What is Revenue Intelligence & How Does it Eliminate CRM Data Challenges?

Revenue leaders invest millions in data systems like CRMs. Their need is simple.

They want to get higher ROI through better visibility into sales opportunities, increased sales productivity, efficient operations and a solid customer experience.

But reality paints a different picture.

Revenue leaders are unable to extract true value out of the data in their CRM.

Traditional CRM tools require sales and marketing teams to manually enter contact information and activity data. 

With sales, marketing and customer success sifting through piles of data to enter into their CRM, they are frustrated and losing out on the energy that keeps them productive.

The result? 

Siloed(probably lying in an excel sheet in your rep’s desktop), uncaptured, or irrelevant data.

These data inefficiencies cause B2B brands to miss out on 70,000+ sales opportunities per year. This is a potential $36 billion in missed revenue.

Thankfully, artificial intelligence has the potential to eliminate these inefficiencies through a revenue intelligence system.

A revenue intelligence system can help you automate data capture, and enrich and update it as you go.

This is a game-changer for revenue leaders as it helps fill up the data cracks in the GTM funnel. Let’s see how.

What is Revenue Intelligence?

As the name suggests, revenue intelligence provides you the insights that you can use to drive revenue. 

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), revenue intelligence helps gather, manage and analyze key data across all your revenue generating functions like sales, marketing and customer success – and integrates it into a single source of truth. 

Revenue intelligence works on a data-first approach. Hence, there are no blind spots, missing data, or missed opportunities.

Revenue intelligence plays a vital role in making the revenue operations (RevOps) function successful. Revenue teams can uncover powerful insights to identify sales opportunities, track sales performance and drive productivity.

Revenue intelligence software is an AI platform to capture all the data related to sales which include sales call data, customer data and market trends.

This software is solving problems for sales managers and giving them shortcuts to get more profit. The productivity rate is increasing with the usage of this software. Sales experts get a full roadmap of the market and sell their products according to the trends they see. Many sales managers have started using this software and getting full productivity results.

Sally Stevens, Co-Founder at FastPeopleSearch.io

Key Data Challenges That Revenue Intelligence Solves 

The data in your CRM can give your revenue team what it needs to maximize their revenue generation strategy. 

However, is that data efficient?

Does your CRM even have the right data to start with?

Revenue intelligence solves all the frustrating data issues that companies have been facing for far too long now.

Here are top four ways through which revenue intelligence makes the battle for data easier for RevOps teams:

1. Free your teams from manual data entry

CRMs have been around for 20 years. Yet:

• 63% of reps refuse to use their CRM. 
• 40% of reps continue to use spreadsheets to track activity. 
• 55% of salespeople admit that they don’t store lead and customer data in their CRM. 

Forcing sales, marketing and customer success teams to manually log in their contacts, engagement data and activities into the CRM is clearly a lost cause.

Your sales reps are tired. They do not have the data that can transform their selling process, and the CRM is adding more workload to their already hectic schedules.

Knowing this resistance to CRM data entry, it’s clear that changing human behaviour is not the solution to this problem. 

Instead, start relying on technologies that make your reps’ lives easier, and encourage them to spend more time on the “selling floor.”

A revenue intelligence system automatically logs all activities and contacts of your sales reps. This can free up to 5 to 6 hours of their time per week. 

They can spend more time focusing on what they do best – selling.

2. Achieve higher data confidence

There is no way to confirm if the data in your CRM has been entered correctly, or is reliable for gathering useful insights to improve the sales process. 

Nearly 70% of revenue leaders are not confident in the accuracy of their CRM data. Despite the fact that 72% use one or more data vendors to enrich and update their CRM data.

Second, CRM data grows stale with time. 91% of data in CRM systems is predicted to be incomplete, stale, or duplicated each year.

With these errors, your CRM can quickly turn into an unreliable and expensive mess with missing contacts and activity data. 

A revenue intelligence system automatically tracks and updates changes in contacts in real-time. Your CRM stays up-to-date with it.

3. Break traditional GTM silos

The data that your company actually captures gets siloed in the separate tech stacks of sales, marketing and customer success. 

This notorious lack of collaboration between these customer-facing functions means that they derive their own insights, and use them to create separate department-led growth strategies.

Let’s understand this through an example.

Let’s say the goal of your sales team this quarter is to get more bookings. Your customer success team is focused towards retention the same quarter.

Both these teams are headed in separate directions. They aren’t focusing on how they can support each other to achieve common goals.

This lack of collaboration leads to missed opportunities and failed goals and key KPIs aren’t aligned for the teams.

A revenue intelligence system eliminates this silos by capturing all data across your GTM funnel in real-time and placing it all under a single view. 

