A big struggle that many companies face is getting real value out of sales information in their CRM and other sources. Sometimes, this is because the data they need simply isn’t there. Even with some of the incredible capabilities of big-named CRMs nowadays, people just fail to input the proper data or any data at all.
Unfortunately, you can’t change human behavior.
Fortunately, we can leverage technology like software tools and AI to help us make up for human error. Companies can now streamline operational productivity using revenue intelligence and gain invaluable insights.
Contents
What is revenue intelligence?
Revenue intelligence is collecting product usage and sales data from leads, prospects, and even current customers, then analyzing it using technology such as algorithms and AI. It helps identify metrics and market trends that can maximize revenue.
Revenue intelligence gathers insightful data across multiple different avenues within the sales funnel. Here are a few examples of a few different points that revenue intelligence can pull data from:
- Email openings and clicks
- Downloads (Content such as eBooks and whitepapers)
- Website visits and other interactions
- Inbound and outbound calls (Answer rates, left messages, callbacks)
- Conversion analytics
- Progression of deals
- Forecasting and other predictive analytics
- Sales playbook adherence
Gathering data from these different points of the sales process helps you collect real data about your business, ensuring that you take the right steps to help you grow. It’s about working smarter, not harder, gathering answers to questions that are essential for the well-being of your sales process and the entire foundation of the company.
Think about the last time you had a deal go bottom-up. Most likely, it was because of some sort of unseen variable. Revenue intelligence is designed to ensure you see all the pieces on the board and are ready to make the next move based on the collected data.
For revenue leaders, this means visualizations and predictions to help monitor business health, remove risks from the pipeline, and accurately forecast. For people selling, this means guidance in every step of the sale process, giving information like who to talk to, what needs to be said, and what needs to be sold.
What metrics should you look for?
We talked about identifying metrics to maximize revenue just above. Metrics are a vital part of measuring the success of revenue intelligence, and we’re not just talking about meeting a sales quota.
If you want your revenue to grow and your various teams to perform, you need to bring metrics to the table that perhaps weren’t thought about before. You need all the nitty-gritty details that let you know what’s going on in the sale and where you can improve. Here are some examples of metrics that you can track so that you can enhance your data:
Win rates
Look at the total number of deals you had lined up in your pipeline. How many of those are closed? If you want to forecast accurately, you will need to understand better the likelihood that deals will close. Is it one deal in every five? One in fifty? You will need to average these wins and create a ratio for your forecasting efforts.
Deal size
Are you closing more small deals or larger deals? Revenue intelligence relies on your visibility into the average deal size in the pipeline. Measuring this metric allows you to teach your sales reps to focus on deals that will produce the highest impact, closing larger deals and increasing revenue.
Deal velocity
Even if you’re closing larger deals, velocity matters; the fastest way to increase revenue is to speed up the deals and sell faster. Using metrics to measure how fast an opportunity can turn into a closed deal is very insightful. It helps you turbocharge your sales process and even shrink the sales cycle.
Product mix
You should pay close attention to what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, and when it’s being sold. Most of the time, companies offer a variety of products, and if it’s not tracked, it can be hard to know what product mix is best to sell to certain people at certain times. Tracking these metrics will help your sales team sell more relevant products.
Other metrics
The metrics above are just a foundation. They will help you get on your feet, but if you want to thrive, you’ve got to think out of the box. As time goes on and you get used to measuring these metrics, try throwing your own, custom metrics into the mix. Things like annual recurring revenue (ARR), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and annual contract value (ACV) are all great metrics to track to improve revenue intelligence.
The 5 operating principles of revenue intelligence
Along with the definition and the process involved in revenue intelligence, it’s important to understand the five operating principles that give it drive. These are principles essential to the streamlined dataflow that revenue intelligence brings, and what truly gives it value in sales.
1. Use automation instead of manual data entry
Revenue intelligence utilizes marketing automation and AI from beginning to end. The idea behind it is to eliminate human error and constantly analyze data, both passively and actively. That being said, automation is an essential part of gathering that data.
