The Ultimate Guide to Revenue Intelligence

Only 43% of sales reps hit their quota. That’s a lot of missed deals and lost opportunities that cost revenue. But the real danger is not knowing why those deals are lost because this allows the same errors to be repeated.

That’s where revenue intelligence steps in.

Revenue intelligence prepares your team to navigate deals with greater confidence and improve sales performance by giving them predictive insights and a comprehensive view of deal health.

Keep Reading

Table of Contents

What is revenue intelligence?

Revenue intelligence uses insights from call recordings, email interactions, and customer sentiment to give accurate predictions on deal outcomes.This is thanks to revenue intelligence’s complete visibility into the sales pipeline, which allows consideration of the prospect’s health and sales reps’ performance throughout each interaction.

Revenue intelligence gathers data through each interaction and uses conversation intelligence to analyze customer sentiment and deal outcomes. It keeps in mind the traits and skills of each sales rep and analyzes what skills need to be developed to save at-risk deals.This saves your sales team time and centralizes data insights into one platform. Doing so ensures your sales team operates with quality intel and a comprehensive view of what strategy to use for each call.

Revenue intelligence’s ability to pinpoint deal risks and attribute skills and content that can increase win rates makes it a powerful tool to boost sales team performance and increase company revenue.

Revenue intelligence and sales forecasting: How are they related?

On the one hand, sales forecasting relies on subjective input from sales reps who attempt to predict sales through qualitative measures. For example, how they perceive customer sentiment or if they believe they performed well on a call.

On the other hand, revenue intelligence considers customer interactions across the whole company and collates the outcomes into quantitative data points. In turn, the predictions made by revenue intelligence are based on these data points and trends, which can then be analyzed and optimized.

As revenue intelligence takes into account each customer touchpoint and analyzes reactions, it can optimize and improve the customer’s journey throughout the sales pipeline and improve win rates.Therefore, revenue intelligence empowers and improves sales forecasting with accurate data and insights to hit sales quota objectives.

What are the benefits of revenue intelligence for your sales team?

Revenue has a big impact on the health of your company. However, research shows that close to 49% of sales teams face revenue challenges because of a reliance on manual data entry and a lack of platforms and tools. On top of that, 52% of sales reps struggle with revenue due to poor-quality data.

Revenue intelligence can remove those errors and improve the quality of data entry, empowering sales reps to hit their goals. Here are some benefits your sales team will notice by adding a revenue intelligence platform to your operations.

Improve close rates with comprehensive insights

Revenue intelligence takes into consideration data from sales, operations, and marketing to remove silos of information and find the most effective strategies that move prospects through a sales funnel.Revenue intelligence constantly learns from sales reps’ interactions. Therefore, it finds the best sales skills and traits that had the biggest impact on closed deals. With those traits and approaches recorded, it builds recommendations for future sales reps to follow and increase win rates.

For example, if revenue intelligence picks up that sales reps who listen 40% of the time in the discovery stage are more likely to progress to the next stage, it can send those insights to sales reps who might be talking too much and losing prospects as a result.

Optimize rep performance

Revenue intelligence uses conversation intelligence to analyze sales rep communication, sales skills, and product knowledge on calls. It compares a sales rep’s skills and traits against the ideal rep profile (IRP), and then, with the data gathered, it pinpoints the sales rep’s weaknesses. This allows sales coaches to recommend personalized training or course material that will develop a seller’s skills in that area.

In turn, sales reps can improve a root cause of a sales weakness and improve their win rates. Reps that receive follow-up on sales training can improve their skills and sales readiness scores by 13 percentage points.

Improve sales predictions and forecast accuracy

Revenue intelligence takes into account industry practices, customer health, and the sales reps’ skills, then improves sales prediction and forecast accuracy based on quantitative data.Most sales teams struggle to make accurate predictions due to a lack of tools or using too many platforms that don’t have centralized data. With revenue intelligence, teams can save around 30 hours per week on manual predictions and help improve their forecast accuracy to 95% or more.

With revenue intelligence, sales teams can also spot deal risks ahead of time and better prepare for calls. This helps improve sales teams’ ability to gain accurate forecasts and sales predictions, which allows them to stay ahead of bad surprises and prepare different approaches and strategies to improve outcomes.

Accelerate onboarding

Revenue intelligence provides new sales hires with relevant deal knowledge and exposure to real-life scenarios. New hires learn from the best approaches from day one, which helps them understand how to tackle different conversations to get the best results.This is because revenue intelligence listens and stores past conversations and feedback from team members. By doing so, the team members teach new sales hires about what worked and what didn’t.

And, with revenue intelligence, new sales hires can put their knowledge to the test with role plays to spot strengths and areas of improvement.

With so much information and knowledge at hand that is directly applicable to real-life scenarios, revenue intelligence platforms can decrease ramp time by 40-50%. That directly impacts the amount of revenue a new sales hire can bring to the company in their first months.

Integration with content, operations, and sales

Revenue intelligence gathers data from across the organization and different customer touchpoints. Such clarity gives your sales reps a 360-degree view of each deal’s health.This is important, as half of all content engagement is generated by just 10% of content. Revenue intelligence can highlight which content customers interact with the most, unveiling what topics or features are the most desirable.

