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.
- It checks (and reduces) deal risk
- It gives you 100% visibility
- It forecasts how many deals you’ll close in real time
- It tracks historical conversion rates
- It increases productivity across your teams
- It’s your one source of truth
- 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.