2. Get a complete view of your interactions with customers
For the data to bring value to your sales process, you need a complete and total view of your customer interactions. Partial views will only give you a fraction of the story and make your forecasting highly inaccurate. One tiny detail could mean the difference between the next big sale and walking away empty-handed.
3. Real-time data is required for decision making
In most business operations, utilizing data in real-time is essential to the success of a project or campaign. If you’re looking for accurate predictions and you want to improve your sales process down to the tiniest details, you cannot be using old data. You need to know how customers are interacting with your company right now.
4. Make decisions based on reality
One of the quickest ways to sink your revenue earning channels is to make predictions and decisions based on opinions. Even if those opinions are based on experience, that experience may not be entirely reliable in a certain situation. You need real data and numbers to make the best decisions.
5. The entire company should be connected through data
Data is the driving force behind revenue intelligence. This data should be the glue that holds the entire company together and grounds them to the reality of the business’s success or failure.
This data that is being collected is not just beneficial for the sales team but the entire company.
What issues does revenue intelligence solve?
As a whole, revenue intelligence solves five basic issues for any company that implements it. Here they are in no particular order:
1. Uncaptured data
Even with the incredibly helpful tech, we have nowadays, most organizations’ analytics entirely rely on the manual input of marketing, sales, and customer service. Manually logging data like contacts, engagement data, and other activities into a CRM is painfully repetitive, and it’s not always accurate.
In fact, sales reps have admitted to spending upwards of 30% of their time during the day inputting that data. Using this manual system, it’s unavoidable that some data will go uncaptured and unutilized.
A revenue intelligence system will automatically capture the data we just mentioned in the sales process, populating the CRM where the data fits. The need for manual data entry is almost completely eliminated, meaning no data slips through the cracks, and people can spend their day doing less repetitive tasks.
2. Siloed data
Remember just above, when we said that one of the essential operating principles of revenue intelligence is connecting the entire company through data? Well, if each department (sales, marketing, customer service) is manually capturing this data in their own siloed document, then it certainly won’t be useful for connecting the rest of the company.
Although this isn’t the case for every company, marketing and sales teams worldwide in every sector are notorious for lack of collaboration. Both with each other and the rest of the company. They stick to what they know and stay in their lanes.
Revenue intelligence avoids siloed data by automatically capturing data and pulling it into one platform. This platform serves as a single source for all customer-related data and can be made available to everyone in your organization. Because this data is collected and analyzed by AI, stored and sorted unbiasedly, and is trustworthy, everyone can finally be on the same page and marketing and sales can be more aligned.
3. Old data
Even as we speak, your CRM data will age and become outdated. This isn’t usually a bad thing, but it can certainly add up over time and become quite the issue in the long run.
On average, a B2B customer database will continuously grow. Sometimes data will double within a year. Because of this, contacts and their information will grow old and outdated.
Since revenue intelligence is designed to be an active data collection AI, it will constantly be looking for ways to update new and old contacts, regardless of your interference with it. Data like emails, numbers, titles, and addresses will be checked constantly and updated when any changes are detected.
4. Uncoordinated teams
Sales representatives are often tasked with more than just selling. Frequently, they’re asked to onboard new customers or even offer support to customer service. Sales reps can easily get distracted from their primary purpose in the company: selling.
So how do we avoid that? How are sales reps supposed to hand off customers to other departments efficiently? The answer is to increase customer interaction transparency!
With the implementation of a revenue intelligence tool, each department involved in the sales cycle can access and reference customer touchpoints, eliminating the need to contact sales to get accurate customer data. This high visibility can decrease any friction between departments and save a ton of time.
5. Productivity roadblocks
Sales reps usually have their own unique workflow but share systems, processes, and other data with the rest of the team. This means that a good revenue intelligence tool can have some pretty substantial productivity effects on everyone.
For example, sales reps typically start their day by determining which leads are most likely to close and which will be a waste of their time. With a revenue intelligence tool, sales reps can use real data to predict better which leads will bite the bullet and convert and which ones still need to cook a little longer in the sales funnel. More than that, sales reps can use this data to determine the most relevant channels for any given lead and the best time to connect.