By understanding how prospects interact with content, the sales team can use revenue intelligence to fine-tune the content to send depending on the stage of the customer and the needs that have been identified. In turn, this guarantees that prospects receive relevant and useful content that pushes them further along the buying journey.

Understand your customers needs

Revenue intelligence can uncover customers’ sentiments and predict the outcome of a deal that could have been missed due to human bias or error by using Call AI to spot themes or keywords that indicate a prospect’s sentiment or deal risk.For example, if the prospect is asking questions about competitors or features your product doesn’t have, revenue intelligence can flag it as a deal risk and come up with the best next-step approach to secure the deal following practices from top-performing sales reps.

In turn, this helps your team understand your customers’ pain points and recurring questions, which allows reps to enter each call prepared to address them. By doing so, you ensure the prospect experiences a confident buying journey as all their questions and hesitations are answered and addressed.

4 essential features of a revenue intelligence software

Here are a few things to take to look for when choosing a revenue intelligence software.

Conversation intelligence

Conversation intelligence records, transcribes, and captures themes in conversations between buyers and sellers.This is a very valuable feature because it spots customer sentiment to alert sales teams to deal risks or upselling opportunities. It also has the ability to surface insights found from calls or emails that help the sales rep know where and how to focus their efforts.

And it’s especially helpful to use conversation intelligence for new sales hire training purposes and inform the sales team about the best communication approach.A study found that 40% of respondents consider the biggest benefit of conversation intelligence to be call preparation, and 37% consider it especially helpful in discovering the root cause of missed deals.With conversation intelligence, you gain insight into recurring themes, listening vs. talking time, sales reps’ product knowledge, and sales behavior. All these insights are quantified, so sales reps can continuously work on skill improvement and optimized sales approaches.

Simplified workflows and integrations

Revenue intelligence platforms should pull data from different touchpoints and automate next steps that take into account all customer interactions and industry best practices.In order to have complete visibility over a sales pipeline, you need each interaction and customer touchpoint to be accounted for and gathered. Therefore, your revenue intelligence software should be able to integrate with your CRM and sales enablement tools to avoid data getting lost or scattered.

By having all your data in one location, your revenue intelligence software can then create simplified workflows and sales approaches that incorporate all the resources your company offers.Sales teams benefit from the guidance of workflows in every stage of the customer buying journey. With simplified workflows, the sales team can analyze areas of improvement, as well as see the chain reaction that follows an interaction and the different approaches that win the most strategies.

Compare sellers against ideal rep profile

Revenue intelligence is able to improve win rates by analyzing individual sales rep behavior against the ideal rep profile (IRP) and pinpointing skills that need to be improved to match it.Due to a lack of tools or resources, less than 1% of businesses have a list of sales traits or skills that have a proven effect on increasing win rates. However, with revenue intelligence, every interaction is recorded and analyzed. This empowers sales reps with the right sales traits to work toward.The average company that uses an IRP identifies 15 competencies per role. These competencies depend on the skills, behaviors, and traits that the revenue intelligence platform picks up from best-performing sales reps.

For example, some of the competency traits revenue intelligence takes into account are product knowledge, tone, assertiveness, sales skills, process adherence, competitor knowledge, customer knowledge, negotiation, objection handling, value articulation, and approach.With insights provided by an IRP, coaches can create customized benchmarks for behaviors and compare their sales reps’ performance to them using sales readiness scores. Revenue intelligence also empowers coaches to adjust sales reps’ training so that it is personalized and customized to every sales rep’s needs.

Pipeline visibility and deal health

Revenue intelligence software should create accurate data graphs and offer insights that highlight deal risks and opportunities for sales coaches to step in if necessary.What improves pipeline visibility is the ability to have automatic data entries from each interaction, as this informs the revenue intelligence software about the state of a deal without relying on human data input.The platform should have a clear breakdown of all the email interactions, phone calls, and content touchpoints a prospect has received. This allows sales reps to understand the current level of engagement and the stage of the prospect’s buying journey.

Apart from showing sales reps a comprehensive view of a deal’s trajectory and past interactions, it must also alert deal risks beforehand, so teams can prepare for the next meeting with the right material and approach.It’s important for your revenue intelligence to accurately forecast sales predictions because your team needs to be able to spot roadblocks in the process and understand how to leverage insights into actionable tasks.

Revenue intelligence is useless without sales readiness

Having revenue intelligence software is a great start to understanding the relationship between sales rep skills and customer behavior.However, for lasting results, you need more than great insights into your sales pipeline.

That’s where sales readiness and revenue intelligence go hand in hand. The insights gained for revenue intelligence are useless if you don’t have a sales team who are able to actively improve on their sales skills and weaknesses. This means that there is a relationship between continual training and improvement.Think of it this way: a football manager may have the best tactical data, but if their team is out of shape, the tactics serve no good use.

Empower your sales team with insights into sales pipelines but also support them with the right sales training and development to see results in the long run.This ensures your team is continually ready and scores high on the skills and behaviors they need to tackle prospect conversation at any stage of the sales funnel.If you want to learn how Mindtickle combines sales readiness with revenue intelligence, schedule a demo to see how to improve your sales team’s win rates.

Get free access to the best sales-readiness content.

© 2024 Mindtickle Inc. All rights reserved.