Revenue professionals are always looking out for clarity about their customers. And sometimes, it gets lost amongst obscure data and information. We understand that given the limited, stale, and distorted data in our CRM, it becomes difficult to find the ultimate truth.
Today the needs of the customers are changing very quickly, and they have become quite demanding off late. This is where it becomes essential to get access to customer reality. And, the customer reality will help answer some of the toughest questions about our customers and business.
This is where revenue intelligence comes into the picture. It helps to answer some of the toughest questions about your customers and business. With the help of a good revenue intelligence system, revenue professionals can easily unify the entire company around all-inclusive, fresh data based on reality.
What exactly is revenue intelligence?
Revenue intelligence is the next-level technology that uses AI-driven, data-centric process to accumulate, sync, and manage data across all your customer-facing teams to help generate revenue.
The concept of revenue intelligence is pretty fresh. It came into existence as a result of the availability of artificial intelligence solutions and the ability to integrate them with other applications and tools to collect data.
Revenue intelligence uses a data-first approach while it accumulates data from multiple teams like sales, marketing, customer success, and support. Then, it integrates them into a single source of truth where the data can be used in unison to drive home an advantage.
When it comes to the sales team, revenue intelligence provides an entirely new level of insights that accompany sales opportunities.
With the help of these opportunities, sales team can get relevant information with advanced buying signals, targeting data, and forecasting information.
Thanks to revenue intelligence, sales representatives are able to better prioritize leads, personalize their communications, and ultimately result in more revenue, thanks to use the use of revenue intelligence applications.
Sales team are also able to enhance their efficiency and productivity as they are able to ascertain which prospects are most likely to close and which may waste their time.
Even sales representatives can better engage with revenue intelligence tools, as they can predict which contact is most likely to respond, through which channel, and when.
With its help, customer success teams can easily and effectively ascertain customers who they can successfully upsell, which are not fully utilizing the product, and who might churn.
Now that you have understood the definition of revenue intelligence, let us dive into the problems that can be resolved by a revenue intelligence system.
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Problems resolved by a revenue intelligence system
Here are some of the problems that can be resolved once you start using a revenue intelligence system.
1. Uncaptured data
Till now, organizational analytics were totally dependent upon sales, marketing, and customer service representatives who were responsible for the repetitive tasks of logging all of their contacts, engagement data, and activities within the CRM.
While in theory, this happens after point of contact with the customer or prospect, in practical life, it seldom happens.
55% of salespeople admit that they don’t store lead and customer data in their CRM. Sales representatives who do already spend almost 30% of their time each week manually entering the data.
Most organizations are still dependent upon this incomplete data for sales reporting, capacity planning, and sales forecasting.
This problem can be resolved with the help of a revenue intelligence system. Such a system automatically captures all contact and activity data in the sales process from customer-facing teams and populates the CRM in the right opportunities, in the right accounts.
It gets rid of manual data entry and creates a reliable and accurate CRM.
2. Siloed data
Data that is successfully captured is siloed in sales, marketing, or customer success.
The lack of collaboration between sales and marketing results in companies missing out on customer trends, opportunities, and does not use a single source of truth while interacting with customers.
Data gets stored in different locations. There are times when it is stored on a spreadsheet on a representative’s desktop which does not prove useful for organizational-wide analysis.
With the help of a revenue intelligence system, you can get rid of such siloes by capturing all data across functions in real-time and extracting it into a single platform that serves as a single source of truth for the whole organization.
Such trustworthy data can enable everyone to be on the same page. It uses the same data sets to make better decisions on an enterprise-wide level.
3. Outdated data
With every passing moment, your CRM grows stale with outdated data.
Fact Check:
An average data of a B2B organization typically doubles every 12 to 18 months. And, with 25% of contacts in the typical database consisting of critical errors, your CRM swiftly becomes an expensive, unreliable mess with missing contacts and activity data. People shift jobs, change time, and often do not update their LinkedIn profile till they are a few months into the new job.
Thanks to the revenue intelligence system, you can automatically track and update changes in contact’s public data, including email address, title, phone, and address in real-time. This allows CRM to stay up-to-date. Your sales and marketing can trust such data available in the CRM to be right when they plan a campaign and make calls.
The next big thing in revenue intelligence
Here are some of the things that the business world of tomorrow can expect with the introduction of an ingenious revenue intelligence platform.
A revenue intelligence system helps in capturing every single detail of their customer interactions across all relevant channels.
Everyone in the organization will have access to information pertaining to the customer and market in real-time, thanks to revenue intelligence. And since everything captured by revenue intelligence platform is as it is, its chances are high in reality as it is captured using AI and not humans.
Advanced buying signal
With the help of a revenue intelligence system, it would become easier to track everything from email opens to on-page clicks and customer conversation analysis. It would enable you to search through a wider depth of data to see in case customers are putting out buying signals that are even not easy for sales representatives to catch!
A revenue intelligence system accumulates all data and insights into a single dashboard for an easy reference. This will give an opportunity for your customer-facing teams to access the dashboard to enhance their processes like providing upselling opportunities. They can even tailor a sales approach to specific leads by looking at comprehensive insights instead of the basic demographic data.
Revenue forecasting
In the business environment, one of the most difficult things to do is to predict the future. You can make educated guesswork. However, forecasting revenue with a degree of precision needs comprehensive data.
Since revenue intelligence deals with accumulating, processing, and absorbing data than any most individuals, it is far better bet to provide more accurate revenue forecasting models. This way, it assists decision-makers to select the best initiatives.
Concluding Thoughts
A revenue intelligence system is a must in today’s time as far as a B2B SaaS company is concerned. With the help of the things mentioned above, you can easily envisage the next big thing in the revenue intelligence system.
Dattatraya Shetty is an IT Professional with 2 Decades of experience in areas of Product Development, Implementation & Service Delivery Management. As the Head of Implementations and SOC Compliance in Smartkarrot he is on a mission to provide relishing customer experience.
Published December 02, 2021, Updated May 21, 2024