Question for you:
How are you and your sales reps gathering intel on your prospective buyers?
No, we're not talking about hanging around outside your customer's office trying to find out which of your competitors' products they're already using.
We're talking about sales intelligence: details on your prospects like purchase intent signals, firmographic data, and yeah, a little bit of tech stack intel.
Most reps are going blind; they know very little about the person on the other end of the phone (or Zoom call, or LinkedIn InMail thread), short of what that customer has told them.
So, ready to get the upper hand?
This article will discuss how sales intelligence can boost sales cycle speeds, improve needs identification, and help you find the right buyers faster.
Okay, let's start at the highest level here: What even is sales intelligence?
Sales intelligence is basically a subset of sales software tools that helps teams gather insights on their customers beyond what they've submitted in a lead generation form. The most basic example is firmographic (like how many employees a customer has or how much revenue they make).
Let's walk through an example.
Your sales team receives a new B2B lead. The lead form your prospective customer has filled in includes the following information:
A good start, sure, but not enough to hold a robust sales conversation about the customer's needs and challenges, and how your product or service can help service said needs and challenges.
Yes, much of this you'll need to uncover during the sales process, but sales intelligence can give you a headstart.
For example, your automated sales intelligence software tool might offer the following insights:
Now, your rep can open the conversation with a lot more data at hand, putting them in a more advantageous position to close that deal.
Okay, so we know how this thing works, but what's the point?
Sales intelligence solutions offer five key benefits:
Let's explore how.
Stronger data is kind of the overarching benefit of sales intelligence tools.
By bolstering your data with sales intel, you're putting more knowledge at the hands of your sales reps, and you know what they say about knowledge.
We get it; sales prospecting is hard.
Finding buyers who fit your ideal customer profile can be challenging – sometimes, it's impossible to determine until you start the conversation.
You think a given prospect could be a fit, but once your sales development rep starts talking to them, they realize they don't have a large enough team to benefit from your tool and to see a decent return on investment.
These tools give reps more sales intelligence data, enhancing the prospecting process and making things a whole lot more predictable.
We all want a faster sale. Faster sales cycles mean a lower customer acquisition cost (because reps take less time for each deal) and a better ROI (because that CAC is so, so low, baby).
Sales intelligence helps boost sales cycle speeds by eliminating some of the exploratory needs identification process (because reps have access to that data right away).
Plus, sales agents are better able to disqualify leads that aren't a good fit, meaning they don't waste time on dead opportunities, which tend to drag out the average sales cycle length.
More data makes it easier to identify whether a customer is a good fit or not. In reality, that's what the whole prospecting and qualification process is all about; figuring out whether our two companies will work together nicely.
With the additional information that sales intelligence tools provide at hand, reps can make these decisions more rapidly.
The best sales intelligence tools identify purchase intent signals and allow teams to separate leads based on need.
For instance, high-intent leads can go straight through to a sales rep, while low-intent leads might be directed to a marketing lead nurture email sequence first.
Like most software categories, there is more than one type of sales intelligence platform out there.
Actually, there are three main ones:
Let's take a look at each in a little more detail.
Prospecting and outreach tools and platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
You'll gain access to important information like roles and positions, as well as key changes.
For instance, if you're selling a tool that helps digital marketers, you might get a notification if a target account gets a new VP of Marketing.
Firmographic data refers to aspects like annual revenue, headcount, and ownership.
For example, your ICP might require customers to have a revenue of over $5m+. If they don't, you're not a fit, and firmographic data can help you ascertain this.
Purchase intent intelligence is a little more complex. It's especially valuable for teams taking an account-based marketing (ABM) approach.
Let's say you're targeting a specific account. Let's call them Company A.
You tell your sales intelligence tool they're a target account. A few weeks later, that tool sends you a notification:
Person B at Company A has been searching product reviews (in your category) on Capterra. That's a purchase intent signal, meaning it's a good time for your sales representative to get involved.
To summarize:
|
Types of sales intelligence tools |
Information delivered |
|
Prospecting and outreach |
Hiring and changes in roles and positions |
|
Firmographic data enrichment |
Annual revenue, headcount, and company ownership |
|
Purchase intent intelligence |
Real-time buying intent signals |
Convinced now that sales intelligence is a must-have for your team, but you're not exactly sure how to determine the tool that you need?
There are six key considerations to bear in mind when assessing different options:
Now, we'll explore each of these six facets in more depth.
Makes sense, right?
If you're going to be accessing prospect data, you want it to be up to date and accurate. Otherwise, what's the point? Actually, scratch that. You're worse off with incorrect data than you would be without any.
So, your first port of call should be to ask about where the sales data is coming from, and how reliable it is.
Your sales intelligence tool isn't going to be the only software platform you're playing with.
You're probably already using:
And that's just a minimum; the average company uses as many as 10 tools in their sales tech stack.
To make life easy, you want all of your tools to play nicely together.
So, when eyeing up a sales intelligence platform, ask: does it have a native integration with the other sales tools I'm already using?
Here, we're talking about two things:
Obviously, it needs to be affordable for you.
Just as important, however, is the pricing model used. Ask:
This is an easy question: does the sales intelligence software tool that you're assessing offer tech stack data?
The reason this is a crucial question is that many tools focus more on firmographic data, so if you're in need of tech stack data, specify this in your sales conversations.
In the B2B sales world, speed is everything.
Okay, to be fair, accuracy is more important than speed, but speed is a pretty close second.
When working with sales intelligence, you not only want the right data but the most up-to-date data.
