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.
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:
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.
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:
I'd add a fourth, and not insignificant, benefit: happy sales people... because you're giving them the best tools to explode their targets.
Good news: it's simple. It's done in three steps.
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:
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.
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.
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.
There are two scenarios.
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:
.... Pedagogy and humanity!
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.
Best,