Data is at the heart of business growth. With enough time and budget, sales professionals can find enough firmographic data, org charts, email addresses and even direct dial numbers to keep them busy chasing prospects.
But today’s sales cycles call for more than the basics.
Modern sales teams require predictive sales intelligence tools with accurate, up-to-date data that informs dynamic customer profiles, lead generation, and efficient prospecting.
What is Sales Intelligence?
Sales intelligence is the data used for ideal customer profile creation, lead generation, pipeline acceleration, and growth opportunity discovery.
Good sales intelligence is the dynamic fuel for your go-to-market strategy, including decision-makers, reporting structures, financials, budgets, company initiatives, personnel moves, tech stacks, and predictive features such as buying signals and intent.
What Do Sales Intelligence Tools Do?
Sales intelligence tools supply your team with up-to-date information about your prospects and addressable market — and how you can reach them.
To do this, modern sales intelligence platforms must employ predictive prospecting. Predictive prospecting applies machine learning to recognize patterns in how typical buyers act, and layers on pattern recognition to pinpoint new buyers to pursue.
Along with predictive intelligence capabilities, sales intelligence solutions should also be able to integrate seamlessly into sales and marketing software you’re already using, and connect easily with the rest of your business data.
The Benefits of Sales Intelligence Tools
Sales intelligence tools can make the sales process significantly more effective by allowing your salespeople to pursue the strongest opportunities at the right time, maximizing the impact of every sales and marketing dollar.
Tap Into What Actually Influences Buying Decisions
When used strategically, sales intelligence running on good data gives insight into who, how, when, and why people make a purchase. The more information business development teams know about prospects, the better they can craft outreach and cut through the noise with targeted, relevant messaging that directly addresses prospects’ pain points.
Prioritize Leads More Readily
Sales intelligence tools provide insights into each prospects’ lead potential. A contact’s role, seniority, purchasing authority, and previous engagement touchpoints, among other factors, can all contribute to the quality and urgency of individual leads, making it important for salespeople to prioritize effectively. Sales intelligence tools allow sales teams to focus on leads that are more likely to convert, improving efficiency.
Cross-Sell and Upsell With Purpose
By constantly analyzing customer behavior and purchasing patterns, sales intelligence tools identify timely cross-selling and upselling opportunities. This can increase revenue from existing customers.
Build Sales–Marketing Alignment
Many sales intelligence tools seamlessly integrate with and enrich customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This creates a centralized platform that sales and marketing — as well as customer support and product teams — rely on to manage cohesive customer interactions. Such a collaborative platform is key to the sales and marketing alignment that drives conversions.
Leverage Always-Actionable Data
Staying on top of an ever-changing market requires proactive, fresh intelligence that brings prospects directly into a sales team’s workflow. Sales intelligence combines advanced prospect data with real-time buying signals so business development teams can connect with the right buyer at the right time.
Improve Lead Quantity and Quality
In a report published in partnership with Forrester Consulting, we found that companies using B2B sales and marketing intelligence solutions grew the number of leads in their pipeline as well as the quality of those leads — increasing revenue and growth.
6 Features to Shop For in a Sales Intelligence Tool
Sales intelligence software should give you actionable, accurate information about individual contacts and their respective companies. Here are the top capabilities to look for:
1. Prospect Intelligence
You should get correct and updated information about potential customers, including:
- Contact information
- Job function
- Management level
- Organizational chart
- Professional certification
- Academic and employment history
2. Tech Stack Data
One of the most effective yet often undervalued ways of prioritizing accounts is by assessing their sales tech stack — the technologies a company uses.
This data is important early in the sales cycle because it helps identify opportunities, target displacement campaigns, and introduce a compelling talking point for prospects considering tech-stack consolidation.
For example, ZoomInfo has profiles of millions of technology pairings in the categories of enterprise applications, hardware/OS/systems environment, virtualization, security, and networking.
3. Buying Signals
While understanding a prospect’s technology stack is important, it’s buying signals that should prompt timely outreach.
Signals can come from a variety of sources, providing up-to-the-moment information that infers a prospect’s likelihood to purchase – such as a flurry of web searches or multiple content downloads on a particular topic. Opportunity data can mean favorable selling conditions, such as a financing round or a new key executive hire.
