Sales intelligence includes technologies that help sales teams understand customers, markets, and competitors. Sources of data include: 

• Customer profiles 
• Buying patterns 
• Customer surveys 
• Financial reports 
• Intent data 
• Competitive analysis 
• Social media monitoring 

Its ultimate goal is to give salespeople buying signals to prospect better, close more deals, and increase pipeline value. 

The benefits of sales intelligence include the following: 

1. Improves access to customer insights: Sales data analysis improves customer understanding. They can use the insights to adjust their sales pitch and meet their quota.
2. Augments customer prospecting: Is your sales team prospecting the wrong people? Sales intelligence helps your team find new prospects matching your ideal customer criteria.
3. Increases close rates: Sales reps can win more deals with accurate customer data.
4. Boosts team efficiency: It simplifies your sales process by collating account data for the access of sales teams.
5. Enhances competitive intelligence: Sales intelligence can provide businesses with valuable insights into their competitors’ strategies, enabling them to stay ahead of the competition.
6. Streamlines sales processes: Sales insights automate data entry and lead tracking to save your sales team time for more strategic initiatives. This lets them focus on customer relationships and follow leads.

Overall, sales intelligence helps you achieve business objectives, including understanding your customer base, which enables you to create more targeted marketing campaigns and increase sales. 

How Does a Sales Intelligence Platform Work? 

AI software collects public data like websites, social media, business directories, and market research reports. Salespeople can view and analyze these data organized in a dashboard. 

They include: 

• Who their target customers are (like B2B stakeholders/decision makers) 
• What they need 
• How best to reach them 
• What their buying signals are 

for intelligent prospecting and opportunity prediction. 

How Does AI Help Align the Sales and Marketing Departments? 

AI is aligning sales and marketing and fusing the two departments. Experts see companies cutting investment in field sales representatives and spending money on inside representatives. 

Besides, online behavior tracking by AI is growing. We can measure website visitors’ scrolling speeds and track the lead’s mouse movements and downloads. Then AI can interpret these signals to tell marketers and reps how likely a sale is and how to make it. 

There are many signals that AI can track and deliver to sales intelligence platform dashboards. 

AI can look at 20,000 signals before a sales call, help marketers find leads, and prioritize sales action. 

Transform Sales and Marketing 

AI can improve sales and marketing alignment, identify target accounts and market segments, and provide insights for better decisions. It guides decision-making by analyzing the likelihood to buy, revenue or profit, lifetime value, and account retention. 

AI will eventually strengthen the marketing’s role in finding leads and pushing them further down the sales funnel. In many cases, representatives might come in only toward the end of the sales process. 

AI can better observe prospect behavior before engagement. If a company’s products become commodities, sales reps could become the main differentiators by showing empathy and other human traits to a nearly ready-to-buy prospect. 

This may require fewer reps, but their work is vital. However, only a quarter of B2B sales organizations currently use AI. 

Here’s our take on this – AI can assist with sales tasks. So, sales teams must work with AI to be more productive and efficient. 

Here is what the future holds: 

1. More focus on account-based selling enables sales teams to target accounts rather than contacts. They can get information on account landscapes, including key decision-makers, budget restrictions, and company trends. 
2. Better integration with AI and ML will automate lead generation and market research so sales teams can focus on more important aspects of the sale. 
3. Extensive data visualization helps sales teams analyze large data sets and spot patterns to make sense of the growing data. 

Create a Data-Driven Culture Within the Organization 

Sales intelligence is valuable only if the organization uses data for its decisions. Companies that place a premium on data and analytics are more likely to make strategic decisions that result in improved outcomes. 

Consequently, it is essential to establish a data-driven culture within the organization that encourages all teams to use data to enhance their performance. 

Sales and marketing teams should collaborate closely to achieve the same goals. 

Sales teams can provide valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, and marketing teams can use this information to create targeted campaigns that resonate with their audience. 

Regular communication and data sharing can help both teams work more efficiently and effectively. 

Marketing teams can leverage sales data to identify patterns and trends in customer behavior, preferences, and purchasing habits. They can analyze the data regularly to determine what’s working and what’s not, which can help them refine their marketing strategies and tactics. 

Draup’s sales intelligence combines human and AI-driven curation to help sales heads to use industry, account, and stakeholder intelligence to micro-target high-value sales opportunities. 

By leveraging Draup’s proprietary tools, sales teams no longer have to worry about quality lead generation. They can instead focus on prospecting, pitching, and closing deals in record time.