When it comes to sales, building strong relationships is essential.
But let’s face it, the process can be incredibly time-consuming and demands a significant amount of effort from the sales reps.
But here’s the kicker: Today, 44% of millennial buyers prefer minimal contact with a sales rep during the buying process. That means your sales rep has ~5% of the prospect’s time to establish a connection. It’s tougher than ever to develop relationships from a seller’s point of view.
Does this mean that your reps should stop building relationships? Should your reps just try and sell whatever they can to whoever you find?
The answer to that is a resounding NO.
In the digital era, data and insights are what drive sales . They have the potential to give out more information than you know about your prospects. CRMs capture all possible data, churning it and spurting out information that otherwise was not visible earlier.
But wait. There’s more to sales success than your CRM. To truly understand your prospects, you need to dig deeper to uncover hidden insights to help close your deals faster. That means mining your CRM data for a wealth of valuable information that will give you a competitive edge.
This is exactly what relationship intelligence does.
What is a Relationship Intelligence Tool?
Picture this: You have access to a wealth of data from your clients, colleagues, and partners, but it’s scattered across various touchpoints like emails, phone calls, messages, meetings, and more.
How do you make sense of all that information?
That’s where relationship intelligence comes in.
By pooling in, processing, and analyzing all that data, relationship intelligence technology provides invaluable insights, builds stronger relationships, and helps you make smarter decisions.
With relationship intelligence, you can discover a treasure of data-driven and actionable insights that support the organization’s understanding of the customer, identify the optimal solutions, and determine the best communication strategies. This results in a more tailored and informed approach to prospects to maximize the best chance of a positive outcome.
Your prospects are more than just a phone number or an email. Relationship intelligence broadens your potential and plays a strong role in connecting the dots from other sources. It supplements your CRM, finding other & useful opportunities to close prospects, otherwise not visible to us.
Why Does a Relationship Intelligence Tool Matter?
Enterprise-based selling in B2B is no walk in the park.
With a plethora of relationship intelligence tools out in the market, organizations are spoilt for choice. However, tools that leverage AI/ML, offering data-driven intelligence with invaluable and actionable insights, will be the ones that will dominate the market.
On the flip side, the process of onboarding a tool no longer rests in the hands of a single decision-maker. Gartner states that the number of buyers involved in the last decade has increased from 5 to 20. A potential account will have multiple stakeholders who will be involved in the decision-making process. Hence, it becomes critical for sales reps to identify and engage with key stakeholders regularly.
With the rise of digital selling, organizations can now track the process of selling in a more in-depth manner. All forms of digital outreaches and communication with prospects can now be tracked, analyzed, and acted upon with the help of relationship intelligence.
Today, with markets being down and companies being extremely meticulous in their choice of tools to invest, having a relationship intelligence tech stack will be the game-changer. Here’s how
1. Showcasing a single view of all your relationships with your prospects
Having relationship intelligence data will bring together all the stakeholders in one view, so sales reps have a clear idea of the sales cycle the account is currently in.
2. Identify every stakeholder involved
With the buying process evolving constantly, the final decision often lies not with one but multiple owners. In other words, for a sales rep, multithreading is the best way forward. And in this process, it’s very easy to confuse the right person to engage with, especially if there is a handover involved.
Sales reps often fail to map out the stakeholders involved. The dots are not connected and not visible, which can lead to confusion and no clarity to other higher authorities.
Relationship intelligence tools fill these gaps. It will identify each & every stakeholder involved at every stage of the selling process, bring them together, and map out the relationship of each, and provide all the information about these stakeholders.
Not only that, but the data also provide insights to those who are frequently engaging and also point out the next best champion to continue the sales process seamlessly if the key decision maker is unavailable at any stage of the sales process.
3. Give detailed insights about each prospect
The thing about relationship intelligence tools is that not only do they provide details in one place, but they also show you the best possible way to contact and reach out to your prospects. It can be email, phone calls, or video calls; it will give you solutions that are sure to boost your process of converting.
4. Recover lost leads
In the world of sales, not all leads or prospects will convert.
If the target is to convert 2 leads in a month with a value of X, sales reps need to build a pipeline of at least 10 leads with a value of 10X. This results in 8 leads that will not convert or be disqualified or lost in the process.
However, these 8 leads don’t have to be lost forever. With relationship intelligence, you can identify the most engaged buyers and reignite the relationship with them. And here’s the kicker: the relationship intelligence technology considers all the data even before onboarding the tool.
This kind of intelligence will only unleash hidden superpowers for your sales reps. Who knows, your lost prospect’s business priorities might have changed over time, and getting back to them might just make all the difference.
4. Discover trends in engagement for a better sales approach
Each prospect behaves differently when evaluating a tool for their business. It varies based on the response time, the number of demos needed to showcase the value of your tool, the industry the prospect belongs to, the hierarchy the prospect falls under in the company, etc.
Similarly, there over hundreds or thousands of leads in your CRM, which can be bucketed into the segments mentioned above. Based on the information provided by prospects that have been closed, relationship intelligence technology can pull out insights and identify patterns of interaction that led to the closure.
This way, your sales reps can optimize and tweak the sales playbook based on these insights and create stronger connections with their prospects.
Top 10 Relationship Intelligence Tools
1. Nektar
Relationships are the outcome of the activities that reps undertake daily. But when these activities stay buried in inboxes and calendars, it becomes impossible to measure these outcomes.
