On-Demand Webinar: Unfiltered take on AI in Account Planning: Meet DemandFarm’s KAM AI The Power of Relationship Intelligence in Opportunity Management for Strategic Deals
Strategic deals can be seen as a team sport, much like a relay race where each member must sprint in a carefully coordinated fashion to ensure the team’s victory. An integral element of teamwork is a unified platform that keeps everyone on the same page. Several companies are adopting strategies such as opportunity management to manage the sales pipeline at every stage which involves identifying, tracking, and managing potential sales opportunities. Strategic planning, data analysis, and relationship-building are some of the important tools to choose the best opportunities to pursue. No organization can afford to have scattered deal information that can lead to wasted hours and miscommunication. Relationship intelligence can be the most powerful tool in the process of opportunity management that enhances efficiency and improves collaboration by creating automated processes to view, analyze, and implement all relevant information. Read More: Complete Guide on Sales Methodologies to Win Large Deals The Growing Relevance of Relationship Intelligence Key account relationship intelligence is much more than the information and data about your contacts and extends beyond phone numbers, job titles, and pain points. It’s an invaluable repository of the timeline of client interactions, their budgets, and their choice of service or product. Relationship intelligence also includes gauging client sentiment in order to truly understand the nature of your business relationships. An efficient relationship mapping software platform will capture and extract information about all your contacts, analyze it, and share intelligent insights to manage those business relations. It goes beyond traditional customer relationship management software and interprets disparate data to enable better business decisions. In any strategic deal, ‘opportunity’ is the stage between spotting a lead and actually closing your deal. It’s crucial and your sales team must put their best foot forward to introduce your product and convince your prospect to close the deal. Even before they interact with different stakeholders, your team must be armed with a unified plan and must have access to all relevant information. Let’s look at how tapping into relationship management can enable better opportunity management for strategic deals: 5 Benefits of Tapping into Relationship Intelligence in Opportunity Management for Strategic Deals 1. Keeps everyone in the loop It’s convenient for any team, large or small, to track key deals when the relevant information is visible at a glance and everyone is on the same page. With the help of relationship intelligence, you can leverage tools that keep everyone on the same page through automation and extensions that support existing workflows. These tools also offer certain advanced filters to help you discover opportunities by setting specific criteria. This can enable your team to take the necessary steps to fast-track these prospects in the sales pipeline. You can also maintain a record of all your sales collaterals in a centralized repository. Members of your sales team can access and edit these documents that are available to anyone who might need them. Relationship intelligence platforms not only store important information but they go a step further by monitoring and analyzing the data fed into them to provide useful insights. These contextual inputs provided by AI-powered tools assist sales professionals in spotting opportunities and creating more meaningful interactions with customers. 2. Improves communication and collaboration A complex and multi-tiered process, sales requires careful coordination and collaboration between several teams and stakeholders. From refining sales pitches to making the final offer, it takes the collective efforts of many to successfully close deals. Relationship intelligence provides efficient tools that can be integrated with built-in live chat systems. They provide an efficient platform for your team to align their sales activities, share updates, and celebrate wins. Relationship intelligence expedites and automates many key but repetitive tasks for sales teams and customer managers. This considerably reduces their administrative workload leaving them free to focus on revenue-generating activities. In fact, by using relationship intelligence, every update in the team’s deal view can be automated, transforming the Monday meeting and making the deal progress more efficiently. Your team can also divert their time and energy to formulate sales strategies and create a transparent ecosystem where open communication thrives. 3. Provides automated deal and pipeline insights One of the key features and benefits of relationship intelligence solutions is their use of the latest innovations such as Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that can automate many functions and enhance your team’s efficiency. AI tools can slice and dice your sales data to spot trends that can help you forecast future sales opportunities. With automated deal and pipeline insights, your team is in a better position to score more leads. AI-powered tools can also help your team decode data like industry, company size, and budget to design bespoke communication for leads. Analyzing historical data can be particularly useful to make predictions about future performance. With these informed learnings, you will be setting more realistic targets and smartly allocating resources, thereby optimizing the pipeline management process. Data visualization enables sales teams to have a clear vision of their networks, clients and stakeholders by breaking down sales data and identifying relevant trends and patterns. With the help of automated pipeline insights, your team can also efficiently conduct partner reviews and LP reporting. Relationship intelligence gives your leadership a 360° view of the entire strategic account management process by helping them understand engagement with clients, tracking the flow of communication between relevant stakeholders, and mapping the influence and power of client contacts. 4. Betters Deal Closure Time and RatesIn the sales realm, it’s highly unlikely that all deals will go through and all leads or prospects will convert. There could be a sizable number of engaged buyers who did not close the deal the first time and offer a chance for conversion the second time. Over a period of time, their business priorities can change and you may be able to win them over. Relationship intelligence can help you identify the most engaged buyers and help you reestablish a rapport with them. By identifying process blockers and trends that lead to lost deals,
How AI is transforming Relationship Intelligence in Sales Today
