Episode summary

In this video, Mindtickle’s Director of Product Marketing, Lindsey Plocek, talks through the mistakes revenue operations leaders should avoid when choosing a revenue intelligence solution. She breaks down the difference between conversation intelligence and revenue intelligence and then dives into four common mistakes people might make when choosing a technology partner.

Key highlights 

Lindsey talks through the mistakes to avoid when choosing a revenue intelligence partner. Here they are:

• Don’t focus on features focus on pain points you are solving and simplifying workflows
• Don’t just stop it insights –  make insights actionable
• Don’t just stop at the deal level
• Don’t undervalue the quality of professional services

Video transcription

Hi everyone, I’m Lindsay and I lead product marketing for AI solutions at Mindtickle. Last time I came at you with some powerful tips lead discovery calls. And today I’m going to talk about four mistakes you should avoid making when choosing a partner for conversation intelligence or revenue intelligence.

Before I get into the four mistakes, I’m going to set the stage. So when I say conversation intelligence, I’m referring to technologies that record transcribe analyze sales conversations, sales meetings, as well as emails.

When I say revenue intelligence, I’m referring to using AI machine learning capabilities to analyze all of the activity taking place and actually predict what is going to close or not and deliver, you know, a deal score or an account health score. There’s some differences between these technologies.

But a simple way to think of it is analyzing interactions, and predicting what will actually close and how healthy your deals and accounts are. So when you are evaluating conversation and revenue intelligence partners avoid these four mistakes.

And the first is, don’t focus on features. Focus on pain points you are solving and simplifying workflows. The biggest mistake that I think people run into is they’re buying all these different sales technologies in silos. And as a former seller, that just takes time away from us being able to close deals. Your team has tool fatigue, they don’t want for 712 different places, they have to log in to get all the insights, training, and content they need to provide a better customer experience.

So when we think about sales reps, specifically, let’s think about some of the different things they need to be able to do with conversation and revenue intelligence insights:

• Onboard and ramp faster
• Better prepare for upcoming meetings without thinking
• Get relevant coaching from their managers from their peers
• Be able to self-coach
• Share call snippets, transcripts, and mentions of competitors
• Feedback on the product roadmap to share with other internal teams,
• Know what content to send to a prospect or customer after an interaction
• Easily and automatically update your CRM

So those are some of the top use cases. And of course, one is certainly using those deal and account health scores, to anticipate, which accounts you can grow to really understand those deal risks that might be deal blockers. But really put those people and those pain points first above those features.

Mistake number two, don’t just stop it insights: make insights actionable. Conversation and revenue intelligence are engines and their engines that need to ultimately power behavior change.

If you really want to maximize revenue growth and help your team win more. Insights only go so far right? We need to intelligently, as I mentioned, recommend content and training that’s going to help the rep work that deal or work that account better.

We need to give front-line managers tools to coach and sales enablement, teams, tools to bring in those best-in-class call examples, you know, to really train people. And a lot of times these these platforms are a really good way to measure the ROI of your enablement and your marketing efforts. So don’t just stop it insights make them actionable.

Tip number three, don’t just stop at the deal level. Think about the account-level view. A lot of products in this space just about deal coaching. They don’t factor in very complex enterprise, customized Salesforce instances or CRMs. They don’t let you manage multiple opportunities and ladder them up to a single account view.

But we are in the world of ABM marketing and ABM sales and you really need to give your team all the training content and insights they need to not just close deals but working grow accounts and that includes your CSM and your account growth roles, all of the GTM roles on your team. Right.

Tip number four: don’t undervalue the quality of professional services. Bookmaker rating en.bet-rate.top best bookmakers And so that always starts with looking at the background of the people who are going to support your digital transformation.

And as I mentioned, conversation and revenue intelligence are not going to be working in a silo. So look for people with those backgrounds, but also backgrounds and things like sales, content management, training, enablement – all of the different things that are going to be integrated together to use this insight.

Look at if the company you’re partnering with provides really in-depth customer enablement, user conferences training, and things to get you started with these technologies. Look for things like content-as-a-service. If you are going to go beyond just using the insights to actually chain people look for partners like that.

And most importantly, look at someone who has a really good track record of working with enterprise-size brands to keep compliant managing user permissions and access to things like call recordings and emails. It’s very, very critical that you use the right partner to maintain compliance and in addition, really start to reduce the number of tools your team that that’s a biggie now for chief compliance officers.