That means you need real-time alerts and updates from your tool. Let's say you sell to CMOs. If a target account hires a new CMO, you need to know immediately.
That new CMO will be hungry to make an impact, and maybe your product or service can help them do it.
Similar to real-time information is the need for purchase intent data.
Put simply, does the sales intelligence software tool you're looking at offer this, or not? If not, it might still be a good fit, but you won't receive the kinds of alerts you need for ABM-style sales approaches.
So, now it's time to choose an actual sales intelligence platform to access all of those helpful insights.
But which one? Here, we'll look at the top seven software tools so you can choose the best option for your needs.
|
Platform |
Pricing* |
Key Features |
|
LinkedIn Sales Navigator |
From $99 per month |
|
|
ZoomInfo |
Unspecified |
|
|
Apollo.io |
From $49 per month |
|
|
Outreach |
Unspecified |
|
|
Groove |
Unspecified |
|
|
6sense |
Unspecified |
|
|
Lusha |
From $29 per user/month |
|
*Pricing accurate as of 20 August 2022.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is all about prospecting and gathering high-level firmographic insights.
It's basically LinkedIn on steroids, giving you access to a tonne of data you don't get with the free version.
We're talking stuff like:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator costs from $99 per month, depending on the plan you choose.
Pricing is accurate as of 20 August 2022.
Technically speaking, ZoomInfo is a company that offers a bunch of different sales and marketing tools, divided into four platforms:
As you can probably tell, there is a bit of overlap in these products, especially the first three.
From a sales intelligence and data perspective, OperationsOS is the most robust. With this software platform, ZoomInfo provides information like:
Unfortunately, ZoomInfo doesn't share pricing for their OperationsOS product.
Pricing is accurate as of 20 August 2022.
Apollo.io is a sales intelligence and engagement platform wrapped into one offering.
For this review, we'll focus mostly on the prospecting and intelligence aspects.
Apollo.io has a database of more than 220 million prospects (impressive), and claims it one of the most robust and accurate data sources around.
This includes information like:
Each of Apollo.io's prospects includes more than 200 attributes attached, and to make data handling easy, it integrates with pretty much all of the popular sales CRMs.
If you want to get super nerdy, you can use Apollo.io's Persona Lookalike functionality to build an ideal customer, then access AI-powered recommendations.
The platform does have a free version, but you'll need to pay $49 or $99 per user per month (depending on the plan you choose) to access the most important features and to up your monthly limits.
Pricing is accurate as of 20 August 2022.
Outreach is most commonly known as a sales engagement and automation platform. However, as their product offering has grown and developed, it's also included some pretty helpful sales intelligence tools.
This collection of tools is branded as Outreach Guide.
With Outreach Guide, your team can take advantage of:
As a result, Outreach claims some impressive results: 30% better rep productivity and 15% higher deal close rates.
It's worth noting that Outreach's intelligence offering is built more around its engagement offering than the typical data enrichment platform.
As a result, you might not get the same depth of data, but you'll also gain access to features like a centralized resource library, enablement-focused content cards, and call recording and transcription.
Outreach pricing isn't made public, so you'll need to speak with a sales rep to access that information.
Pricing is accurate as of 20 August 2022.
Technically speaking, Groove is a sales productivity platform.
That said, part of being productive is having access to robust customer data, so there's a reasonable overlap here.
As you might expect, Groove offers a tonne of features to help speed up your sales processes, like:
It also has deep integrations with both LinkedIn and Salesforce, two very popular software sales tools.
On the intelligence front, Groove's offering focuses mostly on the revenue side of things, giving you AI-powered insights into performance so you can improve targeting and spend time on the right conversations.
Groove doesn't openly discuss pricing, but some reports say pricing starts at around $12 per user, per month.
Pricing accurate as of 20 August 2022.
6sense brands itself as a revenue AI platform, which is more or less the trendy new name for sales intelligence software.
The platform is popular among account-based marketing teams, offering features like:
6sense doesn't communicate pricing publicly, probably because their platform is quite complex and you can pick and choose certain features
Pricing accurate as of 20 August 2022.
Lush is a straightforward B2B database, offering in-depth data on the companies you're targeting and providing data enrichment plumbed right into your CRM.
Lusha can be used as a web extension for capturing prospect data in real-time, but also as a list-building platform for B2B sales reps. They boast a seven-step data authentication and verification system too, so you can be confident that the data Lusha provides is correct and ready to work with.
Oh, and there's an enterprise version for large companies with complex sales team makeups.
You can access a free version of Lusha, but if you really want to ramp things up, you'll need to pay either $29 per user per month for the Solo plan or $51 for the Team plan.
Pricing is accurate as of 20 August 2022.
A sales intelligence tool is a special kind of software platform that gathers data on your customers. Sales intelligence tools support your business in three key areas:
Sales intelligence is not mission critical for all sales teams, but it's super helpful for:
An analytical CRM is a specific kind of CRM tool that collects customer data and then provides insights and recommendations designed to improve the customer experience and boost customer satisfaction.
By now, you should be intimately familiar with the details of sales intelligence software tools, the most popular options out there, and of course, how to choose the right platform for you.
But here's the thing:
Most of these aren't standalone tools, and they can't support your team throughout the entire sales process.
For that, you'll need a robust CRM platform that allows you to integrate your sales intelligence tool and store all of that important customer data in one place.
But you've done enough choosing for one day, so once you've signed up for a sales intelligence platform, check out Ringy, then book a demo with our team and supercharge your sales outreach process.