Tag: Sales Intelligence

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,

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.

Powering Sales Intelligence in KAM to Drive More Leads

“There was once a factory that was run by a large engine at its core. One fine day the engine broke, shutting down the entire operation. ‍ After several engineers failed to solve the problem, the factory owner approached a veteran engine expert as a last-ditch effort. ‍ The expert inspected the engine for a whole hour, pulled out a hammer from his toolkit, placed it above a specific spot, and tapped once with panache. ‍ The engine roared and started working again at once. ‍ The owner, ecstatic at the result, thanked him and inquired about the fees. The expert handed him an invoice for $10,000. ‍ Angry at the ‘atrocious’ amount, the owner exclaimed, “You hardly did anything! $10,000 for a single tap? I want to see an itemized bill.” ‍ Without saying anything, the expert simply made another invoice that read: ‍ Tapping with a hammer: $2 Knowing where to tap: $9,998” Every time I think or read about Automated Sales Intelligence, it reminds me of this story. As sales leaders, we come across such scenarios every day. Whether it is about finding qualified leads, pushing customers through their buyer journeys, or boosting the conversion with landing pages, every information about the customer helps to ‘place the hammer’ at the right spot for the ‘decisive tap’. Today’s blog delves into what automated sales intelligence is, how to gather sales intelligence effectively, and how integrating CRM with sales prospecting intelligence can transform your sales engine. What is Automated Sales Intelligence? Automated sales intelligence refers to the technology and processes that empower sales teams to gather, analyze, and leverage substantial amounts of data about prospects and existing customers. This intelligent approach allows sales professionals to derive actionable sales intelligence that enhances their decision-making capabilities. This helps sales leaders and teams to: Track key changes and information bytes of existing accounts Map key stakeholders in prospective organizations Understand the needs and wants of prospects Collate and index real-time company information And much more… Sales Intelligence = Intelligent Prospecting When done right, Sales Intelligence is all about selling hard and more in the least possible time. Naturally, the benefits extend to a crucial arm of the new-age sales process – Prospecting. By overhauling prospecting and equipping it with ‘Intelligence Data’, Sales Intelligence tells salespeople who they should be talking to, the precise conversations that they should be driving, ideal times at which they should be reaching out to prospects, and more. Ideal Sales Intelligence tools also go to the extent of eliminating manual processes of scraping for critical insights, verifying for their authenticity, and providing a 360-degree view of the prospect. Such benefits have been driving the adoption of Sales Excellence to the point of no return. As per a report from GrandViewResearch, this has witnessed the global market to be valued at $2.29 Billion in 2019 with the expected CAGR to be 10.5% from 2020 to 2027. For instance, consider a scenario where a salesperson is in charge of generating new leads. She is armed with a list of ‘potential’ prospects and the blueprint criteria of what the company’s ideal customer profile stands as. By feeding such data into a Sales Intelligence tool, she can be instantly notified when any new company falls under the purview of the ideal customer profile. And all this without the customary stalking behavior that we usually exhibit as salespeople! Importance of Data in Sales Intelligence As you may have caught up by now, data naturally plays a central role here. But long and complex sales cycles often need much more than numbers and addresses. And as reported by Salespanel, most sales intelligence platforms focus on providing intent data. This usually includes key behavioral information about the prospect’s digital activities. Sales are all about making the right decisions at the most ideal times, a natural habitat for data to thrive in. But while the quantity of data matters here, so does the accuracy. With hyper-contextual marketing and sales data, sales intelligence can drive successful relationship-building that focuses on the correct conversion or engagement parameters. And that’s not all. Sales Intelligence also seeps into the foundation by transforming how customer profiles are shaped. Hunches, feelings, and opinions are categorically eliminated and all intelligence is driven by a consistent profile that does not deviate from one leader or department to another. Such a stable approach keeps every stakeholder on the same page and channels sales and marketing efforts in the right direction. How Sales Intelligence Affects: Data Quality and Management Poor sales data is one of the foremost challenges that salespeople face. Sales Intelligence places immense focus on assessing data quality and improving it with a data quality strategy that brings positive ROI. Key metrics that are usually leveraged here include: Email Bounce Rates: The number of emails that go undelivered due to bounce backs directly correlates with the health of your sales data. The ratio of Data to Errors: Tracking redundant, missing, or incomplete data entities that are depleting data quality. Improved data health here translates to fewer errors with constant or growing data size. The number of Empty Values: Corresponds to missing information or data that has been entered incorrectly into a field. Keeping a track of empty fields and how this number changes over time is a characteristic of sales intelligence. Data Transformation Error Rates: Converting existing data into a different format can introduce another class of errors. As a sales intelligence metric, it becomes important to keep track of data transformation tasks that fail. Quantity of Dark Data: Dark data refers to complicated data quality issues that may not be resolved easily. They are best resolved with elimination and require close monitoring. Data Storage Costs: If the amount of data that you are leveraging in sales remains constant but the storage costs are rising, it can be a sign of poor quality issues. Data Time-to-Value: Another way to measure quality is the time it takes for salespeople to derive actionable value from a given data set.

Sales Representative to Sales Operations – A Good Move?

We understand that this might be a point of view that is subject to argument, but that did not stop us from putting this down, as we believe that this might prove to be a good move. Let’s see why. The Sales Representative has seen, lived, breathed, tasted, every bit of the sales process himself. He has tasted rejection and success, pain and pleasure, respect and denigration; he has seen it all in his role as a sales representative. He knows the process inside out and stands a good chance of knowing what works and what doesn’t. The Sales Representative will understand the challenges and pain points of the sales team and the weak links in the process and systems and process as he has experienced them first-hand. So simply put, he will know how to address them. He will be able to put an operations department in place that takes the routine work off the sales team’s shoulders so that the team can focus on their core strength, sales. The Sales Representative will have an all-around view of the sales-marketing- customer triangle of love and will do his best to keep it in the love mode and not allow it to deteriorate. He will add more value to the sales team’s role and ensure he keeps smoothly running operations so as to enhance the performance and productivity of the sales team. On the other hand, many times, organizations opt for external administrative heads or specialists. Let’s find out why this might not be a good problem to have for the sales team. The non-sales person will never know how the sales organization or department works and the nitty-gritty involved. He will never know the sales departmental processes inside out or how they work, as much as a person who has lived with these processes would know. He would not be able to relate to the real world challenges and problems and the aspirations and inspirations of the sales team. He may be more focused on tactics and not results. He may be more reactive instead of being proactive, which is more a result of not knowing fully how the sales system works. He would still be an outsider to the sales department and may not be readily accepted as one of them soon. Sales and Operations are not being two separate things, and being intricately intertwined, needs a sales representative, a hands-on guy to perform sales operations well. Sales operations are perhaps one of the most important roles in the sales organization and on the sales floor and the person who heads it needs to be chosen from one among the tribe if it were to work smoothly without too much friction.