So those are my four tips just to repeat them. You know, don’t focus on features focus on people and pain points and the workflows that you’re putting in place really streamlining and simplifying things for them. Don’t just stop at insights, make them actionable. Don’t just stop at the deal level, consider that account level view, and finally do not undervalue the quality of professional services, particularly when it comes to compliance. So I’d love to hear your tips as well please drop them in the comments or feel free to reach out to me and thanks for listening.

Want to learn more about revenue intelligence? Check out more posts from Lindsey outlining what to look for and how to select a revenue intelligence solution.

• 4 Must-Have 2023 Sales Technologies for CROs and RevOps Leaders
• The Ultimate Guide to Sales Forecasting
• 7 Reasons Why Revenue Intelligence Is Your Forecasting Crystal Ball

As sales leaders barrel into what will likely be a challenging Q4, many do not like the look of their forecasts.

Even before the rumblings of a recession, just 43% of reps in B2B tech sales were hitting their quota. Now, due to inflation, layoffs, spending and hiring freezes, and a host of other difficulties, most sales leaders agree that deal risks are popping up at the eleventh hour.

Competitors are coming out with aggressive offers that bring down market rates, and champions are under fire to make even better business cases than before. Even then, good deals do not close.

This leaves most sales and operations leaders scratching their heads after weekly forecasting meetings where it can feel as if very little progress is being made. With so much tough news, what can sales leaders do about this all? In this blog post, we’ll share our secret sauce for measuring sales productivity so you can do the same at your organization.

1. How Mindtickle measures sales productivity
2. The problem with how sales organizations measure sales productivity today
3. How Mindtickle tracks sales productivity KPIs
4. 5 scientific tips for measuring sales productivity

Focus on what you can control: sales productivity

Myopically focusing on what number will be hit or not has never helped sales leaders hit quota. Often, numbers are settled well before you enter the quarter. In this economy, even deals that previously looked highly winnable may be lost.

Focusing on leading indicators, such as sales productivity, provides a better way to understand how ready your organization is to sell, and how rapidly your team is improving. In this blog, we’ll share five ways you can scientifically measure sales productivity and forecast with much higher accuracy than before.

How Mindtickle measures sales productivity

At Mindtickle, we define sales productivity as how efficient and effective your sales executives are at hitting a variety of revenue milestones and goals. Of course, just because reps are making more calls and sending more emails does not mean they are necessarily progressing sales or generating revenue.

That’s why, in addition to accountability around activity tracking, measuring preparation and effectiveness is key.

Here, we use our Sales Readiness Index to measure which reps are demonstrating the right skills, will, and in-field behaviors. With our readiness index, we cross-reference who is hitting quota with who is doing all of the other activities that make a rep successful, such as:

• Conducting effective outreach
• Engaging buyers
• Sending educational content
• Completing new product and competitor training
• Practicing via AI video role-plays
• Achieving high call scores

At the same time, we use revenue intelligence and AI forecasting software through our technical partner BoostUp to help our sellers call their numbers with higher accuracy and confidence.

Deal risk analytics give detailed signals that help reps know exactly what action they need to take when they follow up, such as better multi-threading with a higher number of senior-level contacts.

At the same time, our sales enablement function moved from a traditional approach where most time was spent creating content, and delivering trainings, to focusing on call and deal reviews. We call this revenue enablement and have rallied our entire organization around the concept of ensuring sellers focus on closing more deals with confidence.

The problem with how sales organizations measure sales productivity today

Many organizations use Salesforce to track revenue metrics and sales productivity. Yet not long ago, sales professionals started to game the system to hit their numbers. Maybe they exaggerated prospecting or sandbagged their forecast so they could sweep in as the hero at the end of the quarter, or got overly optimistic about pricing and happy ears.

Here at Mindtickle, our revenue intelligence and forecasting solution is built in to our readiness platform so our sales managers use a new workflow to gain a deeper level of transparency into deals, calls, and buyer engagement.

You can see that workflow in our interactive sales manager product tour here.

Instead of looking at lagging indicators of success, such as who has the most pipeline or who has historically hit their numbers, we look at what our reps do holistically to prepare for the future climate. We better understand where our reps are putting their time and calories, and have put accountability systems in place to help them uncover risks, and focus on truly winnable deals.

This means our executives have real-time visibility into every call, email, and meeting, and they spend more time helping reps uncover deal blockers so they not only forecast more accurately, but help reps deliver faster, better wins.

How Mindtickle tracks sales productivity KPIs

Sales productivity can be tracked many ways. Here are some of the metrics we use to keep our team on track.

