With the volume of sales data rising by terabytes with each passing day, sales experts have correctly posited that they can no longer rely on traditional sales tactics to close deals.  

As a result, many have jumped into the ‘sales intelligence‘ bandwagon to collect, curate and shortlist prospects intelligently and to sift through massive sales metadata efficiently. 

However, there still exists some confusion as to what exactly sales ‘intelligence‘ means. What exactly is the intelligence here? 

Sales intelligence is the concept of pooling in real-time data on prospects and leads from multiple channels and platforms and presenting them in an easily-digestible format for stakeholders.  

Let us now examine what constitutes an “intelligent“ sales platform. 

Data + Context – Noise = Intelligent Decision Making 

 As far as sales data goes, many sales professionals still mistake a curated list of prospect contacts and account intelligence metrics to constitute useful data. 

Make no mistake; these are still useful data.  

But sales intelligence tools can offer more, much more, than that.  

To keep the sales pipeline moving, marketers need access to the right tools & right information about their prospects and leads that don‘t just spit out names, contact numbers, and business addresses.  

Modern sales intelligence tools offer a variety of insights and critical data on: 

• Enterprise digital intentions 
• Organization structures 
• Market landscape 
• Global footprints 
• Technology landscape 
• Funding activity and more. 

However, this data by itself is useless since they: 

• Lack context 
• Are sometimes inaccurate & outdated 
• Leverage monolithic data sources 
• And contain excessive, incomprehensible data that is often not validated. 

Enter AI: Intelligent Sales Use Cases  

 The solution to the challenges mentioned above is to manually sift through the mountains of data and clean it up. This is easier said than done.  

And this is the problem statement that AI-powered sales intelligence tools have successfully solved. By utilizing AI/Big Data frameworks built on business heuristics that evaluate characteristics across industries, companies, and stakeholders, these tools can provide real-time, interpreted sales intelligence. 

In recent times, the capabilities of sales intelligence platforms have accelerated at a surprising pace. Some even go so far as to provide you with key stakeholders’ psychological profiles at your target company.  

Here are some example use cases and how AI-powered sales intelligence tools can help to shorten the timeline to close deals significantly: 

Account & stakeholder intelligence

AI-powered sales intelligence tools like Draup help you benchmark yourself with your competition by providing you with a comprehensive view of their capabilities, customers & characteristics of offerings to their customers.  

Sales intelligence tools also help you build hyper-targeted prospect lists with the ability to segment accounts & stakeholders by comprehensive and real-time metrics. Thanks to proprietary metrics like Opportunity Index(available in Draup only), sales teams now have a concrete, data-backed metric to check deal feasibility, strategize and pitch relevant companies.  

Account Management

The most highlighted feature of sales intelligence tools is their built-in 360-degree account intelligence feature. With this, sales teams have access to a comprehensive and data-driven view of their customer & their ecosystem across hundreds of curated metrics across locations, technology, partnerships, stakeholders and talent.  

In Draup, this real-time data, while built using machine learning models, is also validated by a team of analysts to ensure data integrity.  

Sales pursuit 

The most critical yet the most overlooked process in the sales process is data harvesting to smoothen the sales pipeline’s pursuit stage. Most sales professionals have no idea about how data can significantly ease this stage.  

For example, consider a sales team trying to pitch a deal to an up-and-coming startup or even to a well-establishing company that has recently undergone a leadership overhaul.  

While the age-old sales principles still hold true, if you really want to impress the stakeholder, the focus should be to display your in-depth knowledge of industry dynamics. In other words, sales leaders should demonstrate their expertise in the niche and know well in advance about the company‘s pain points before you pitch them a service.  

Sales intelligence tools can arm with such data and much more. 

Spend Less Time Worrying About Data & More Time Closing Deals 

Such kind of deal intelligence, stakeholder engagement data, and real-time account intelligence are not easy to come by. 

Draup uses proprietary ML-models to empower sales teams with comprehensive account and stakeholder intelligence to enable microtargeting. Sales teams no longer have to worry about data integrity since this data is vetted by analysts experienced in the industry. 

This, in turn, enables them to move quickly from prospecting to pitching to deal closure in record time.