Business strategy
6 min reading

Sales intelligence to improve sales performance?

Côme Hug de Larauze
Published on
14/3/2024
sales intelligence and growth strategy

Customer data is the equivalent of gold nuggets in the early days of the Wild West:

"It's very valuable, and you only have to bend down to pick it up!"

As I said in the previous article, artificial intelligence can increase the efficiency of salespeople tenfold in a very short time.

Today, I'm going to explain how data can boost your knowledge of prospects and accelerate your sales cycles. 

How?

Thanks to sales intelligence... aka your new passion.


What is sales intelligence?

It is simply the collection and analysis of data about your customers/prospects.

Its principle is based on a simple reflection: 

Finding 1: Your customers and prospects produce data that you can collect.

Finding 2: This data can give you a huge business advantage by drastically reducing the uncertainty inherent in the work of salespeople. 

> Conclusion: It would be a shame not to take advantage!

In concrete terms, you can collect two main families of data:

  1. ‍Customer data : company profile, market addressed, behavior since first contact (when did they buy?), level of satisfaction...
    This first database is all the easier to populate as your customers provide you with most of the elements themselves.
  2. Prospect data : company profile, target market, strategies and objectives, behavior, buying signals...
    This second database is less easy to feed, as you need to deploy tools to collect the available data. The good news? There are some handy sales intelligence solutions! I'll talk about them below.

Once you have collected this information from internal (or external) sources, you can analyse it, draw conclusions from it, and pass it on to your sales people to sharpen their focus.


What do you stand to gain?

Sales intelligence is a way ofdeepening your knowledge of the market and, above all, of making it actionable.

In concrete terms, it allows you to support the efforts of your salespeople by telling them when and how to approach their prospects .

Timing + good speech = unstoppable.

By the way, sales intelligence is also called "situational"... because it prevents your sales force from trying to sell a prime rib to a prospect who went vegan last week (for example). It highlights the right "buying signals" for your sales force to capitalize on. 

At Modjo, we find that sales intelligence has at least three advantages:

  • Improved pitches: Better knowledge of the prospect + data on their latest research + analysis of call history (if available) = we know how to talk to them and hit the bull's eye.
  • More efficient sales process: Prioritizing hot prospects + the right pitch for each prospect = more sales, faster. 
  • And therefore shorter sales cycles: Faster lead generation = Faster signature.

I'd add a fourth, and not insignificant, benefit: happy sales people... because you're giving them the best tools to explode their targets.

sales intelligence definition

‍How tocreate your data bases and generate sales intelligence?

Good news: it's simple. It's done in three steps.

🧲Step 1: Collect and analyse external data

What are your sources? The most basic ones are obviously the websites and social networks of your customers and prospects. Regular crawling (software that automatically explores the web) will give you all you need. 

To go beyond these essentials, here are a few tools we like at Modjo:

  • Linkedin Sales Navigator: to identify the right prospects, contact them at the right time and present them with a personalised pitch.
  • Dropcontact Dropcontact.io: to correct, normalize, duplicate and unify all your contacts' information in 1 click. Dropcontact.io finds and gathers all your contacts' information accumulated and scattered in your files and different applications.
  • Sparklane Sparklane: to intelligently source prospects and provide relevant actionable data to salespeople. Sparklane allows you to contact the right people at the right time based on business signals analysed and scored by theAI
  • Modjo (of course): to record your calls with your prospects/customers, then which automatically transcribes the exchange into writing. You can then search by topics ("price", "objection", "timing", "decision-maker", etc.)‍
  • Salesforce, which links all these sources and makes them actionable.

💎Step 2: Pamper your internal data

Business relationships create their own data. You already have a lot of information about your customers. 

Secondly, you have probably generated a good deal of data about your prospects by interacting with them. This data is very valuable because it is not available anywhere else. It gives you a competitive advantage. You just have to know how to exploit it.

That's the aim of Modjo, which enables you to process your interactions to extract unique and valuable information about the prospects you contact, as well as about your customers. Behaviors, current questions, budgets... Modjo classifies all this in a highly visual way to offer you clear, actionable conclusions.


🚀Step 3: Start again

When it comes to dirty smarts, the key is consistency.

Your prospects move fast. Finding out good information a few days too late can cost you the business. So make business analysis a regular practice. 

  • Maybe you want to know everything about ONE target prospect for a while?
  • Perhaps you will define a palette of prospects and follow them regularly to detect buying signals?
  • Perhaps you will naturally approach prospects about whom you have the most data?

Whatever your strategy, keep the pace.

After a few months of practice, you will notice that your entire sales strategy will improve. You will know your market's wishes better, you will prioritise more precisely, in short: you will dominate the sale instead of letting yourself be blown around by the wind.

Who is responsible for dirty intelligence?

There are two scenarios.

Case 1:

You are too small to consider creating a dedicated team. Sales intelligence will therefore have to be managed by sales people and/or managers.

How can they be encouraged to do so?

This is where you need to be extremely educational. Explicitly present the merits of this practice. Invest in a few GOOD tools, carefully chosen. Organize training and feedback sessions. And let sales reps see for themselves how sales intelligence can help them achieve their objectives.

At Modjo, I have set up a training course on data and the importance of collecting it. In this training, I take the subject back to basics:

  • Why data? What benefits?
  • How do you get it back?
  • Where to store it in the CRM?
  • And above all... "Do you have any other questions? How does it feel?"

.... Pedagogy and humanity!

Second case:

You have a sales ops team. They are the ones who will take over the sales intelligence. Easy, because they like it and are trained for it.

But be careful to raise awareness among sales people, even if you have sales ops, because they are the ones who will ultimately use the lessons of sales intelligence.

Don't forget, it's a team effort: the more data you have, the more keys you'll have to improve your sales actions, and the more you'll boost your performance.

To sum up!

  • Sales intelligence can make your teams more efficient, shorten your sales cycles, and therefore accelerate your growth.
  • It relies on external data, AS WELL AS internal data: the combination of the two is the key.
  • It is based on two pillars: good tools (including good integration with CRM) and people who are aware of and trained in these techniques. 
  • It's important to ensure that sales reps are properly onboarded, as the tool's effectiveness depends on their buy-in.

Best,

Côme Hug de Larauze
CPO & Co-founder
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