Jim is a senior inside sales representative of a leading provider of accounting software solutions. Over the last few weeks, he has been working hard on a lead he was sure he could convert into a dollar-paying customer. Jim spent a considerable time trying to come up with the best way to close the deal, based on his intuition. As a result, he failed to focus on converting other leads whom he believed were less promising. Unfortunately, after several interactions and putting in a lot of effort, he realized he was chasing the wrong prospect – the deal was never going to materialize.
Andy is the global sales head of a leading multinational heavy electrical equipment manufacturer. Over the last few quarters, the company reported a sharp decline in its sales revenues. Andy conducted a thorough analysis to identify the causes of the company’s poor performance. The results of his analysis surprised him – negotiations on a few critical deals in some of the company’s key market regions went haywire, as its most well-performing sales reps were not assigned to conduct the negotiations.
Do these stories sound familiar? How can you make sure your sales teams have the necessary insights to pursue the right deals? What does it take to ensure your best salespeople handle the most important leads and successfully convert them into income-fetching sales? You need to have the right, timely revenue intelligence.
What we cover in this blog?
- What is Revenue Intelligence?
- What are the Advantages of Having Solid Revenue Intelligence?
- How Salesforce Empowers You to Harness the Full Potential of Revenue Intelligence?
What Is Revenue Intelligence?
In simple words, revenue intelligence is a method that allows businesses to manage their sales and revenue performance through automated, real-time insights backed by solid data.
It leverages your data using cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to provide a comprehensive picture of the revenue-generation process. Revenue intelligence empowers you to get a thorough understanding of your sales pipeline and the steps to be taken to augment your sales revenues.
What Are the Advantages of Having Solid Revenue Intelligence?
The biggest benefit of good revenue intelligence is the ability to take the right actions to grow your sales revenues. It enables you to:
- Spot new opportunities without delays and get the right data-backed insights to maximize the chances of closing deals. You can also pinpoint the right trends and come up with suitable ways to obtain the desired results.
- Make super-precise sales forecasts; you can get a 360-degree view of each stage of the deal. This allows you to reduce risk and make sure the deal progresses seamlessly, as intended.
- Enhance the efficiency of the sales team. You can track the actions of and the progress made by each rep and guide him appropriately to enable him to make the sale.
Having seen what revenue intelligence and how it helps your company, let’s now proceed to examine how Salesforce helps you make the best use of the AI-enabled paradigm to achieve your sales targets.
How Salesforce Empowers You to Harness the Full Potential of Revenue Intelligence?
Identify Prospects Who Will Turn Into Customers Using Predictive Scoring Techniques
As seen earlier, a key element in enhancing the performance of your sales team is identifying which prospects will convert into customers that generate revenue. For years, companies relied on the intuition of their salespeople to score prospective customers; however, developing strategies on mere guesswork doesn’t always provide the desired results. A better option is to use solid data-enabled insights to rank prospects and zero-in on those who are most likely to buy.
Salesforce helps you execute statistical and other analytics activities, very easily, in real time, with just a few clicks. The innovative Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can be accessed anytime, anywhere, using any connected device, including mobile devices. This allows your sales reps to obtain required insights, which are very useful to come up with the right actions to achieve selling success.
You can also identify which prospective customers to engage first with high levels of efficacy, using Salesforce’s predictive lead scoring capabilities; based on this, you can take steps to connect with the prospect without delay. Prospects are scored every 60 minutes; if there is a change to one of your prospective customers, it will be re-scored in the coming hour. No wonder, your sales team can close deals very effectively.
Craft an Efficacious, Multi-threaded Approach to Maximize the Chances of Success
One of the keys in executing a B2B sale successfully is getting all stakeholders on board; as you are aware, most B2B buying decisions are not a single man show but the result of the collective judgement of a buying group. You must not forget we’re treading through uncertain times and all corporate purchases are thoroughly examined, and an objection from one of the decision makers can derail the deal. So, it’s important to make sure you reach out to all people who have a say in the deal, at the right time, with the information sought by them.