All your customer-facing teams can now look at the same data sets, collaborate on common goals and support each other to reach their goals. 

This harmony gets everyone on the same page and increases chances of making better decisions that ultimately drive more revenue. 

4. Turn your data into actionable insights

Raw data in itself is useless. You need the tools that can help you convert raw data into actionable insights.

Revenue intelligence can transform the data in your CRM into powerful insights. Let’s look at some examples:

• A revenue intelligence system can help you get insights on deal activity. With a revenue intelligence system, your reps will have complete visibility on which deals are moving in the pipeline, and which need attention.
• A revenue intelligence system allows your sales teams to discover the depth and strength of their relationship with their buyers. These insights can be used to execute winning playbooks for your teams.

Benefits of a Revenue Intelligence System

Clean, updated and reliable data pulled in real-time under one roof can do wonders for your business.

Let’s look at some of the top benefits of a revenue intelligence system.

1. Deal intelligence and guidance

Revenue intelligence can power your revenue teams to understand sales activity insights and the momentum on existing deals. 

Track pipeline shifts in real-time to see which deals are active, which opportunities to focus on, who will be the influencers and what communication should be used to take conversations forward. 

Your teams can get alerts on predictive next steps on all their leads, opportunities, accounts and tasks. 

2. Sales productivity

A revenue intelligence system helps you track and compare your sales team’s performance on crucial sales metrics. 

With activity metrics, you can know which activities make your best reps win more deals. You can use those insights to generate a predictive sales playbook.

Based on how your reps are performing, you can leverage data to coach them strategically, and help them increase their win rate. 

3. Sales forecasting

A revenue intelligence system delivers insights on your pipeline to drive accurate sales forecasting for all your business reviews.

Get alerted on what has changed in deals in real-time and identify deal risks early on. Use those insights to positively influence the outcome of deals and hit your number. 

4. Strong buyer relationships

A revenue intelligence system collects prospects information like name, location, designation, behaviors etc.

It segments prospects and accounts with scoring, which gives a deeper understanding of your buyers. 

For example, Nektar.ai gives you a multithreading score. This score tells you how well your reps are engaging with the key stakeholders of your buying committee.

With these insights, your reps can confidently navigate the needs of buyers and take appropriate actions.

5. Cross-team collaboration

Sales is a team sport. 77% of salespeople say selling collaboratively with other departments is important.

Revenue intelligence grants sales teams a single window of deal execution,. Here, they can create, view and assign tasks to cross functional teams, and collaborate on successful playbooks to win every quarter. 

For example, you can identify lonely accounts in a revenue intelligence system. With these alerts, marketing can use the insights to run targeted ABM campaigns. 

I firmly believe that revenue intelligence will become a must-have tool in a business’s tech stack. Most RevOps teams I work with struggle to make sense of the huge amount of data they have in their CRM. A good revenue intelligence tool helps parse that data, and shows them where they should be focusing their time on. It can have an immediate impact on their bottom line.

Brandon Wind, Senior Salesforce Developer at Faire

Get Started With Revenue Intelligence

There is enough evidence to prove that revenue intelligence is the future of data collection. It can shift sales teams into high gear by collecting all parts of the business to activities that drive revenue.

A connected view of data across the entire customer journey will make your sales team 2.1 times more likely to succeed. 

Before you decide to invest in a revenue intelligence software, make sure the tool is designed for your reps.

Make reps the centre of your purchase decision. They are the end users. You must convince them how a revenue intelligence system can address their unique particular pain points.

Like any new sales tool in your sales tech stack, your sales reps have to understand the purpose of a revenue intelligence tool and how to incorporate it into their existing workflow.

The next step is to define your data sources and what specific data challenges your business is facing. Outline your sales process and revenue channels and examine where your data comes from, what is the type and how large is it. 

After identifying the gaps in your sales process and learning the needs of your reps, start researching revenue intelligence tools in the market.

Get feedback from sources and leverage demos or trials to see how these tools help your business. 

Ask specific questions like the complexity of integration with your business, the amount of change management required etc. Here’s a list of 10 questions you must ask before investing in a sales tech stack.

No two companies have the same sales process.

Ask how your business can fit revenue intelligence into its processes and how will its implementation impact your current processes.

Accelerate Your Revenue With Nektar.ai

The quality of your data will affect your revenue. Make data a priority to uncover powerful revenue opportunities. 

Nektar.ai’s revenue enablement platform provides a frictionless way to improve CRM hygiene and helps extract value from your existing GTM tech stack.

Nektar.ai’s solution assists you in finding answers to complex revenue questions. You can get clear and complete visibility into your pipeline health and drive revenue predictability. 

Eliminate the inefficiencies caused by manual dependencies today.