• Deal health scores: With our revenue intelligence solution, every deal is scored and labeled red, yellow, or green so reps know exactly why a deal is at risk, and how to address it.
• Call scores: With our Call AI solution, we score every call against the winning behaviors from top reps on every team, including BDRs, account executives, sales engineers, and customer success executives
• Email sends & dials to conversions: We look at not only how many emails and dials our reps make, but also what percent of those connected touchpoints convert. This helps us understand quantity and quality.
• # of meetings that take place: We look at the number of meetings that are scheduled, and examine those that were actually completed and deemed sales-qualified or not by our reps.
• Buyer engagement and sentiment: By analyzing all of the calls, emails, and meetings that take place, we are able to uncover keywords associate with deal risks, or positive/negative buyer sentiment. Increasingly, buyer engagement and sentiment is a really important metric for us as we look to forecast more accurately and truly assess deal health.
• Content usage & engagement: Our sales content management solution tracks metrics beyond just asset views and also looks at content adoption. This includes the number of times each asset has been used in the sales process, the percentage of sellers who have used each asset, and the number of times each asset has been shared in deals progressing in stages including closed/won.
• Sales enablement program data: This includes onboarding and ramp-up metrics for new hires like time to onboarding completion, time to first deal/revenue, average ramp time, annual number of new hires, and yearly rep attrition. We also look at everboarding or ongoing readiness metrics like seconds of training videos watched, pages of documents read, correct answers on assessments and questions asked over time, scores on video role-plays, overall team performance on programs, certification completions, rep feedback on program efficacy, and overall engagement.
• Pipeline and forecasting data: We look at whether reps, teams, and regions have enough pipeline coverage to hit their number

5 scientific tips for measuring sales productivity

So how do we measure all of this vast data and make sense of it all without creating a ton of work for our operations team in charge of measuring sales productivity and forecasting?

1. End manual data entry

The days of relying on manually entered Salesforce data and trusting it’s correct are long dead. We implemented revenue intelligence and forecasting through our BoostUp integration to track the activities that meaningfully move deals forward (or stall them).

To do this, we started by tracking buyer engagement across every call, email and meeting – all of which we transcribe and tag when we uncover an important voice of customer insight, such as a competitor or product mention, next step, or strong instance of buyer hesitation.

We use this information to score every deal and proactively uncover risks. At the same time, we improved the way we do opportunity management by pulling together a rich visualization of all of the activity that has taken place – including what emails buyers and sellers have sent, what calls have taken place, what meaningful sales themes have been mentioned, and even whether or not our sellers have created a Digital Sales Room to engage customers with educational content.

This helps us offer self-coaching to reps by nudging them with activities we know will move a deal forward, such as follow-up content they might want to send, or battle cards they should review before their next call.

Our enterprise team takes more of an account-based approach. We track the number and percentage of accounts in each rep’s territory that haven’t seen an activity logged in the last 30 days.

To ensure both our enterprise and commercial teams multi-thread, we track how many personas are engaged in an opportunity, and if we’ve reached the VP+ level.

Content analytics are also important to us. This year, we launched our Digital Sales Rooms – a digital buyer experience helping reps share content, understand what content customers and prospects are engaging with, link to call recordings, and manage the next steps.

Digital sales rooms have helped our sellers better multi-thread and improve engagement with our content by 300%.

2. Cut meetings in half, and reserve more time for practice & coaching

One invaluable tool for sales productivity is Call AI – our conversation intelligence technology that records, transcribes, and analyzes every call while making calls easily shareable with other departments, such as product or marketing.

Now that our sellers can listen to calls on 2X that they weren’t a part of, and don’t have to spend time on internal updates calls and hand-offs. This makes it faster and easier for every relevant person here at Mindtickle, such as our CSMs, to get the deep details on every deal or account while attending fewer, but more valuable meetings.

Where did we reinvest those hours of precious extra time each week?

Into practicing via AI video role-plays, and data-driven call coaching.

Here are some examples of how our sellers self-coach and get automatic feedback on how they handle difficult questions and objections.

Here’s how our reps use call score analytics to understand their talk time, whether they’re using filler words, understanding how many questions they’re really asking, and digging into the customer’s longest monologue – e.g. the moment where the customer truly opened up.

3. Create better buyer experiences

Sales productivity has never been about drowning customers in emails and cold calls. It’s been about connecting with the right person, at the right time, with meaningful information that helps them solve significant business challenges.

That’s why we started using Databook to provide our sales reps with better information on how their accounts are doing financially and their “big bets.” This enables reps to provide hyper-personalized outreach and follow-ups.

At the same time, we regularly share call recordings with our customers so that they can include others who may have missed a meeting without slowing the sales cycle down.