Nektar is a relationship intelligence tool that automatically syncs past and ongoing activities against relevant contacts and opportunities so you gain timely relationship insights sent to your Slack and via Salesforce reports.
With Nektar, you Identify your champions from the buying committee by tracking who among them has been actively engaging back. Sales teams can prioritize accounts that are poorly multithreaded by monitoring the depth and breadth of account penetration.
Nektar’s relationship intelligence tool makes sales people aware if key stakeholders have been identified at every stage and are being engaged frequently, not only to monitor buyer-seller interactions but to also track if reps are adhering to sales processes. This helps in reviving ghosted or lost deals by identifying highly engaged buyers from activities that happened in the past, even before Nektar was implemented.
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is specifically designed to aid sales folks and their teams in streamlining sales processes, identifying the right prospects, and building strong relationships with them. The tool comes with advanced search filters, lead recommendations, and real-time insights; Sales Navigator makes it easier to connect with decision-makers and close deals faster.
3. Outreach
Outreach is a sales-enabler platform that streamlines sales outreach efforts and increases productivity. The platform automates and optimizes sales outreach strategies. Outreach is packed with features like email sequencing, call automation, and detailed analytics designed to have more meaningful conversations with your sales prospects.
With such features in the bag, Outreach promises improved efficiency and time-saving for sales reps, allowing them to focus and close on critical and high-value deals.
4. TrustSphere
TrustSphere is a relationship analytics solution that is changing the way businesses understand their relationships with clients, partners, and other stakeholders.
Its relationship analytics platform offers deeper insights into its relationships, improves collaboration, and drives better business outcomes. TrustSphere’s technology allows them to identify opportunities for growth and strengthen key partnerships.
Moreover, TrustSphere’s solutions are highly customizable and adaptable to meet the unique needs. Its platform integrates seamlessly with existing systems, providing a smooth transition and ensuring a quick return on investment.
5. Terminus
Terminus is a tool that helps you reach your ideal customers by running targeted advertising campaigns. Basically, it lets you show ads to the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services, based on things like their job title, industry, and company size.
It goes one step above the top-of-funnel strategy by targeting specific accounts to create a strong pipeline at the top to grow, nurture, convert, and retain. You can also use it for retargeting people who have already visited your website or engaged with your content, which is a great way to keep your brand top of mind.
Another cool feature of Terminus is that it provides detailed analytics and insights into how your campaigns are performing, so you can see exactly what’s working and what’s not. This allows you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your campaigns for maximum impact.
6. Lusha
Lusha is a tool that helps you find direct contact information for people at companies you want to target. It’s super easy to use – all you have to do is search for the person or company you’re interested in, and Lusha will pull up their contact info.
It offers advanced search capabilities that sales reps can use to better target their outreach and build a quality and relevant pipeline. The platform fills gaps in your database, enriching every lead with more data, offering total control and visibility of the leads.
7. Lead411
Lead411 tool that helps sales teams discover accurate contact information for their prospects. With Lead411, you can quickly build targeted lists of leads based on criteria like industry, location, company size, and more.
Lead411 provides verified contact information, so you can reach out with confidence. You won’t waste time on outdated or inaccurate information, and you can avoid the frustration of reaching dead ends.
Plus, Lead411 integrates with popular CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, so you can easily import your leads and start engaging with them right away.
8. Kaspr
Kaspr is a sales prospecting tool that can help you find the right prospects for your business. It works by using AI and machine learning to analyze data and identify potential customers based on criteria like company size, industry, and job title.
Kaspr also helps you find contact information for these leads, such as email addresses and phone numbers. And once you have your list of prospects, you can easily export it to your favorite CRM or sales automation tool.
9. Hunter.io
Hunter.io is a handy tool for finding email addresses. It’s perfect for when you need to reach out to someone but don’t have their email on hand. With Hunter.io, all you need to do is enter the person’s name and their company website, and it’ll give you their email address.
Whether you’re looking to get in touch with a small startup or a giant corporation, Hunter.io has got you covered. Plus, it’s really easy to use – even if you’re not a tech whiz.
It also comes with a free cold email platform that allows you to send email campaigns directly from the tool. Hunter’s search engine crawls the web and indexes publicly available professional email addresses. It’s super simple to use, and the data is easily accessible through a user-friendly interface.
10. Affinity
Affinity is a smart relationship management platform aiding teams in building better connections and closing deals faster. It uses AI and machine learning to automatically capture and pool data from emails, calendar events, and other sources to provide insights and suggestions on how to strengthen relationships with customers and prospects.
With Affinity, you can keep track of all your interactions with contacts, see mutual connections, and even get recommendations on who to connect with next. The platform also integrates with tools like Salesforce and Gmail, making it easy to manage your pipeline and stay organized.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, the objective of relationship intelligence is to deepen your relationship with your prospects and close deals in a much more dignified and seamless manner.
Having the right tool like Nektar can give you data-driven and behavioral insights about your prospects, tell you precisely about the status of each account, stitch together poor multithreaded accounts, and gives actionable solutions to your sales reps to close the deal.
Nektar’s AI capabilities bring together all the information about the buying stakeholders involved and also capture new ones that may be included. With powerful and real-time information about the buying committee, sales reps can get a better understanding of their prospects and close deals faster.
Get in touch with us to learn more.
