The global market has never been as competitive as it is at the present time. There are a number of well-established multinational corporations that dominate the market. However, there also myriads of emerging startups which compete among themselves and even with the largest corporations.
Today it is much easier to design and make a product than to sell it. The largest portion of most companies’ budget is actually directed at marketing, sales and finding the way to outrun their competition.
That is why there is a constant need for innovative methods that can help businesses actually sell their products and services.
One of the areas that have proved to be rather useful in the whole sales process is sales intelligence, which is only becoming more and more important.
There are numerous definitions of sales intelligence, from the complicated to the very simple ones.
If you want a more complicated definition, we could say that sales intelligence is a collection of data, insights and automation that enable sales teams to stay on top of prospects and client data.
But simply put, sales intelligence data includes all of the information which helps companies improve the sales process.
Sales intelligence is necessary on the modern market and there are new methods and trends emerging in this field with each new day.
To illustrate how important this field is and what it does for businesses, we are going to list a few ways in which companies can benefit from using sales intelligence.
All sales reps know how pointless it usually is to blindly call cold leads.
Sales intelligence tools are very useful when it comes to tracking leads through the pipeline and prioritizing follow-ups based on the level of qualification or sales stage.
Personalization is a big thing on every market as chances to sell dramatically increase when you know how to push your client’s button.
Each of the prospects has challenges and objectives which need to be properly addressed.
This is where sales intelligence enters the stage ‒ it provides behavioral and contextual data that is essential to improving follow-ups and subsequent consultations.
Not all prospects need the same time to decide if they are going to buy your product or service.
Sales intelligence tools help you to categorize inquiries and MQLs. In addition, they are extremely useful when it comes to separating the undecided MQLs from those who are ready to buy.
People who make decisions at companies often find themselves in vague situations.
With better revenue analysis, as well as the analysis of revenue channels and departmental workflows, CFOs, CROs and CMOs are much more likely to make better forecast and strategy development plans.
Ironically enough, there are numerous sales intelligence platforms designed by various sales intelligence companies.
Each sales intelligence company tries to offer great options and possibilities which can help boost your sales. However, some of them stand out from the crowd thanks to some special features.
For this reason, we are going to list the best sales intelligence platforms for 2018.
This sales engagement platform can help you improve performance and insights and, consequently, drive your sales.
Among other benefits, it will help you have more meetings with prospects, make reps more productive and manage your pipeline with considerable predictability.
It is used by many companies, from those in Fortune 100 to various startups.
ZoomInfo is a sales intelligence platform which offers great filtering options and a credit system to redeem contacts.
In addition, its ReachOut Browser extension allows for simple browsing of LinkedIn profiles.
This sales intelligence platform was created by LinkedIn, as the name suggests.
It allows you to perform multi-faceted prospect searches, notifies you how you are connected to prospects and shows employment trends to help with targeting accounts.
DiscoverOrg can come in handy if you want to get in touch with a specific target market.
The data reliability of this software is amazing ‒ over 95% of correct contact information. Moreover, the predictive analysis and SalesForce integration it offers are very efficient and simple to use.
If keeping up-to-date on your clients’ business and industry presents a challenge for your company, you should consider using sales intelligence data provided by InsideView.
This software is great at cutting down company research time before making a sales call. In addition, you can use it for connecting with social media platforms and gathering real-time information.
Rapportive is a very smooth sales intelligence platform and recently acuired by LinkedIn.
It works great with LinkedIn profiles and tells you if you have the correct email address of the contact (email validation).
Also, it easily finds a picture of your contact and provides concise but very helpful information about them.
When it comes to internal data collections such as sales qualified leads (SQLs), sales statistics, reps time management, etc. the data is essentially can be collected from a simple Excel sheets but the more interesting data is always collect via some kind of a scraper.
Scraper / crawler / spider all performing the act of going to another website > searching for the relevant information > aggregating data in a meaningful way and finally – visualizing massive amounts of data in a custom dashboard or report.
Sales intelligence companies utilize high-end proxy servers for successfully accessing data that otherwise be impossible to retrieve. This is why tech-savvy individuals can replicate A+ grade sales intelligence platform with the proper proxies and a bit of code.
GeoSurf is the backbone of some of the biggest data driven companies out there because of their exceptionally good residential proxies, support and ease of use. Are you a tech-savvy yourself? Get started today.