Revenue intelligence tools eliminate the need for manual data entry, increasing productivity across the board.
Who benefits from revenue intelligence?
Because of its design, revenue intelligence benefits any stakeholder in the company. Since it is used solely to aid sales and any revenue-driving avenues within the company, it makes sense that everyone would be a beneficiary.
Revenue intelligence contributes a distinct advantage to any business. However, using data to produce better, actionable insights to attack sales pain points, is for more than just sales representatives. Revenue intelligence benefits many key stakeholders within a business.
Here are three examples:
Revenue leaders
Revenue leaders like Chief Revenue Officers can view forecasts from the bottom-up. This allows them to identify more and better deals and compare the team’s performance against their set goals. Any revenue leader can use revenue intelligence to forecast accurately and drive healthy business growth.
RevOps managers
Revenue operations (or RevOps) managers can use this intelligence to view past and historical trends as well as point-in-time performance to aid in enhanced scenario modeling and setting goals. Because Revenue intelligence software is often incredibly robust, data analysis can be automated, allowing the RevOps manager to focus on fixing the problems they identify.
Read more: Revenue Operations Roles: Who do you need to build a RevOp team?
Sales managers
With accurate CRM data, sales managers can manage team and individual performance easily and more efficiently. They can even use the data to develop rollup forecasts for leadership. Above all else, they’re firmly rooted in the information, answers, and insights needed to boost revenue and drive better revenue retention for every team member.
How you can implement revenue intelligence
It might sound a little scary, but revenue intelligence can put your business on the fast track to substantial revenue growth.
The first and biggest step in implementing revenue intelligence is ensuring your sales team is on board with it. They really have to understand the purpose of this implementation and how they will need to incorporate it into their own workflow.
Once everyone gives a thumbs-up, the next step is to outline your revenue streams and sales processes. Pinpoint where your data is coming from and how much there is.
Based on this information, you can decide which revenue intelligence tool is right for you and your team. There are plenty of tools out there to choose from, and each one provides a different experience depending on your needs. That being said, they can also track customer activity and provide actionable data. Take advantage of all the demos and free trials you can before taking any drastic leap.
An important note here is that you should involve the sales team in any way you can with training in this department. They might need a little guidance to fully understand how to leverage revenue intelligence tools effectively.
5 Revenue intelligence software examples
So you’ve talked with your team, and everyone is on the same page. It’s time to pick a software and run it. Where do you start? Here’s a quick guide for revenue intelligence software that you can implement.
Gong
Gong focuses on conversation intelligence within revenue data. It aims to help you identify any sales funnel gaps that may be causing friction, and it even pinpoints the areas that need improvement.
Gong logs interactions with real people, increasing the visibility of your operation. With a comprehensive view of your sales pipeline, you can stay updated and fix any potential issues that come your way.
Outreach Commit
Outreach Commit provides detailed insights into sales trends within your company, uncovering better deals and shedding some light on your team’s performance.
The main dashboard analysis team actions and keeps potential deals in-check. Because it captures this data continuously, it can send updates and alerts anytime it deems a deal to be at-risk.
The built-in forecasting feature is very robust, generating quarterly projections and future scenarios so that you can better plan for future sales and conditions.
InsightSquared
InsightSquared boasts advanced forecasting and analytics features that help generate better revenue intelligence data.
What makes InsightSquared unique is that you can create 350 different types of reports that stay updated automatically.
In addition, it has a very powerful and insightful dashboard that helps increase operations visibility, monitor individual team members, and even keep a close eye on your most important metrics.
Clari
Being one of the more popular revenue intelligence software tools out there, Clari provides you with accurate forecasting and other automation tools that will help you drive more sales through your pipeline.
Clari pulls data from your CRM, email conversations, and other applications that you use within your sales stack to provide actionable and up-to-date insights. Using this data, you can make accurate quarterly estimates, monitor your sales execution, determine your next plan of action, and even highlight deals that might be risky.
