The Case for Pushing Sales Intelligence

By Heather Baldwin

Today, it’s harder than ever to keep track of prospects. Layoffs, reorganizations, mergers, and acquisitions – they all result in your targets’ moving in and out of jobs quicker than ever. In such an environment, how do you identify the most likely buyers of your product or service, become well educated about their challenges, and do it all quickly?

Peter Ostrow, research director of sales effectiveness at Aberdeen Group, recently explored this topic in a benchmark report, "Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling." In it, he examines how better information about prospects and clients has enabled organizations to reduce their sales cycle and maximize their chances of hitting quota. His conclusions are based on an Aberdeen study of 528 end-user organizations to learn about their sales-intelligence deployments. Aberdeen describes sales intelligence as any information used to educate and enable the sales force and enrich the sales pipeline.

The study revealed that best-in-class companies – the top 20 percent of organizations surveyed – experienced a 9 percent overall reduction in the amount of time reps spend looking for relevant company and contact information, as opposed to a 5 percent increase in time among laggard companies. At the same time, best-in-class organizations saw a 5 percent year-over-year reduction in their sales-cycle time, as compared to a 7 percent increase among laggards.

So what are best-in-class sales organizations doing that their competitors aren’t? For one, they’re using sales-intelligence tools to get the right information to the right reps at the right time. Indeed, Aberdeen reports that users of sales intelligence achieve 56 percent better lead-conversion rates than non-users. For users of externally provided, sales-intelligence content to support sales efforts, 46 percent of reps made quota versus only 26 percent at companies that did not use this tool.

But it’s not simply having access to sales-intelligence tools that makes the difference. It’s how best-in-class organizations employ those tools that sets them apart. "The most popular strategies among best-in-class organizations to improve sales performance via sales intelligence follow a number of themes," says Ostrow, "but an underlying concern focuses on two key issues: depth of knowledge and timing."

In other words, they want more than just surface-level information about their prospects, and they’re not content to simply wait for it. That last point is key, says Ostrow. While, in general, there’s a trend away from the efficiencies of push technology, it’s interesting to note that 55 percent of best-in-class organizations indicate that at least half their sales-intelligence data is pushed to the organization through sales-intelligence technology. Bottom performers, on the other hand, are 39 percent more likely than best-in-class to rely almost completely on a manual process. "The takeaway here is that ‘push’ technologies represent a trend associated with better sales results," says Ostrow.

"Push intelligence to your team rather than wait for them to fetch it," he urges. "With only 43 percent of average performers engaged in some form of automated push, they are 28 percent less likely than the best-in-class to recognize the value of empowering sales staff with customer, prospect, and market intelligence that essentially appears before their eyes when the related CRM or SFA record is opened."

Specifically, that value is a 20 percent increase in revenues when average organizations move to best-in-class. That kind of top-line growth, he concludes, should provide ample incentive to adopt a "push" methodology when it comes to arming your sales team with sales intelligence.