As B2B sales organizations continue to mature and become more complex – a variety of tools become available for them to optimize their selling motion. In the early days of a B2B sales team, most interactions are ad-hoc and sales rep driven. There are no automated CRM data entry tools – instead, the sales leaders rely on the goodwill and fastidiousness of sales reps to enter all of the necessary data about their conversations and customer interactions into the CRM. Inevitably, the outputs generated from the CRM are incomplete and untrustworthy because the data that drives the outputs (reports and dashboards) is unreliable.
As the sales organization matures the frustrations build and the company exposes itself to blindspots that result from the incomplete data. One solution to these blindspots is to ensure sales rep compliance and participation when it comes to logging every customer interaction. There are informal SMB-centric tools that can help automate the CRM data entry for the sales reps – but few of these tools are built for the enterprise – resulting in clumsy user interfaces that rarely pass enterprise security requirements. Most of these CRM data automation tools require that the sales reps install software locally on their computer that connects to Outlook or Gmail through a plugin or browser extension.
The next level up from these email and calendar automation tools would be revenue intelligence platforms or revenue intelligence software companies. These revenue intelligence platforms help companies gain insights into their sales rep’s activities and their entire revenue stack. Aragon Research defines Revenue Intelligence as a category of sales software that:
“…uses AI to provide the right level of insights so that data that is tied to sales opportunities and forecasts is up to date. This type of intelligence is used to develop a platform that aims to drive productivity and efficiency for the accelerated growth of enterprises and offers a more intelligent and effective method of sales automation.
The challenge in enterprises is that deal attainment and account revenue growth is often dependent on understanding everything that is happening in an account. Revenue intelligence ensures sales professionals have the information they need.
Sales efficiency is also increased by consistently updating key contacts and decision makers across all accounts for maximum opportunity.
By leveraging natural language processing and predictive analytics, revenue intelligence can improve productivity by analyzing buyer behavior to create a better predictive sales playbook.”
Revenue Intelligence Platforms
The best revenue intelligence platforms don’t rely on client-side plugins or add-ons to help the sales reps automate data entry into CRM. Instead, the best solutions connect to Outlook 365, Exchange Server or GSuite at the server level and auto-capture all of the data at the server level. This ensures that all of the data is automatically logged in the CRM and that it doesn’t require any manual sales rep intervention nor any software for them to install.
Good revenue intelligence not only requires Salesforce integration but also delivers revenue insights to help optimize revenue operations at the company. These revenue insights are usually based on sales rep activities and customer interactions. This activity data is cross-referenced against opportunity data in Salesforce and leverage both Machine Learning (ML) and Intelligent document processing software to find patterns, trends, predictive insights and customer sentiment to deliver time-sensitive insights to the sales manager and the sales reps. These insights and actionable data points can only be achieved through revenue intelligence tools that have native Salesforce integration.
Armed with complete activity data and artificial intelligence, revenue intelligence platforms like SalesDirector.ai can deliver a variety of insights and intelligence to sales organizations such as: sales rep efficiency, accurate forecasts, reduced churn, pipeline movement and can understand sales rep behavior in-depth. Revenue operations teams everywhere can rely on revenue intelligence software like SalesDirector.ai to help drive these insights to become better sellers and better sales organizations.
To learn more about how SalesDirector.ai can help your sales team achieve sales intelligence visit us at https://www.salesdirector.ai and ask us to help you evaluate your revenue operations strategy for your SaaS company.
Cleark Roney is a content writer who is always looking for the next project to sink her teeth into. His favorite thing about writing is that it can be applied to any industry and He loves getting to combine creativity with knowledge of an industry. Cleark enjoys reading, hiking, traveling and watching movies in her spare time. Cleark Roney is a creative content writer who has been published on various platforms. He likes to write about topics related to every where he spent all his time and gained knowlegde.