Clari is unique because it allows you to collaborate directly with your customers and provide them with a personalized experience. This is all made possible through their Align function. It’s designed to help you add more weight to your various deals, and boost individual success rates for each deal.
Aviso
As any good revenue intelligence software should, Aviso offers advanced forecasting and other solutions for conversation intelligence to help you grow and improve sales performance.
Aviso utilizes a powerful AI that closely analyzes conversations between your sales reps and the customer. Using the data that it collects, it then guides your sales reps on the proper steps that need to be taken to improve the odds of closing the deal.
It also provides reports and key metrics, giving you a clear overview of your revenue streams, individual representative performances, ongoing deals, forecasting, and predictions.
Conclusion and takeaway
Revenue leaders are often underequipped and overwhelmed with things to do. The pressure piles high, but resources don’t always match the growing need for increased revenue.
However, with an accurate forecasting process, revenue leaders can more efficiently deliver higher-valued revenue targets at a greater frequency. Instead of spending mindless hours manually inputting data that may or may not be accurate or even get put in at all, revenue leaders nowadays are running towards ways to refocus their precious energy and time on increasing revenue within their company. They are embracing revenue intelligence!
Revenue intelligence is a fairly new concept, but it’s growing more and more important each quarter. It’s allowing businesses to ditch siloed, outdated, and uncaptured data and improve their sales cycle all at once.
Unfortunately, you can’t change human behavior.
Fortunately, we can leverage technology like software tools and AI to help us make up for human error. Companies can now streamline operational productivity using revenue intelligence and gain invaluable insights.
What is revenue intelligence?
Revenue intelligence is collecting product usage and sales data from leads, prospects, and even current customers, then analyzing it using technology such as algorithms and AI. It helps identify metrics and market trends that can maximize revenue
Revenue intelligence gathers insightful data across multiple different avenues within the sales funnel. Here are a few examples of a few different points that revenue intelligence can pull data from:
- Email openings and clicks
- Downloads (Content such as eBooks and whitepapers)
- Website visits and other interactions
- Inbound and outbound calls (Answer rates, left messages, callbacks)
- Conversion analytics
- Progression of deals
- Forecasting and other predictive analytics
- Sales playbook adherence
Gathering data from these different points of the sales process helps you collect real data about your business, ensuring that you take the right steps to help you grow. It’s about working smarter, not harder, gathering answers to questions that are essential for the well-being of your sales process and the entire foundation of the company.
Think about the last time you had a deal go bottom-up. Most likely, it was because of some sort of unseen variable. Revenue intelligence is designed to ensure you see all the pieces on the board and are ready to make the next move based on the collected data.
For revenue leaders, this means visualizations and predictions to help monitor business health, remove risks from the pipeline, and accurately forecast. For people selling, this means guidance in every step of the sale process, giving information like who to talk to, what needs to be said, and what needs to be sold.
What metrics should you look for?
We talked about identifying metrics to maximize revenue just above. Metrics are a vital part of measuring the success of revenue intelligence, and we’re not just talking about meeting a sales quota.
If you want your revenue to grow and your various teams to perform, you need to bring metrics to the table that perhaps weren’t thought about before. You need all the nitty-gritty details that let you know what’s going on in the sale and where you can improve. Here are some examples of metrics that you can track so that you can enhance your data:
Win rates
Look at the total number of deals you had lined up in your pipeline. How many of those are closed? If you want to forecast accurately, you will need to understand better the likelihood that deals will close. Is it one deal in every five? One in fifty? You will need to average these wins and create a ratio for your forecasting efforts.
Deal size
Are you closing more small deals or larger deals? Revenue intelligence relies on your visibility into the average deal size in the pipeline. Measuring this metric allows you to teach your sales reps to focus on deals that will produce the highest impact, closing larger deals and increasing revenue.
Deal velocity
Even if you’re closing larger deals, velocity matters; the fastest way to increase revenue is to speed up the deals and sell faster. Using metrics to measure how fast an opportunity can turn into a closed deal is very insightful. It helps you turbocharge your sales process and even shrink the sales cycle.
