Power of Relationship Intelligence for Key Accounts

Relationship Intelligence for Key / Strategic / Large Accounts

Let’s face it- enterprise selling isn’t easy. There are dozens of similar products in the market, and figuring out what your customers want is a whole other challenge altogether. From days of yore, sales has always been about understanding your customers and their needs. A great salesperson goes beyond this, and leverages his relationships to solve problems clients face in their growth journey by cross-selling and up-selling. Hence it goes without saying that customer data is a crucial element to crack the enterprise selling puzzle. This comprises everything from your business experience with your clients- from who your champions are to who could be blocking possible deals.

With the advent of digital selling, global organizations have to ensure that they are able to capture, track, analyze and act on this relationship data. They can no longer afford to ignore tribal information across their sales organization, and risk missing out on potential opportunities to grow their key accounts. Strategic account planning process would be rendered ineffective and slow without these facets.

A strategic account will have many many contacts we will have to manage, communicate & build relationships. The questions are

• Who are those right people?
• Who is on your side- your biggest supporters and detractors?
• What is the formal hierarchy of those people?
• What are the formal or informal influences between those people?
• Who has the highest decision making power- what are the buying roles?
• With whom and when have we won or lost opportunities in the past?
• Who are pursuing active opportunities today?
• Who is that champion who can introduce me to that ‘unaware’ contact with a big budget?
• What is your level of interaction and cadence of engagement?

Most of the above answers are what we sometimes call ‘tribal knowledge’, and are in the heads of multiple people in our company. Consolidating all this knowledge into a meaningful algorithm and insights that can lead to action is called Relationship Intelligence.

Enter relationship intelligence!

At a basic level, key account relationship intelligence is just all the information you have about your contacts, stored in CRMs like Salesforce and MS Dynamics. This consists of how many interactions you have had with your clients, their timeline and budgets, the service/product they are interested in, etc. In a nutshell, it is everything you have about a single potential client! Good relationship intelligence goes one step further and tries to gauge sentiment to give you the true picture of your business relationships. It is critical to understand if your outreach is actually effective, where you should prioritize your efforts to meet your sales targets. So now we know that relationship intelligence is the key to this- let’s take a closer look at how relationship mapping tools can aid global clients in their digital transformation journey!

Relationship Mapping Tools – the future is today!

Sales Prioritization

Sales teams are always on the lookout for strategic intelligence which would help identify gaps, can save time, help them advise contacts, close deals faster, and generate more revenue. A salesperson has hundreds of leads to follow up at any time and the ability to prioritize is critical to meeting his targets. Relationships Mapping Tools help make life easier by leveraging sales data to give you clear and relevant insights about your contacts, giving you visibility in the client organization, and helping identify where to focus your efforts.

CRM Enhancement & User Adoption

A recent LinkedIn survey pointed out how ‘top performers are more likely to say that sales intelligence tools are “extremely critical” in closing deals by a margin of 49% to 29%’. However, parallelly Salesforce points out that 91% of CRM data is actually incomplete. Therefore, there is a clear gap in user adoption and CRM data integrity, which is leading to salespersons missing out on deals. True Relationship Intelligence tools bridge this by having two-way sync with CRM. This ensures that you don’t spend your resources on manual data entry, and focus on what you do best- selling!

Data Visualization & Insights

Sure, you have all your sales data inside your CRM but it is of no use if you can’t make sense of it. Sales organizations need to always have a clear picture of what’s happening with their networks, and churn of relevant stakeholders, etc. Data Visualization helps break down sales data in an accessible way, helping identify patterns and trends. It is also great for leadership to understand the status of engagement with clients, tracking communication flow between relevant stakeholders, mapping power and influence of client contacts, and identifying revenue at risk- a 360° view of the entire strategic account management process.

We at DemandFarm recognized very early on the importance of relationship intelligence in the digital sales journey.  In fact, we have worked with over 250 customers & 25,000+ Account Managers to become a leader in the Digital Key Account Planning space today!

The Org Chart by DemandFarm helps you visualize relationship intelligence and enables you to keep track of all your major account relationships.  Our product guarantees that you break past top-line targets and adds a dimension to your sales planning process by forging wider, deeper, and richer relationships.