I Have This Intent Data But I Don’t Know What To Do With It

I had a phone call the other day from a Sales Rep I know and he said 

“you know all about these fancy sales tech stacks. I’ve been sent a report from Marketing about “Intent data” what am I supposed to do with it?”

I answered, “what does it say”.

The sales rep said “It says that one of my accounts (he named them, but I will spare his blushes) are all over our corporate website, what should I do?”

I asked him, “what do your contacts say in the account?”

He said, “I don’t have any any contacts, I’ve never spent any time on it as they are a big user of our competition”.

I thought it was time to get back to basics so asked him “do you know what intent data is?”

“Oh yes, it's where a company will look at a website, the assumption that because people from a company are looking at the suppliers website, there is "intent""

Spot on.

I asked him “have you connected anybody in that prospects account?”

He said “how do I do that?”

It was then, I realised that the issue was actually bigger than I thought.

It was Grady Booch who famously said "A fool with a tool is still a fool.”

We often hear about Account X that has cancelled this tool and Company Y has cancelled that tool. You can understand it in the current economic climate, if somebody isn’t seeing any “value” from a tool, then they will cut the spend on it.

The problem isn’t the tool, we have looked at pretty much all the tools and they do pretty much what the supplier says they do. I might question why you might want to use some of tools, but they do what they said they will do. The issue always comes down to training the team to use them.

In the early days of DLA Ignite, Alex Low had a meeting at a company and they had just rolled out a tool, I won’t mention them. The tool supplier had done a great job of selling it, the company gave it to the sales people and guess what? Nothing happened. 

In fact, in the first quarter, nobody logged on, let alone used the tool.

As Alex Low often says

"In many cases, we see that the capability of the sales tech has outstripped the ability of the salesperson."

While I have been driving for over 20 years, I know that if I got into a Formula One (F1) car I would probably crash it at the first corner. 

Giving sales tools to sales people is often like this.

I’m aware of one sales tool that if you train the person on the tool, they become the world’s best spammers. It doesn’t help them get more meetings or close more deals, in fact it will probably piss more people off, more quickly than they have ever done so far in their life. 

My advice: Before investing in the tool, make sure you have enough money in the budget to train the team, not just on the tool, but the business process. 

For example, you can have the best Linkedin trainer in the world, but training on just the tool won’t help you. You have to understand the end-to-end business process of why you need to social sell and the psychology behind that.