Product mix
You should pay close attention to what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, and when it’s being sold. Most of the time, companies offer a variety of products, and if it’s not tracked, it can be hard to know what product mix is best to sell to certain people at certain times. Tracking these metrics will help your sales team sell more relevant products.
Other metrics
The metrics above are just a foundation. They will help you get on your feet, but if you want to thrive, you’ve got to think out of the box. As time goes on and you get used to measuring these metrics, try throwing your own, custom metrics into the mix. Things like annual recurring revenue (ARR), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and annual contract value (ACV) are all great metrics to track to improve revenue intelligence.
The 5 operating principles of revenue intelligence
Along with the definition and the process involved in revenue intelligence, it’s important to understand the five operating principles that give it drive. These are principles essential to the streamlined dataflow that revenue intelligence brings, and what truly gives it value in sales.
1. Use automation instead of manual data entry
Revenue intelligence utilizes marketing automation and AI from beginning to end. The idea behind it is to eliminate human error and constantly analyze data, both passively and actively. That being said, automation is an essential part of gathering that data.
2. Get a complete view of your interactions with customers
For the data to bring value to your sales process, you need a complete and total view of your customer interactions. Partial views will only give you a fraction of the story and make your forecasting highly inaccurate. One tiny detail could mean the difference between the next big sale and walking away empty-handed.
3. Real-time data is required for decision making
In most business operations, utilizing data in real-time is essential to the success of a project or campaign. If you’re looking for accurate predictions and you want to improve your sales process down to the tiniest details, you cannot be using old data. You need to know how customers are interacting with your company right now.
4. Make decisions based on reality
One of the quickest ways to sink your revenue earning channels is to make predictions and decisions based on opinions. Even if those opinions are based on experience, that experience may not be entirely reliable in a certain situation. You need real data and numbers to make the best decisions.
5. The entire company should be connected through data
Data is the driving force behind revenue intelligence. This data should be the glue that holds the entire company together and grounds them to the reality of the business’s success or failure.
This data that is being collected is not just beneficial for the sales team but the entire company.
What issues does revenue intelligence solve?
As a whole, revenue intelligence solves five basic issues for any company that implements it. Here they are in no particular order:
1. Uncaptured data
Even with the incredibly helpful tech we have nowadays, most organizations’ analytics entirely rely on the manual input of marketing, sales, and customer service. Manually logging data like contacts, engagement data, and other activities into a CRM is painfully repetitive, and it’s not always accurate.
In fact, sales reps have admitted to spending upwards of 30% of their time during the day inputting that data. Using this manual system, it’s unavoidable that some data will go uncaptured and unutilized.
A revenue intelligence system will automatically capture the data we just mentioned in the sales process, populating the CRM where the data fits. The need for manual data entry is almost completely eliminated, meaning no data slips through the cracks, and people can spend their day doing less repetitive tasks.
2.Siloed data
Remember just above, when we said that one of the essential operating principles of revenue intelligence is connecting the entire company through data? Well, if each department (sales, marketing, customer service) is manually capturing this data in their own siloed document, then it certainly won’t be useful for connecting the rest of the company.
Although this isn’t the case for every company, marketing and sales teams worldwide in every sector are notorious for lack of collaboration. Both with each other and the rest of the company. They stick to what they know and stay in their lanes.
Revenue intelligence avoids siloed data by automatically capturing data and pulling it into one platform. This platform serves as a single source for all customer-related data and can be made available to everyone in your organization. Because this data is collected and analyzed by AI, stored and sorted unbiasedly, and is trustworthy, everyone can finally be on the same page and marketing and sales can be more aligned.
3. Old data
Even as we speak, your CRM data will age and become outdated. This isn’t usually a bad thing, but it can certainly add up over time and become quite the issue in the long run.
On average, a B2B customer database will continuously grow. Sometimes data will double within a year. Because of this, contacts and their information will grow old and outdated.
Since revenue intelligence is designed to be an active data collection AI, it will constantly be looking for ways to update new and old contacts, regardless of your interference with it. Data like emails, numbers, titles, and addresses will be checked constantly and updated when any changes are detected.
