By Tom Lavery
We're living in an ever-connected digital world where detailed information on prospects is increasingly easy to access. It's no longer a trend to deliver a personalized, relevant experience to prospects and clients - it's very much expected.
You probably haven't missed the hype around Sales Intelligence. The aggregation of customer and sales data has been necessary for sales teams to deliver these personalized experiences, and demonstrating knowledge in your interactions with prospects can increase your chances of winning a deal.
On its own, Sales Intelligence gives you visibility over the "what" and the "who", but beyond that, you're left to your own devices to make sense of mountains of data. The data is great, but it takes time to comb through it all. In addition, humans are prone to bias. It's impossible to be completely objective when analyzing data mountains and often, takeaways are driven by opinion.
Yes, this intelligence helps sales teams prospect the right businesses and provides insights into your sales process. You can understand these buying signals, you can measure intent, but the data doesn't really tell you how to win a deal, or why you've won deals in the past.
Sure, it can help you identify the right people to talk to and provide you with some leverage over your competitors when you start the conversation, but what impact does it have on continually driving results?
Coupled with the fact that the majority of sales teams have gone remote - businesses are losing even more visibility than ever over performance. In a time of economic shock where driving consistent revenue is vital for every company, understanding the why and how has never been so critical.
Enter Revenue Intelligence. But understanding what it is and how you can ensure it has a positive impact on your business are two very different things.
What is revenue intelligence?
Revenue intelligence provides deep visibility into sales pipelines using data from various sources. Its aim is to maximize revenue, through more efficient sales and marketing efforts.
The process involves data from CRMs, marketing automation tools and customer support interactions. Revenue teams analyze topics including conversion rates, deal velocity, and sales cycles to identify key touchpoints and areas for improvement.
In short, Revenue Intelligence is the "why" and "how" of your sales data that we were talking about. It's the single source of truth that shines a light on the reality of your sales performance. If you expect to survive and thrive in today's sales environment, managers need to learn how and why deals progress.
With Revenue Intelligence, sales leaders can empower organizations with comprehensive, transparent data that is driven by facts - not opinion
What is the difference between revenue intelligence and revenue operations?
Revenue operations is a business function that considers all revenue-generating activities within a business and seeks to optimize processes for more efficient revenue generation. Revenue Operations or RevOps leaders utilize revenue intelligence tools to analyze their business data and highlight areas for improvement.
The 3 key pillars of revenue intelligence
1 - Customer intelligence
The process of collecting and analyzing data from customer conversations found from any source and turning them into actionable insight is customer intelligence.
With customer intelligence, we understand our customers better. We understand their needs and wants by listening to them. Not just physically listening to them, but really understanding what they’re saying.
It’s not just about looking at what was said. Context is important.
Revenue Intelligence flags key signals that may be important in the wider context of the buying decision. Mentioning next steps, handling objections and understanding decision-making criteria. These are the eureka moments that you can use as you move deals forward.
If you’re raising topics that prospects regularly bring up, you’re having relevant conversations. If you’re having relevant conversations, you’re helping to deliver a personalized experience throughout the sales process. This allows you to create a better customer experience.
Improved customer experience equals increased customer retention. This crucially increases conversion rates and growing financial success.
A study by Forbes finds “64% of companies rate customer experience as the best tactic for improving customer lifetime value.”
2 - Conversation analytics
Conversation analytics is the process of understanding the wider context of conversations through data analysis.
In sales, it’s crucial to know what constitutes a strong conversation or a challenging conversation. You want to spend your time driving forward deals that are likely to convert, and taking deals that are unlikely to progress off your plate.
Revenue Intelligence allows you to cut through what was said. In a typical one-hour conversation, over 6,000 words are said. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to recall a handful.
Conversation Analytics eradicates the need to spend time note-taking and allows you to build a rapport. The transcription of interactions provides a searchable record of every conversation.
This data puts conversations into categories that can be analyzed for insights. Grouping all calls where a prospect mentions a competitor or tracking “wow” moments, and understanding specific objections can now be done easily and reps can tailor these categories depending on specific requirements.
3 - Team and deal insights
With Revenue Intelligence, you can quickly view deals that are at risk and your team can create a strategy to keep accounts moving.
Team Insights is a reporting suite on your teams, covering conversational activity, engagement statistics, themes and coaching areas. This highlights areas of strength within your organization as well as providing a useful framework showing areas where improvement is needed.
Deal Insights is a pipeline forecast showing which deals have which activity associated with them, and identifying any risks associated with a deal. Deal insights are a useful barometer for any sales team to identify the interactions that help progress deals and turn prospects into customers.
