Your outside sales team needs a boost. What sales intelligence tools should you consider?

1 Sales intelligence definition

Sales intelligence is the process of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data and insights about prospects, customers, markets, and competitors. Sales intelligence tools help salespeople find and prioritize leads, understand their pain points and needs, tailor their pitches and proposals, and track their progress and performance. Sales intelligence tools can also help managers coach and train their team, identify best practices, and optimize their sales strategy.

2 Sales intelligence benefits

Sales intelligence tools can offer a range of advantages for outside sales, such as automating and streamlining tasks like data entry, lead generation, and follow-up. These tools can also reduce human errors, update data in real time, and provide relevant and reliable information. Additionally, they can enable personalized and timely communication, deliver value-added insights, and create trust and loyalty with customers. Ultimately, sales intelligence tools help salespeople identify and target the most qualified and profitable prospects, close more deals faster, increase their win rates, and boost their revenue.

3 Sales intelligence sources

Sales intelligence tools utilize different sources of data and information, such as internal data from CRM, ERP, marketing, and customer service systems; external data from third-party sources like social media, news, websites, blogs, and reviews; as well as user-generated data like notes, calls, emails, meetings, and tasks. This information can provide insights into the prospects' behavior, interests, challenges, and opportunities while helping salespeople track and manage their activities and interactions.

4 Sales intelligence features

Sales intelligence tools can provide various features and functionalities to meet your needs and goals. Lead generation and scoring can help you find and rank prospects based on criteria such as industry, location, size, revenue, and engagement. Lead enrichment and verification can help you confirm the data about your prospects. Lead nurturing and engagement enables you to reach your prospects through various channels with personalized messages. Sales analytics and reporting provides insights into your sales performance, such as pipeline, revenue, conversion, quota, and ROI. This is done through dashboards, charts, and graphs.

5 Sales intelligence examples

There are many sales intelligence tools available in the market, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Popular options include Salesforce, a comprehensive CRM platform that offers various sales intelligence features; LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a social selling tool that helps you find and connect with prospects on LinkedIn; ZoomInfo, a B2B contact database that helps you find and reach prospects; and HubSpot Sales Hub, a sales automation and acceleration tool that streamlines and optimizes your sales process. Each of these tools offer features such as lead generation, scoring, enrichment, verification, nurturing, engagement, analytics, reporting, InMail, PointDrive, TeamLink, email tracking, templates, sequences, meetings, calls, live chat and integrations with other tools and apps.

6 Sales intelligence best practices

To get the most out of your sales intelligence tools, you should follow some best practices. Start by defining your goals and KPIs; this will help you measure your success. Additionally, choose the right tools and features that match your needs, budget, resources, and skills. It may be beneficial to compare different options and test them before making a decision. Integrate your tools and data with other systems and platforms to ensure accuracy and accessibility. Lastly, train and support your outside sales team on how to use the tools effectively and provide them with feedback, guidance, and incentives.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?