4. Uncoordinated teams
Sales representatives are often tasked with more than just selling. Frequently, they’re asked to onboard new customers or even offer support to customer service. Sales reps can easily get distracted from their primary purpose in the company: selling.
So how do we avoid that? How are sales reps supposed to hand off customers to other departments efficiently? The answer is to increase customer interaction transparency!
With the implementation of a revenue intelligence tool, each department involved in the sales cycle can access and reference customer touchpoints, eliminating the need to contact sales to get accurate customer data. This high visibility can decrease any friction between departments and save a ton of time.
5. Productivity roadblocks
Sales reps usually have their own unique workflow but share systems, processes, and other data with the rest of the team. This means that a good revenue intelligence tool can have some pretty substantial productivity effects on everyone.
For example, sales reps typically start their day by determining which leads are most likely to close and which will be a waste of their time. With a revenue intelligence tool, sales reps can use real data to predict better which leads will bite the bullet and convert and which ones still need to cook a little longer in the sales funnel. More than that, sales reps can use this data to determine which channels are most relevant for any given lead and the best time to connect.
Revenue intelligence tools eliminate the need for manual data entry, adding to the increase in productivity across the board.
Who benefits from revenue intelligence?
Because of its design, revenue intelligence benefits any stakeholder in the company. Since it is used solely to aid sales and any revenue-driving avenues within the company, it makes sense that everyone would be a beneficiary.
Revenue intelligence contributes a distinct advantage to any business. However, using data to produce better, actionable insights to attack sales pain points, is for more than just sales representatives. Revenue intelligence benefits many key stakeholders within a business.
Here are three examples:
Revenue leaders
Revenue leaders like Chief Revenue Officers can view forecasts from the bottom-up. This allows them to identify more and better deals and compare the team’s performance against their set goals. Any revenue leader can use revenue intelligence to forecast accurately and drive healthy business growth.
RevOps managers
Revenue operations (or RevOps) managers can use this intelligence to view past and historical trends as well as point-in-time performance to aid in enhanced scenario modeling and setting goals. Because Revenue intelligence software is often incredibly robust, data analysis can be automated, allowing the RevOps manager to focus on fixing the problems they identify.
Read more: Revenue Operations Roles: Who do you need to build a RevOp team?
Sales managers
With accurate CRM data, sales managers can manage team and individual performance easily and more efficiently. They can even use the data to develop rollup forecasts for leadership. Above all else, they’re firmly rooted in the information, answers, and insights needed to boost revenue and drive better revenue retention for every team member.
How you can implement revenue intelligence
It might sound a little scary, but revenue intelligence can put your business on the fast track to substantial revenue growth.
The first and biggest step in implementing revenue intelligence is ensuring your sales team is on board with it. They really have to understand the purpose of this implementation and how they will need to incorporate it into their own workflow.
Once everyone gives a thumbs-up, the next step is to outline your revenue streams and sales processes. Pinpoint where your data is coming from and how much there is.
Based on this information, you can decide which revenue intelligence tool is right for you and your team. There are plenty of tools out there to choose from, and each one provides a different experience depending on your needs. That being said, each of them can also track customer activity and provide actionable data. Take advantage of all the demos and free trials that you can before taking any drastic leap.
An important note here is that you should involve the sales team in any way you can with training in this department. They might need a little guidance to fully understand how to leverage revenue intelligence tools effectively.
Conclusion and takeaway
Revenue leaders are often underequipped and overwhelmed with things to do. The pressure piles high, but resources don’t always match up with that growing need for increased revenue.
However, with an accurate forecasting process, revenue leaders can more easily deliver higher-valued revenue targets at a greater frequency. Instead of spending mindless hours manually inputting data that may or may not be accurate, or may not even get put in at all, revenue leaders nowadays are running towards ways to refocus their precious energy and time on increasing revenue within their company. They are embracing revenue intelligence!
Revenue intelligence is a fairly new concept, but it’s growing more and more important with each quarter that passes. It’s allowing businesses to ditch siloed data, outdated data, and uncaptured data and improve their sales cycle, all at once.
