What is Revenue Intelligence – Why Does It Matter to You?

You may be forgiven for not knowing about or having not heard of Revenue Intelligence, as it is a relatively new concept that integrates sales, operations and marketing data into a single source of truth about your company’s revenue streams. 

As revenue is generated across a business in different areas and via various tactics, this can make tracking and understanding where your sales are coming from and what is performing well complicated. Sales leaders need to be able to build a holistic picture of where sales are coming from, how they are generated and what tactics are working to be able to direct the focus of teams and forecast pipeline. This is where revenue intelligence comes in.

What is Revenue Intelligence?

Revenue intelligence collates real-time data from your sales teams, engagements, pipeline and deal close to build a holistic viewpoint of your sales activity. Which in turn provides an understanding of the “how, where and why” that make up your revenue generation processes and highlights what drives growth. By understanding this data companies gain actionable insights which can be used to build workflows that drive deal closes and optimise their sales pipelines. 

While revenue intelligence collects together a lot of internal business data which can be exacted by sales leadership in various ways, one of the best and simplest ways is to integrate a revenue intelligence platform into your revenue process. These systems use your internal and historical data as well as trends to model your sales performance for you.

What value does revenue intelligence add?

Accurately forecast sales

Revenue intelligence is uniquely placed to give sales managers and leaders an overview of what is happening within their business and where their revenue is coming from. Platforms are able to collect data from a variety of sources across the business and track the role that each data point has in the sales process. This means that management at all levels is able to evaluate and predict sales pipeline performance. This insight increases the accuracy of predictive sales forecasting, by adding the dimension of real-time tracking to any sales projections. Which in turn means that any sales forecasts can be more accurately targeted to create realistic expectations and quota targets. 

Furthermore, the ability to track sales activity in real-time also provides additional insight for sales managers by highlighting potential risk within their sales pipeline. As revenue intelligence platforms use historical data to assess how a deal is progressing this also shows opportunities that are not hitting the correct points within the sales process. Therefore, allowing leadership to recognise when a deal is losing momentum and take corrective action before the deal drops. 

Optimise tactics and outreach

One of the biggest issues that sales teams encounter is ensuring that they are targeting the right opportunities to drive sales. Understanding prospect engagement allows sales teams to see which of their outreach campaigns are working and optimise their workflows around the likelihood of closing a deal; focusing resources on opportunities that are more likely to close quickly. 

Revenue intelligence platforms evaluate how engaged a prospect is based on a series of factors or goals. These vary depending on how your company’s sales process is built and what your goals are. However, generally, assessments on the potential of a lead can be shown by understanding their engagement with your sales teams activities or campaigns and how far it has progressed through your funnel, as well as if any follow-ups have been set.

Potential activity data that revenue intelligence can track are:

• If the lead has interacted with outreach campaigns
• If a prospect is responding to your sales activities (emails, phone calls, etc)
• If there any follow-up meetings or sales calls set-up
• How recently has the prospect engaged with your sales team

Revenue intelligence platforms use this data to assign a score the potential to close a deal. This kind of insight into how individual prospects are progressing through the sales pipeline enables sales managers to understand where their team’s efforts are focused best, as well as what campaigns or outreach is working and what is not. 

Improve team productivity

With sales teams working remotely or conducting their normal field calls from home due to COVID-19, it is a challenge to manage sales teams effectively. With this disconnect, it can be challenging to know individual sales reps are focusing on where and if they have enough pipeline to continue driving forward.

This makes it harder to effectively coach sales teams, identify potential issues and improve performance. Revenue intelligence provides data-driven insights into sales activities across all team members allowing sales leaders to identify where problem areas are and address them quickly and effectively. This optimises performance by ensuring that reps are not spending their time on sales opportunities that have low value and are focusing on more engaged deals with better win rates.

Optimising a sales team isn’t just about targeting the right opportunities, it is about knowing what is working and how that can be applied across the business. Knowing who your sales players are and what makes them effective allows you to implement their methods across the team, creating effective data-backed coaching strategies. 

By gaining insight into how your sales team is running and where its weaknesses are means that you have the data and knowledge to create a winning team and strategy.

Revenue Intelligence – How do I get it?

Implementing revenue insights into your business is simple but can be time-consuming, especially building your own… fortunately we know a platform which can help you. Try our 14-day free trial.