Today, industry verticals, companies & business functions are scrambling to add the “Powered by AI” tag to their workflow. To satisfy this, they put together some functionality/solution that tangentially depends on some sub-field of AI. True AI-powered solutions are few and far in between. And precisely because of this, they are highly valued among enterprise stakeholders.

The domain of Sales Enablement is perhaps one of the strongest and most eligible contenders to do justice to the “AI” tag. As far as domains transformed by Artificial Intelligence go, sales enablement is right at the top.

The evergreen sales niche has received a complete overhaul, thanks to a new generation of technology solutions.

These solutions have:

• Reduced prospect research time by over 50%
• Empowered sales teams with current information on their prospects &
• More or less solved the issue with dead leads.

Rightfully so, this overhaul – powered by modern Sales Intelligence tools – today, finds a prominent spot in a company’s sales arsenal.

Just to set the context, the Sales Intelligence market is set to fly past $3.4 Bn by 2024.

In case you’re still unsure about what sales intelligence solutions can do for your enterprise or if you need a step-by-step walkthrough on how they will help you when it comes to deal pursuit, read on.

Dive Deep into your Industry

Let’s start from the outermost ring – the Industry and work our way inwards to the Company and the Buyer, and then maybe move a bit sideways to look at the Competitor as well.

Industry intelligence is one of the most neglected subjects by sales teams. This is because they assume that the information they have on hand is enough without realizing that new variables are constantly varying the equation and influencing underlying trends.

Industry Intelligence enables your sales teams to answer the below questions:

• What are the recent trends in your industry?
• Which are the key accounts driving major deals?
• Who are the key competitors?
• What are the key focus areas in digitization?
• What are the actionable insights on potential areas of opportunities?
• Which are the key recent events that could affect the opportunity?

Once these questions are answered, the sales team can move one step inward into the Company Intelligence ring.

Know Thy Prospect

Understandably, sales and account management teams do a lot of company research. However, despite focused research efforts by multiple teams, key data still escapes the sales radar.

Rather than trying to find out everything you can about a company, your research efforts must be centered around answering the below questions:

• What are their recent Business Intentions?
• Which are their key buying centers?
• What are some of the key executive movements?
• What capabilities have they recently acquired?
• Are there any new technologies that they have recently adopted or dropped?
• What roles are they mainly hiring for?
• What are the key roles that are in demand in this company?

Combined with the answers to the Industry Intelligence questions, these will provide you a pretty comprehensive picture of what your prospect is up to, thus enabling you to approach them with custom solutions.

However, despite all this intelligence gathering, you still need to account for the people factor.

Customize with the right person in mind

It if not enough to just develop the right intelligence on the industry & the company, you must also know about the key stakeholders in the company to whom you will be pitching your deals.

Here are a few questions to answer before approaching key executives of an organization with a sales deal:

• Who are the key decision-makers at this company?
• Who are the leaders in a target business function?
• What are the behavioral attributes of the executives in this company?
• Which are the executives meeting your target persona at the company?

Answering these questions through the help of our psychographic modelling will help you create highly-personalized pitches that are even customized to the personal attributes of the decision maker.

Now, that we’ve worked our way inwards into the sales intelligence circle, let’s take a sideways detour and explore competitor intelligence.

Understand your Key Competitors

It’s always safe to assume that there are multiple people approaching the same client with new deal prospects quite often. Which is why it’s crucial to understand your prospects already existing relationships.

To do this, you must ask the following questions:

• Which competitors already have a relationship with the prospect?
• What kind of services are they providing to the prospect?
• What are the major workloads that are outsourced by the prospect?
• What are the major locations of the prospect and where are their service providers located at?

Answering all the above questions in a systematic way will help you paint a comprehensive picture about your prospect. This will in turn empower you to approach them with highly-relevant deals that are tailored to their current and future needs.

Of course, answering these questions are easier said than done. You need to leverage the power of a modern AI-powered sales intelligence solution like Draup to get data-backed insights to solve the modern sales equation.

Draup helps you micro-target and extract new opportunities across 33 industry verticals. Understand the ecosystem by analyzing top startup landscape, emerging use cases, regional trends and executives across industries.