Every digital sales interaction leaves a trail of breadcrumbs behind. Within those crumbs, you’ll find key insights about buyer patterns and behaviors, but you’ll only be able to take action on those findings if you have unified CRM data.
Break Down Data Silos for a Better Buyer Experience
Different GTM teams often have access to disparate data, largely because they work in different tools. For instance, your Marketing team may have access to content insights and know who’s engaged with what on your website while Sales has call recordings and analytics on outbound outreach. But the reality is, revenue is a team sport. While many organizations come together with CRM as the respective point of overlap, we’ve found that most organizations have more blind spots than confidence.
With siloed data across the GTM organization, nobody has a complete understanding of what buyers are doing and why — and sales and marketing once again find themselves out of alignment. If data is locked up in separate tools as opposed to a central location, its impact is going to be stifled significantly.
According to Forrester, 49% of teams are getting their data from different sources, creating a fractured and unreliable experience that leaves all parties confused. For sellers, that means an inability to understand which sales materials and tactics are actually working. And for buyers, that means an inconsistent brand experience that erodes trust.
When it comes to analyzing buyer and seller activity data, our research revealed the most significant barrier to success was not having a “single source of truth” for all revenue data. Just as sales enablement has evolved into the broader practice of revenue enablement, we’re also seeing the lines between revenue enablement and intelligence start to blur. Revenue intelligence has become a crucial part to helping revenue teams drive growth — and do so predictably.
What High Performers Do Differently
When compiling the 2023 State of Revenue Enablement Report, we found there are a few key behaviors that set high-performers apart: they’re automatically capturing activity data to understand what goes on between buyers and sellers, they’re using data from a myriad of data sources and they’re centralizing that data in a single hub.
Automatic Activity Capture & Conversation Intelligence
Our research found that high-performing companies are 20% more likely to rely on CRM data that is automatically collected and uploaded than lower-performing peers. When using a CRM that gathers this information automatically, sellers not only reduce their administrative burden, but the data collected is also more accurate and complete.
While people only retain about 25% of a conversation, machine learning algorithms can preserve every detail. That’s why conversation intelligence (CI) is one the most powerful automated data analysis tools around; high-performing orgs are 10% more likely to use it than low-performers.
Instead of relying on manual data entry – which is both time-consuming and prone to human error – this feature records and analyzes sales conversations, then crystallizes key information from those transcripts. This real-time visibility into seller performance helps sales teams improve coaching, close skill gaps, and identify successful behaviors to be replicated company-wide.
All This Revenue Data, All in One Place
We also found that top performing companies centralize their revenue data and rely on a data lake that seamlessly integrates with the CRM to capture buyer engagement data. So, what’s inside all of these vast data lakes? Most organizations pull information not only from buyer and seller interactions, but also the actions that unfold when the seller isn’t around. These touch points include email exchanges, calendar invites, new contacts, direct messages, content consumption habits, and content sharing patterns.
With this information in hand, stakeholders at every level can make better decisions. Managers use it to inform their coaching, and leaders get better visibility into deal, pipeline, and forecasting efficacy. Despite these benefits, just 44% of companies are leveraging their data to understand their pipeline and the quality of their forecasting, leaving lots of room for improvement.
Not to mention, a centralized hub of data is a critical requirement to being able to successfully leverage technology like Generative AI.
Arm Your Team With the Data They Need to Win
Revenue intelligence is a powerful component of a revenue enablement strategy unlocking incredible insights. But as we’ve established, your revenue data needs to be complete, accurate and centralized in order to drive sales performance. To ensure you’re enabling your team with the data they need to win, here are three recommendations to uplevel your revenue data strategy.
Establish a Single Hub for Revenue Data
Every stakeholder should be getting their information from the same place. Centralized data aligns teams around the same goals, gives higher-ups a wellspring of insights and analysis to coach reps, and arms marketing with the tools to craft messaging they know will be effective.
Reduce Administrative Burden
Time is money — and your most valuable resource. Every minute spent on administrative tasks – like taking notes and searching for details – takes time away from the collaborative and human side of sales. Use automation to free up your team’s bandwidth so they can be fully present, actively listen and collaborate with their buyers without having to worry about the manual data entry that follows.
Capture Every Last Insight with CI
CI tools record 100% of every buyer-seller engagement to ensure nothing falls through the cracks, then analyzes the information to reveal salient insights. The more you collect, the better equipped managers will be to deliver data-backed coaching and scale what’s working well.
This is the third installment of our series breaking down the research and insights from our 2023 State of Revenue Enablement report. Stay tuned for our next post which will explore the importance of value selling tools or check out our previous posts:
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