How to Use Sales Intelligence Technology to Increase Sales Pipeline

It can be difficult to ensure that you are targeting your best prospects. All that time you spend on research — Googling, scouring company websites, and living on LinkedIn — is wasted when the yield is a half-baked contact list that may or may not contain trustworthy information. Lists are an option, but decades of list purchases have shown us that we’re throwing our hard-earned budgets away on contact data that immediately goes stale.

We live in the Information Age. With data in our pockets and at our fingertips, there has to be a better way to identify our best prospects and increase your sales pipeline than tedious information gathering and generic list purchases, right?

Right. But sometimes, the truth hurts.

Your CRM isn’t enough.

It just isn’t.

Part of the problem that revenue teams face today is that they are using decades-old technology to try to find and reach modern buyers. A B2B go-to-market strategy based solely on your existing tech stack — namely CRM and marketing automation — is holding you back. These platforms are good at storing customer and lead data, nurturing, and passing leads from Marketing to Sales, but they were not built to handle what you need or expect today; namely:

• Finding new prospects to grow your pipeline
• Navigating across accounts and people
• Tracking intent behaviors on competitor websites to identify in-market accounts
• Expanding existing customer relationships by cross-selling additional products
• Managing sophisticated digital advertising programs
• Supporting a dynamic and synchronized process where Marketing and Sales work as a team

Sales Intelligence: Tech that helps you find the right targets

So we’ve addressed that your current sales and marketing technology, static lists, and time-consuming methods of data collection aren’t enough. You need real-time company and contact data. Not just what is in your CRM system; you already know that. The information you really need is what you don’t know.

Enter sales intelligence.

Sales intelligence is a critical piece of the go-to-market tech puzzle. Powered by InsideView, the Demandbase Sales Intelligence Cloud does all of the searching and scouring for you, gathering and validating company and contact data, news, and social insights from thousands of trusted sources. We deliver it to you when and where you need it — in your CRM or wherever you browse. No more wasting time on research or chasing prospects who aren’t a good fit.

Once you have all of that data at your fingertips, you can find your best prospects by building a list of accounts and contacts based on the characteristics of your ideal customer profile. Filter by company size, location, industry, and even sub-industry. Does your ideal prospect use specific types of technology? Do you only work with companies that have certain job titles? You can filter for those. How about narrowing your list to companies where you have connections? You can filter on that, too. You can even filter based on the distinct sales triggers your best customers exhibit.

So what do we mean by sales triggers?

Suppose your best prospects are those who are expanding operations, launching a new product, or who just got a round of funding. The Sales Intelligence Cloud helps you quickly find those prospects by filtering on any of 18 common sales triggers, and even customized triggers, that you define. It gathers, curates, and categorizes news about your prospects and customers in real-time to alert you when they have a trigger event. You can use the news as a filter when you build a list or rely on daily email alerts to clue you in on your best prospects or to signal the right time to reach out.

Customer Data Platform for more data insights

Now imagine that you could push further, bringing in intent and behavioral data to really get things kicking. Wouldn’t that make things even better? Absolutely. And that’s why your new best friend is a Customer Data Platform (CDP).

CDPs provide a single view of your accounts, the people within them, and their associated behaviors, so you can deliver the best possible account-based experience. You can use your CDP to further refine who you should be talking to, which accounts you should be targeting, and engage with specific accounts to get them moving from the top of your funnel into actual opportunities (your pipeline).

There are two flavors of CDP:

• Standalone: A separate tool that integrates into the rest of the stack and typically requires a large investment
• Embedded: A capability of another solution, delivering the benefit of a standalone CDP with significantly less work (This is what Demandbase offers.)

With the combination of the right CDP, sales intelligence, intent data, and account-based technology, you increase your pipeline velocity. By engaging with accounts when they show intent, you boost your win rate and deal value, open more opportunities, and decrease the length of the sale cycle because you reach out at that magic moment when an account is in-market and interested in hearing from Sales.

But that, my friends, is a conversation for another blog.

Dig deeper

Until then, you can learn more about sales intelligence, CDPs, and the latest in sales enablement technology so you can increase your pipeline and start closing bigger and better deals. Check out the Sales Intelligence Cloud at Demandbase.