The benefits of revenue intelligence
Capture every interaction for full visibility
Record, transcribe and save all conversations. Understand where your sales efforts are being focused and where improvement is needed in an instant.
Detailed analytics help you understand the "why" and "how"
Uncovers trends across hundreds of conversations, something that it would be impossible for a human to do at scale. This can be done with customizable dashboards and automated reporting.
Machine learning removes bias and reports reality
Meeting forecasts is critical for any sales leader to stay successful in the role. Even in this data-heavy environment, teams are too reliant on human input for assessing funnel quality. Revenue intelligence platforms and conversation intelligence platforms like Jiminny help you leverage your existing data to prepare you for the boardroom. Of course, the top line is just the beginning. The right revenue intelligence technology allows you to understand the reasoning behind your results. Machine learning can deliver a projection based on historical trends with likely ranges of outcomes for each.
Instant analytics for fast-moving companies
Revenue intelligence becomes your single source of truth for your sales team. Gone are the days where you needed to aggregate large quantities of data, you're empowered to make data-driven decisions without wasting valuable time collecting the numbers.
Automation improves productivity
Sales reps can now focus on tasks that are important, and less on data entry and reporting. Revenue intelligence enables a two-way sync between your CRM and the platforms themselves. Our research shows that our clients' sales reps using Revenue Intelligence see an increase in meetings booked by over 50%.
Data transcends sales to fuel growth for the whole organization
It's not just sales teams that can benefit from revenue intelligence. The voice of your customer, understanding their wants and needs and the triggers that led them to purchasing your product or service is incredibly valuable for marketing and customer success teams. This data can be easily shared between teams, encouraging collaboration and unifying your organization based on the reality of your customers' needs.
Data-sharing creates a coaching culture
Understand what ‘successful’ is in your organization, share winning moments, and understand losses more deeply. If you want to grow your business you need to understand the reasons why it's performing a certain way in order to improve it. Revenue intelligence technology helps you understand the way your deals are won or lost; understand how it drives your growth and; how these factors impact sales over time. This data is transparent across the whole organization and allows people to see first-hand where they can make improvements without the need for micro-management.
Who needs revenue intelligence?
Teams that leverage revenue intelligence gain valuable insights into their unique sales process. This results in more accurate, data-driven sales forecasting, improved sales and marketing efforts, and better customer experience.
It also:
- Removes bias, reporting on reality through machine learning and artificial intelligence models
- Provides instant analytics for fast-moving companies
- Transcends the sales function to fuel growth across the organization
- Encourages a culture of data-sharing, coaching and continuous improvement
Done well, it empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, improve sales strategies and fuels revenue growth.
Sales teams
Revenue intelligence gives sales teams greater visibility into customer and prospect activity across channels. By analyzing usage, engagement, and buying signals, sales reps can better understand where customers are in the buying journey and when and how to approach them. Revenue intelligence also identifies high-value accounts that sales should prioritize and uncover cross-sell/upsell opportunities within existing accounts. With data-driven insights, sales teams can have more productive conversations, close deals faster, and exceed revenue goals.
Revenue leaders
For revenue leaders, revenue intelligence is an invaluable ally in forecasting, planning, and strategy. By combining financial data with usage, adoption, and customer health metrics, revenue intelligence provides a holistic view of revenue risks and opportunities. Leaders can model different growth scenarios to create accurate forecasts. They can also gain visibility into changing market conditions and customers need to adjust strategy accordingly. With advanced analytics and AI, revenue intelligence enables data-driven decision-making so leaders can optimize monetization, retention, and expansion. This drives faster revenue growth at reduced risk.
Customer success
Revenue intelligence empowers customer success managers to identify and resolve issues that may impact retention and expansion revenue. Analyzing usage data, revenue intelligence can detect low adoption of product features or disengaged customers. Customer success can then proactively reach out to provide training or support. Revenue intelligence also identifies upsell opportunities based on customers' feature usage and needs. By matching the right offers to the right customers, customer success can drive expansion revenue while also improving retention. Overall, revenue intelligence enables customer success teams to maximize the lifetime value of accounts.
Marketing
For marketing teams, revenue intelligence connects campaign investments to pipeline and revenue. By tracking the customer journey across campaigns and channels, marketers can see their true impact on the sales funnel. Revenue intelligence also helps optimize campaign spending by identifying the highest-converting lead sources, content, and segments. With clear visibility into the ROI of marketing programs, teams can double down on what's working and refine underperforming areas. Additionally, revenue intelligence identifies customer retention and expansion signals, enabling account-based marketing programs to nurture existing customers. With intelligence-driven marketing, teams can generate more revenue at lower acquisition costs.
