A big chunk of the sales rep’s job is to gather sales intelligence. He needs it for prospecting, qualifying leads, nurturing leads, and converting prospects into actual customers.
Sales intelligence is technologies, insights, analyses, and practices that provide salespeople and sales organizations with data (intelligence) so they can:
- stay up-to-date and informed on prospects, clients, competitors, and the industry;
- boost their productivity;
- get better at decision-making;
- improve sales process with better follow-ups and faster lead-to-close times;
- identify new and quality leads;
- gain insight into target audience;
- and, ultimately, win more deals
So we’ve established that sales intelligence is critical in sales. How can you best gather sales data then? There are many tools that you can use, but there are strategies that you can very easily follow to help you gain more insightful information on your prospects and customers. Here are four easy-to-implement tactics:
1. Leverage content
Want an easy way to gather data on the people and companies you need to be targeting?
Write great, valuable content. When you have content that people want to read, consume, share, download, link, etc., you are creating opportunities for people to come directly to you and share their information willingly.
Say, for example, that you have a really informative and well-written white paper on increasing workplace productivity—a topic that any company in any industry would appreciate. You can make this available for downloading on your site in exchange for customer data (company, industry, company size, and all other relevant demographic and psychographic data). You are creating a lead magnet essentially, and it’s a proven sales and marketing strategy.
Lead magnets are content your web visitors can avail of for free in exchange for their information and contact details. Studies show that when you give your subscribers a good idea of the kind of content they’re signing up for, the opt-in rate can rise by almost 85%. Also, 80% of business leaders and decision makers choose to get company information through a series of articles instead of an advertisement.
Lead magnets and great content are not only great for building a contact list or for gathering customer data, it’s also great for lead nurturing and building relationships with prospective and even existing customers.
2. Monitor your email campaigns
What do prospects do with the emails you send them? Do they open them or they don’t bother to open the email at all and just mark it “trash”? Do they click on the links you share in your email? Do they respond in any way?
Why do you need to know these things? Knowing how prospects and customers respond to your emails—whether they respond or not, react positively or not, etc.—helps you understand them better. And that is one of the main roles of sales intelligence: it helps you gain more insight into your target market and understand how they think, decide, and move forward with a purchase.
3. Connect and engage via social media
We’ve long established the power of social selling: 78% of salespeople engaged in social selling are outselling their peers who aren’t. 31% of B2B professionals say that social selling has allowed them to build deeper relationships with clients. More than 10% of social sales reps have closed 5 or more deals due to being active on social media.
Social media marketing, which should not be confused with social selling, is just as powerful: 90% of all marketers say social media marketing has increased their business’ exposure. 84% of CEOs and VPs say they use social media to help make purchasing decisions. Customers report spending 20%–40% more money on brands that have interacted with them on social media.
But whether you market, sell, or do both on social media, one thing is for sure: you are sharpening your sales intelligence generation. Connecting and engaging on social media is the quickest way to gather more data on your target audience. You are not only getting information on the latest developments on them via their posts. Sometimes, you also get more “intimate” information, especially when you engage with prospects on their posts, in group discussions (you can join various groups on social media), or in private messages.
4. Customize your reporting
Your CRM can help you generate all the data you need to perform better and sell better. But why go through complicated, tedious, and tons of reports and data that you don’t need? Opt for custom reports instead. Analyze data with custom metrics and highly functional dashboards. Bid goodbye to useless paperwork and analyze business data easier through custom reports. Customize your dashboards with a collection of widgets that give you an overview on the reports you need.
Not only will generating sales intelligence be more efficient, the data you gather will also be more targeted and, therefore, effective.
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