4. Leverage AI for more accurate pipeline & sales forecasting

Earlier in this blog, we talked about how sales productivity is a better leading indicator to drive scalable, repeatable sales and to enable fact-based forecasting.

Perhaps no group in our organization is better at reaping the rewards of the newfound focus we’ve put on sales productivity than our operations organization.

Whereas before reps and regional vice presidents would manually call their number, we now use revenue intelligence and forecasting software to analyze that number and how realistic it is with AI. Then, we go a step further by uncovering pipeline trends and risks that may prevent us from hitting it.

We are also able to look at week-over-week and month-over-month waterfall charts to analyze where our pipeline is growing and decreasing so that we can better address issues with enablement programs.

This saves our revenue operations more than 30 hours of time previously spent on manual reporting a week.

5. Consolidate redundant sales technologies

In this economic moment, it’s not uncommon for sales teams to be asked to reduce their sales technology budgets by 30-50%, or even more. That’s a lofty challenge, but it’s also a painful reminder that too many teams are using bloated, expensive sales tech stacks that aren’t actually helping improve their ability to hit their number.

Our 2022-2023 Sales Enablement Outlook found that about a third (32%) of respondents indicate there are 10 or more tools to support their tech stack. Notably, 51% of sales leadership professionals indicate this is the case.

However, investing in a sales tool doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be used by the sales team. Twenty-eight percent of respondents report their teams use 10 or more tools on a daily basis. And 53% use five or more.

Here are some solutions we use at Mindtickle:

• Our platform, through which we run enablement, manage content and operate all of our conversation intelligence, revenue intelligence, and forecasting solutions, including enabling our reps to update Salesforce
• Outreach.IO for BDR prospecting
• Databook to uncover personalized account-based insights
• LinkedIn Navigator & ZoomInfo to find prospects and contacts across our accounts

If you’re interested to learn more about our best practices and how to consolidate your sales tech stack while driving more revenue per rep, reach out to request a demo here.

For further reading, check out some of our top resources:

• Why (& How) Eightfold.AI Unified its Sales Tech
• Why Revenue Intelligence is Essential to Sales Readiness

If sales data consistently led to revenue insights, life would be easier. But after collecting and analyzing sales pipeline data, revenue leaders still struggle to accurately forecast sales.

Why? You need to be able to see into your company’s blind spots. You need to understand why your reps aren’t hitting their quotas. Otherwise, you’ll miss key opportunities to maximize revenue and drive growth.

Revenue intelligence solutions are like a crystal ball. They help you understand the data stored in your CRM, see how your business is doing in real-time across all departments, and accurately predict future sales.

Keep reading to learn more about revenue intelligence and seven reasons why it could be the key to predicting your sales future.

1. It checks (and reduces) deal risk
2. It gives you 100% visibility
3. It forecasts how many deals you’ll close in real time
4. It tracks historical conversion rates
5. It increases productivity across your teams
6. It’s your one source of truth
7. It reveals your overall business health

What is revenue intelligence?

Revenue intelligence is the collection and analysis of business data to understand the best processes and plays for consistently hitting your revenue goals. It has two key components: deal intelligence and forecast intelligence.

It reviews your calls, emails, meeting invitations, and the contacts associated with them. It looks at your Salesforce instance and the deal health and it shows you with high accuracy the deals that will close, the risks you must overcome,  and how far you are from hitting your numbers.

It gives you a single source of truth for the voice of customer insights in your go-to-market strategy. Not only does that help you measure performance across marketing, sales, and customer success, it helps you interpret and apply that data to improve products and marketing campaigns

Powered by artificial intelligence, revenue intelligence software helps you work smarter. Manual data collection is slow and often inaccurate. Revenue intelligence is able to capture and analyze data from all your go-to-market activities in a fraction of the time, and it eliminates human error. This saves revenue operations teams an average of 30 hours per week on manual work and helps them achieve 95%+ forecast accuracy.

Why is revenue intelligence important for sales teams?

Revenue growth depends on your ability to track deal health and accurately forecast revenue. Only then can you diagnose and improve your sales cadence.

It’s notoriously easy to resort to gut feelings and opinions when building your strategies. Revenue intelligence counters that inclination. It provides 100% visibility into what’s really happening on your sales calls and meetings.

Mindtickle, for example, scores every deal based on the contacts you’ve assigned to that opportunity. It then transcribes and analyzes conversations, giving you insights and key topics customers are talking about.

Your sales team has the information they need to close deals more quickly. That, in turn, helps sales leaders forecast sales more accurately.