You can make sure your reps are multi-threading the correct way. The powerful CRM platform allows you to clearly monitor the activities of the sales rep to ensure he is connecting with the right stakeholder, in an effective manner. This, in turn, helps you see deals don’t get lost because key member of the buying group such as the prospective customer’s finance or IT team is not engaged properly.
Salesforce also allows you to go beyond the engagement provided by your reps and identify other ways to reach out to the stakeholders, based on the data pertaining to their interactions with your team. For instance, one of our clients, a large BFSI firm used its Salesforce data to launch an executive marketing campaign to explain the benefits of its novel employee insurance product.
Mitigate Risks in a Deal by Identifying Potential Roadblocks
A major aspect companies should focus on is identifying potential dangers that could result in deals getting lost. In some cases, problems in likely deals can be easily identified but in most others it is hard to predict potential issues. This is because organizations need to analyze humungous volumes of prospect interaction data to spot what can go wrong.
You can overcome this challenge very effectively using Salesforce. The novel IT system enables you to carry out comprehensive analyses of massive quantities of data, thanks to its state-of-the-art analytics capabilities. You can find the right answers to the following questions, using the CRM system, which empower you to zero-in on potential roadblocks to making a sale and take appropriate steps to resolve them.
- What has changed in the deal and how will the change(s) impact it?
- Does the behavior of a deal resemble previous deals that slipped away? If so, what can be done to prevent it from getting lost?
- How well is the prospective customer engaged? Is your sales rep handling him well?
- Is the prospect likely to raise concerns that can put the deal in danger?
- Is your sales rep following a proven sales process?
Accelerate Closure of Deals Significantly
You want to close deals and close them fast, don’t you? Good revenue intelligence enables you to identify which deals can be concluded quickly. The latest advances in the realm of AI help you analyze data pertaining to conversations with prospective customers with high levels of efficacy, thereby allowing you to spot opportunities for closing deals early.
You can use Salesforce very effectively to perform thorough analyses of data to accelerate sales. Last year, one of our clients, a well-known corporate healthcare solutions provider, utilized the data analytics capabilities of its Salesforce system to identify highly engaged prospects and speed up deals with them by nearly a quarter, meeting its revenue target for the year.
Another advantage of using Salesforce is you can ensure hassle-free collaboration between multiple teams to hasten closure of deals. The marketing and sales departments of the healthcare company worked in unison to leverage a highly relevant campaign to clinch the deal much earlier than expected.
Manage Sales Territories with High Levels of Efficacy
Managers of sales teams must be able to manage their resources in their territories to meet their targets. The managers must make sure their reps focus on the right accounts. Good revenue intelligence within a sales territory helps you gain valuable insights into how your sales personnel are engaging with these accounts. You can also come up with proper strategies to allocate resources to ensure better retention of customers and penetrate deeper into the market.
You can use the data in your Salesforce system to identify territories that require additional resources and determine which accounts need more engagement. The data also helps you explain the reasons for changes in territory assignment effectively.
The Salesforce data also enables you to track coverage of accounts across your sales team ensuring all accounts are touched. You can also measure engagement of each account in real time and get a fair idea of how your sales reps are dealing with the account. You can ensure your sales reps don’t get overburdened, by assigning additional resources to support them. Conversely, you can assign new accounts to your salespeople if you find their capacity is not fully utilized.
As you can see, proper revenue intelligence can go a long way in enhancing the performance of your sales teams considerably, thereby maximizing revenues. At Solunus, we help you make the best use of Salesforce to get revenue intelligence of the best quality. Our rich experience gained serving companies of all sizes in diverse industrial sectors coupled with a strong emphasis on understanding your unique needs enables us to develop the right solution to meet the needs.
Hope you enjoyed this post. How do you use revenue intelligence to make the right decisions? We’d love to know.
About Solunus
Solunus is a dedicated Salesforce partner organization, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Our unrelenting focus on comprehending the unique needs of our clients coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to deliver the perfect solutions that create the best value for IT and business analytics firms.