How AI is transforming Relationship Intelligence in Sales Today At the core of any sales deal are several relationships, between the customers and salespeople and also between team members of the sales team. These relationships are built and developed over time and transform into crucial assets. This intricate web of relationships results in a ton of tribal knowledge that includes your supporters and detractors, their hierarchies, opportunities won or lost and champions etc. Relationship intelligence (RI) documents, consolidates and maps this tribal knowledge into algorithms and meaningful insights. Importance of relationship intelligence for sales success Relationship intelligence actively involves mining valuable relationship data to generate actionable insights that drive sales. This intelligence is built upon the meaningful interactions that occur between your business and its customers, encompassing data sourced from various touch-points such as phone conversations, emails, and in-person meetings. These interactions serve as the foundation for constructing relationship graphs, forming the crucial building blocks of relationship intelligence. Through the analysis of your company’s relationship data, relationship intelligence provides essential information concerning customer relationships, ensuring personalized and relevant conversations with each customer. By identifying champions and detractors, this knowledge empowers salespeople with the information needed to prioritize accounts and continually enhance relationships. Moreover, relationship intelligence uncovers the relationships within your team members’ networks, leading to the discovery of additional business growth opportunities. AI’s impact on relationship intelligence Even as the sales function has evolved with the proliferation of CRMs to manage customer relationships, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is ushering in a new wave of relationship intelligence in sales. The contextual insights provided by AI-powered tools are helping sales professionals identify opportunities, interact better with customers and forge stronger relationships to drive sales. Take Ai Logo Maker sites for instance, it’s a fast and convenient site to create a logo that truly connects to the right audiences. By leveraging communication data to unravel new opportunities, AI tools are enabling relationship intelligence to manage relationships better and improve conversions leading to higher revenue. Let’s look at how AI is transforming relationship intelligence and creating more opportunities for sales: Enhancing Data Collection and Analysis Relationship intelligence automates the time-consuming task of data collection by centralizing disparate customer databases and capturing the complete lifecycle of a customer. AI tools use data from your inbox and calendar and save valuable time by eliminating data entry and automating the creation and updating of customer contact and company profiles. This process replaces manual data entry and retrieval, enabling your salespeople to focus on higher-value activities and building relationships. Artificial intelligence utilizes AI algorithms to analyze customer interactions and behaviors. Such tools empower your team to search transcript metadata for keywords and phrases to unearth customer needs. Sales personnel can also leverage advanced analytics such as frequency maps and topic clusters to detect significant customer trends. AI tools such as Ask AI provide real-time insights by sourcing the right data about customers that enables you to create customized content and move faster. Achieving Personalization at Scale Empowered by AI-driven insights, sales personnel gain a 360-degree view of the customer’s requirements. This helps them personalize their interactions and nurture trust and loyalty towards their brand. Relationship intelligence helps sales teams to focus on managing expectations, providing clarity and finally choosing strategies that lead to customer satisfaction and higher conversions. Artificial intelligence also provides recurring intelligent reminders to maintain key relationships and establish long-lasting connections. Handling massive volumes of data and leads can result in a serious case of decision fatigue for sales reps. Guided by AI tools, relationship intelligence can considerably reduce this load by automating target account selection and lead prioritization. Sales productivity can increase manifold with your team focused on pursuing high-quality leads, while the follow-up is done by machines. AI tools can update sales managers about relationship status across accounts and also provide real-time insights about prospects. This information enables precise predictions about client behavior and helps you close more deals. AI also enables accurate predictions by providing a real-time picture of transactions to help sales executives decide whether to advance or park deals. The one-size-fits-all strategy rarely works for customers with diverse needs and demands. AI tools enable the creation of customized campaigns and pitches based on customer data. They can also help you establish seamless communication with high-priority customers. Based on their preferences and past behavior, AI tools can suggest the ideal time to make an offer via call or email, when to send an email or interact on social media platforms. Utilizing Intelligent Sales Assistants AI tools provide crucial support to and sales personnel and help them maximize their output and expedite crucial tasks. Chatbots such as ChatGPT generate responses on the basis of an extensive training dataset. With the unique ability to interpret inputs, chatbots are proving to be efficient research assistants. They offer a faster and smarter way to find options instead of spending hours on search engines. Moreover, AI-powered virtual assistants provide insights to help you formulate new sales strategies. While you will still need to validate the results, virtual sales assistants will save a lot of your time and effort by answering all your questions. AI tools maintain a systematic record of communication, appointments, and other basic sales activities relieving salespeople of tedious and time-consuming tasks. Artificial intelligence manages and automates tasks varying from scheduling appointments to assessing your sales team’s pipeline. This gives you and your team bandwidth to focus on building long-term customer relationships and high-value activities. Integrating a video translator can improve your global outreach, making it easier to communicate with clients in different languages. By using this AI tool, sales teams can deliver personalized presentations to a diverse audience, ensuring clear communication with their prospects. Artificial intelligence can mine datasets from multiple sources and get back with prioritized leads. The logic, speed and standardization that AI brings to the process can’t be matched by human effort. Armed with a list of high-quality leads, your sales team can focus on converting them and you can even create
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.