Revenue intelligence metrics for success
There are a few key metrics that indicate an organization's revenue intelligence program is delivering value:
- Increased forecast accuracy - With advanced analytics, revenue intelligence improves forecasting precision so budgets and plans are based on solid projections.
- Faster sales cycle times - Revenue intelligence enables sales teams to shorten sales cycles by identifying the right accounts to target and the right time to engage.
- Improved win rates - Insights into prospect and customer behavior allow sales and marketing teams to craft the right messaging and positioning to win more deals.
- Higher average contract values - Revenue intelligence identifies upsell opportunities within accounts to grow contract values over time.
Increased customer lifetime value - Customer success and marketing teams can use revenue intelligence to improve retention and expansion revenue per account. - Higher marketing ROI - By tracking marketing influence on pipeline and revenue, teams can optimize spending and improve the ROI of marketing programs.
When revenue teams can measure improvements across these metrics, it's a sign that revenue intelligence is delivering material business impact. The metrics demonstrate that intelligence is being turned into tangible results.
The relationship between revenue intelligence and conversation intelligence
Revenue intelligence and conversation intelligence - a match made in heaven.
Visibility on revenue generation is great, but the deeper you can dive in, the better. Recording, transcribing, and analyzing conversations helps you understand your revenue-generating team. Finding out where and how you need to improve will fast-track progress and revenue generation.
By unifying data from revenue intelligence, conversation intelligence, and call recording systems, sales, and customer success teams get an incredibly rich understanding of customer interactions and business relationships:
Revenue intelligence provides a big-picture view of customer health and revenue risks and opportunities. Conversation intelligence analyzes interactions to uncover engagement levels, sentiment, and buying signals. Call recording captures vital context through actual sales and support conversations.
Together, these three capabilities offer a comprehensive view of the voice of the customer along with the business context. Sales reps can hear conversations and see intelligence alerts on key accounts to drive relevance and personalization. Customer success can listen to calls with at-risk customers while viewing usage trends to take corrective actions.
By combining these datasets, teams can have more intelligent conversations, create better customer experiences, preempt and solve issues, and ultimately make more profitable business decisions. Unified intelligence helps sustain revenue growth and maximize account lifetime value. See how harnessing this powerful trio can maximize your impact in our handy guide.
How to implement a revenue intelligence solution
Implementing revenue intelligence solutions takes careful planning and execution:
Get cross-functional buy-in
To ensure broad adoption, bring sales, marketing, customer success, and other stakeholders on board early and communicate the benefits clearly.
Audit existing data sources
Identify all the customer data sources across CRM, marketing automation, finance systems, etc. Assess data quality and accessibility.
Define business objectives and metrics
Align on the key business questions and metrics the solution should answer. Stay focused on driving revenue impact.
Select the right technology
Choose a flexible revenue intelligence platform that can connect data sources, analyze data, and deliver insights through dashboards and alerts.
Clean, map, and integrate data
Invest time in consolidating and preparing customer data for analysis. Create unified profiles.
Develop models and analytics
Work with data scientists to build models, algorithms, and analytics tailored to your data and use cases.
Deliver insights to users
Build dashboards, reports, and alerts that make intelligence easy to access and act upon for different user groups.
Drive adoption with training
Provide training resources and support to users to get comfortable leveraging revenue intelligence.
Refine and expand over time
Continue enhancing data, analytics, and adoption based on user feedback for maximum business impact. With a phased, collaborative approach, organizations can successfully deploy revenue intelligence at scale.
Unlock insights with Jiminny
Sales Intelligence is great at providing data. It’s helpful to know who your customers are and what’s happening. Revenue Intelligence goes one step further. In short, it's the single source of truth that shines a light on the reality of your sales performance.
Knowing how and why you win or lose is the way you guarantee business success. Revenue Intelligence automates this process to help drive growth within your organization.
Join the other sales professionals today that are using Revenue Intelligence software to get transparency and accurate data that understands your customers better.
You can book a demo with one of our team here.
Tom Lavery is the CEO and Co-Founder of Jiminny, the leading conversation intelligence and sales coaching platform that helps companies maximize their revenue. With over 15 years of experience in high-growth VC/PE-backed SaaS companies, Tom was previously SVP at Reward Gateway, now sharing his wealth of knowledge as a speaker in the conversation intelligence space.
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