

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What is sales intelligence?

Quite simply, it's the collection and analysis of data on your customers/prospects.

Dirty intelligence is based on simple thinking:

Fact 1: Your customer portfolio and prospects generate data that you can collect.

Finding 2: This data can give you a huge business advantage by drastically reducing the uncertainty inherent in the work of salespeople.

> Conclusion: It would be a shame not to take advantage!

In concrete terms, you can collect two main families of data:

1. Customer data : company profile, target market, behavior since first contact (when did they buy?), level of satisfaction...
   This first database is all the easier to populate as your customers provide you with most of the elements themselves. ‍
2. Prospect data: company profile, target market, strategies and objectives, behavior, buying signals...
   This second database is less easy to feed, as you need to deploy tools to collect the available data. The good news? There are some handy sales intelligence solutions! I'll talk about them below.

Once you've gathered this information from internal (or external) sources, you can analyze it, draw conclusions from it, and pass it on to your salesperson or sales manager so that they can fine-tune their approach.

What do you stand to gain?

Sales intelligence is a way of deepening your knowledge of the market and, above all, making it actionable.

In concrete terms, it allows you to support your salespeople's efforts, by telling them when and how to approach their prospects during their prospecting session. ‍

Timing + good speech = unstoppable.

By the way, sales intelligence is also called "situational"... because it prevents your sales reps from messing up their sales pitch, emails trying to sell a prime rib to a prospect who went vegan last week (for example). It highlights the right "buying signals" that your sales people can capitalize on to implement their action plan.

At Modjo, we believe that sales intelligence has at least three advantages:

• Improved pitches: Better knowledge of the prospect + data on his latest searches + analysis of call history (if available) = we know how to talk to him and hit the bull's-eye.‍
• More efficient sales process: Prioritizing hot prospects + the right pitch for each prospect = more sales, faster.
• And therefore shorter sales cycles: Faster lead generation = Faster signature.

I'd add a fourth, not insignificant, benefit to your sales force: happy salespeople... because you're giving them the best tools to apply new sales techniques to smash their targets.

‍How tocreate your data bases and generate sales intelligence?

Good news: it's simple. It's done in three steps.

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🧲Step 1: Collect and analyse external data

What are your sources? The most basic ones are obviously the websites and social networks of your customers and prospects. Regular crawling (software that automatically explores the web) will give you all you need.

To go beyond these essentials, here are a few tools we like to use at Modjo to get started with sales intelligence:

• ‍LinkedIn Sales Navigator: the solution for B2B or B2C prospecting. To target and identify the right prospects, contact them at the right time and present them with a personalized pitch, with automation possibilities.
• Dropcontact Dropcontact.io: to correct, normalize, duplicate and unify all your contacts' information in 1 click. Dropcontact.io finds and gathers all your contacts' information accumulated and scattered in your files and different applications.
• Sparklane Sparklane: to intelligently source prospects and provide relevant actionable data to salespeople. Sparklane allows you to contact the right people at the right time based on business signals analysed and scored by theAI
• Modjo (of course): for recording your calls with prospects/customers, then automatically transcribing the exchange into writing. You can then search by topics ("price", "objection", "timing", "decision-maker", etc.)‍. Ideal for helping you steer the execution of your sales strategy or policy.‍
• Salesforcewhich links all these sources and makes them actionable thanks to these super dashboards.

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💎Step 2: Pamper your internal data

Business relationships create their own data. In fact, you already have a great deal of information about your old and new customers. (Youhou the beginning of the road to sales intelligence)

Secondly, you've undoubtedly generated a good deal of data on your prospects by exchanging with them. This data is valuable because it's not available anywhere else. It gives you a competitive edge. All you have to do is know how to exploit the insights gained from your sales activity.

That's the aim of Modjo, which enables you to process your interactions to extract unique and valuable information about the prospects you contact, as well as about your customers. Behaviors, current questions, budgets... Modjo classifies all this in a highly visual way to offer you clear, actionable conclusions.

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🚀Step 3: Start again

When it comes to sales intelligence, consistency is the key.

Your prospects move fast. Finding out good information a few days too late can cost you the business. So make business analysis a regular practice.

• Maybe you want to know everything about ONE target prospect for a while?
• Perhaps you'll define a palette of prospects and monitor them regularly to detect buying signals?
• Perhaps you will naturally approach prospects about whom you have the most data?

Whatever your strategy, keep the pace.

After a few months of practice, you will notice that your entire sales strategy will improve. You will know your market's wishes better, you will prioritise more precisely, in short: you will dominate the sale instead of letting yourself be blown around by the wind.

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Who is responsible for dirty intelligence?

There are two scenarios.

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First scenario:

You're too small to consider creating a dedicated team. Sales intelligence should therefore be managed by the sales team (sales representatives and/or managers).

How can they be encouraged to do so?

This is where you need to be extremely educational. Explicitly present the merits of this practice. Invest in a few GOOD tools, carefully chosen. Organize training and feedback sessions. And let sales reps see for themselves how sales intelligence can help them achieve their business objectives.

At Modjo, I have set up a training course on data and the importance of collecting it. In this training, I take the subject back to basics:

• Why data? What benefits?
• How do you get it back?
• Where to store it in the CRM?
• And above all... "Do you have any other questions? How does it feel?"

.... Pedagogy and humanity!

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Second scenario:

You have a team of sales ops. They're the ones who'll get to grips with sales intelligence. Easy, because they love it and are trained to do it.

Even if you have sales ops, make sure you raise awareness among your sales staff, as they are the ones who will ultimately use the lessons learned from sales intelligence.

Don't forget, it's a team effort: the more data you have, the more keys you'll have to improve your sales actions, and the more you'll boost your performance.

To sum up!

• Sales intelligence can boost your teams' performance, shorten your sales cycles and accelerate your growth.
• It relies on external data, AS WELL AS internal data: the combination of the two is the key.
• It is based on two pillars: good tools (including good integration with CRM) and people who are aware of and trained in these techniques.
• It's important to take care of sales management, and remember to onboard sales staff and the sales manager (etc.), as the tool's effectiveness depends on their buy-in.

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Best,