It really is like having a crystal ball to gain key insights into what matters most. But there’s no magic here, just rich data and an intelligent system to show you how it impacts your bottom line.

Revenue intelligence helps you get a full picture of the present and read the future in seven important ways.

1. It checks (and reduces) deal risk

Revenue intelligence provides AI-powered risk analysis that helps your teams manage pipeline and close deals more effectively.

It identifies pipeline risks, so you know how to save a deal that’s not moving forward. For example, it can score every deal and alert you to elements that impact their health.

Take multithreading as an example. If you know it takes an average of 14 contacts to win a deal, and you don’t have enough people attached to a deal, revenue intelligence will identify that weakness.

Who’s involved in the deal? What are their engagement levels? Are they responding to emails? Is the customer sentiment trending negatively?

Without revenue intelligence, managers must trust the rep’s interpretation of deal progress and sentiment. But reps may be focused on one person who’s advocating internally for your solution while ignoring other signals that the deal is stalling.

2. It gives you 100% visibility

Revenue intelligence tracks all scheduled meetings, emails, calls, and what’s said in each channel. It captures sentiment and intent.

This is especially useful for managers because it gives context on how they can help a rep work that deal.

Reps can easily become overconfident and report the deal is moving forward. Revenue intelligence can track these nuances to identify when a deal is at risk. It then helps you understand how to turn it around.

3. It forecasts how many deals you’ll close in real time

Revenue intelligence provides accurate forecasting information based on real-time data from reps’ engagement with prospects. It uses AI and ML to standardize your sales process, identify trends, and make projections.

Use it to show you where you’re experiencing revenue leakage and which deals are at risk in specific pipeline stages. Or use it for change analysis — where is revenue dipping over the last week or month?

Taking all of this data into account, revenue intelligence gives you an accurate account of how many deals will close and how far you are from hitting your numbers and pipeline goals.

4. It tracks historical conversion rates

Historical data puts current data into context, and revenue intelligence gives you historical conversion rates at the rep, team, and business levels.

The data might tell you that Bill wins 7% of his deals while Susie wins 12% of her deals. With this information, you can evaluate your team’s strengths and weaknesses, what’s needed for them to hit their quota, and how you can help. This helps you proactively respond to gaps in your new pipeline.

5. It increases productivity across your teams

Revenue intelligence helps your teams work better and more effectively by helping them set priorities, and focus on the right prospects and sales activities.

Since it uses AI, it automatically collects data from every interaction your reps have with a prospect, including call recordings and emails. That lessens the burden of manual data, and frees your reps to focus on more productive activities: selling, knowledge building, training, and coaching.

This improved data gives managers a more comprehensive understanding of how they can coach reps and help them move deals forward. It also helps you predict revenue growth based on your past deal flow.

6. It’s your one source of truth

To work effectively, your team needs all relevant information in a single place. Revenue intelligence software removes the frustration of having to log into multiple tools across multiple departments to gather essential revenue data.

By consolidating marketing, sales, and customer success data into one system, everyone has access to the same information. This reduces the need to reach out to different departments or manually crunch data from disparate sources.

Reps and managers can easily understand the status of deals, who’s involved on the customer side as well as internally, and whether reps are closing deals and hitting quotas.

Let’s say you use MEDDPICC as your sales methodology, and you want to ensure all reps are adhering to it. Revenue intelligence tracks your sales activities to ensure everyone is making the right motions. It predicts how teams and people are likely to perform in the future, who’s going to hit their quota, and who needs more training or coaching in a specific area.

How many leads are coming in from marketing? Who are you handing off new clients to for onboarding and support? All of this information is readily available with revenue intelligence.

7. It reveals your overall business health

Revenue intelligence gives you a real-time view of the health of your business at many levels. It doesn’t just process data, it interprets it, so you know the next steps, historical trends, and performance metrics that impact your decisions.

Revenue intelligence changes the game

Revenue intelligence is a powerful tool to help your organization drive growth and reach its potential. But it shouldn’t work alone. To set up your team for success, you need to combine sales readiness and revenue intelligence.

Mindtickle is the first platform to combine sales readiness and revenue intelligence in one place. That gives you higher data accuracy, easy user interface, more integrations, better customization, and a Readiness Index to predict how your teams are going to perform.

Use the Readiness Index to predict how teams and people are going to perform in the future, who’s going to hit their quota, and who needs more training or coaching in a specific area. That, plus revenue intelligence, gives you the insight you need to empower your entire revenue team.

You can check out all of this with a free, guided product tour and see for yourself how Mindtickle can maximize your revenue and grow your business.