4. Extensive Integrations
Intelligence is only as good as how it’s delivered. Look for a platform that provides key integrations into common sales applications, such as customer relationship management, sales automation tools, and prospecting environments like company websites and social media platforms.
5. Data Accuracy
Ensuring data quality is a data provider’s responsibility, but the outcomes affect you and everyone downstream — including your prospects. Your sales intelligence data should have both breadth and depth, meaning a comprehensive collection of contacts and rich layers of information about them. Most importantly, this data should be accurate, trustworthy, reliable, and compliant with all applicable data regulations.
6. Real-Time Alerts
Technology, unlike people, can continuously monitor other contacts and companies.
You can be informed about events like product launches, funding rounds, and changes to executive leadership as soon as they happen. Since sales is all about timing, these kinds of buying signals allow you to get to a prospect before someone else does.
The demand for this kind of real-time, actionable sales data has spurred rapid growth in the sales intelligence sector.
5 Ways to Use Sales Intelligence Software
With the right sales intelligence platform in place, how do you use it to identify and engage potential leads effectively?
1. Create and Target Data-Based ICPs
Sales intelligence shapes accurate ideal customer profiles (ICPs) — a key component of business development.
Any account-based sales and marketing play requires a dependable ICP, and the first step in creating one is to identify and understand who you’re targeting and why. Then you can take a deliberate prospecting approach into those accounts and contacts.
An ICP can refer to both ideal companies and ideal buyers using data including:
- Standard CRM fields:
- Department
- Level
- Function
- Industry
- Size
- Location
- Sales intelligence layers:
- Technologies
- Buying signals
- Business model
- Ownership
Sales intelligence finds companies that match your ICP to quantify your total addressable market, so you can focus your sales and marketing efforts where they’ll make the most impact.
2. Improve Data Quality, Management, and Actionability
Many B2B databases waste salespeople’s precious time with high bounce rates, incorrect numbers, and misaligned campaigns.
In addition to lost revenue opportunities, inaccurate data risks sales team burnout because using inaccurate data doesn’t generate quality meetings or qualified leads. Relying on poor-quality data can also make accurate forecasting and goal-setting significantly more difficult.
Sales intelligence software that automates database hygiene means that data will be dynamic as new information becomes available and your database grows.
When you have the right sales intelligence tools boosting data quality and management processes, salespeople can confidently create specific, personalized messages to target decision-makers and shorten the sales process.
3. Enhance Lead Generation Efforts
Lead generation takes many forms – content marketing, advertising, SEO, email campaigns, cold calling, hosting events, and attending trade shows – but sales intelligence tools can surface new, quality leads dynamically.
Sales intelligence shouldn’t replace all your lead gen efforts, but rather allow your team to spend more time improving lead gen tactics to boost performance.
4. Power Up Outbound Lead Gen Endeavors
A business cannot solely rely on inbound lead generation to grow and thrive. Whether digitally or in-person, your sales team’s outbound lead-gen initiatives should be supported by sales intelligence tools and data.
Salesforce’s State of Sales 2024 report indicates that the average sales professional spends just 28% of their working week actually selling, which means it’s critical for sales leaders to equip their teams with the tools and data they need to broaden their footprint and expand their reach.
5. Follow the Org Chart to the Right Leads
Org charts show salespeople the person they’ve contacted, their entire department, and their role within the organization hierarchy. With this information, a sales rep can quickly go up the chain to connect with a decision-maker who’s worth their time and effort.
A sales intelligence tool like ZoomInfo Sales can take the name or email address of the person you met and find additional contacts at that same company who should be on your radar — plus other information from the database to enrich the lead.
Get Started with Sales Intelligence
Sales intelligence is essential for modern businesses navigating complex sales landscapes.
With the power of predictive prospecting, sales intelligence platforms offer benefits like prioritizing leads and identifying cross-selling opportunities to improving data accuracy and fostering sales–marketing alignment.
ZoomInfo Sales offers world-leading data and tools, including dynamic sales prospecting software, multi-channel conversational intelligence, and integrations with your tech stack.
Sign up for a free trial and work with the leader in accurate, actionable B2B sales intelligence data and applications.