Sales Intelligence Blog by Lattice Engines

What is Sales Intelligence?

So far in this blog series, we reviewed various data sources that sales reps can access to research their customers and prospects. Part 2 highlighted internal data sources that sales professionals could harvest for customer insight and meaning. We made the distinction that ‘internal’ data refers to data generated by a company’s systems, employees and partners about its customers and prospects. In Part 3, we turned to external data, which emanates from outside the company (e.g., 3^rd party databases, company websites, social media, etc.)

Photo credit: Juan Jose Velasquez, November 2009

By now, I hope you’re getting a feeling for how much data is out already out there. There’s certainly no shortage of ‘homework’ that sales reps could be doing to shine in their next customer interactions. And the magnitude of data will continue to grow, in terms of new sources and better coverage of companies and decision-makers within each source (e.g., just imagine when LinkedIn really goes mainstream with millions of SMBs and their employees actively participating in the network).

So, let’s be clear. Sales Intelligence does NOT mean providing even more raw data to reps, not even if it’s of the much-hyped social variety.

Sales Intelligence enables sales professionals to connect individual data dots into a cohesive picture about underlying customer needs. It weaves the challenges and opportunities facing your customers into a broader story about their business journey. Take, for example, the story of a precision-tool manufacturer that has enjoyed an annual growth rate of 17% over the past three years. A significant driver of this growth has been exports to European markets. The company secured a round of growth capital and is now about to open its first international office. The journey is making the transition from a domestic winner to an international competitor.

If you’re a bank, Sales Intelligence would advise you to avoid a generic pitch on credit, and instead, focus on describing how your trade finance and international payment solutions will accelerate the customer’s expansion. If you’re providing business services, you would want to engage in a discussion on how the customer plans to staff and support their international employees (e.g., recruiting needs, office needs, payroll solutions).

Sales Intelligence not only signals when to engage with each account and but also guides your sales team to articulate how and why your company is best positioned to help each of your customers reach their destinations.

Beyond connecting the data dots into an overall customer narrative, Sales Intelligence needs to be relevant for the day-to-day activities of sales professionals. It must fulfill at least the following operational requirements:

• Customer-specific: Suggests sales approaches to specific accounts and contacts. In the context of Large Enterprise sales, it identifies buying centers for different types of products and services

• Actionable: Makes specific recommendations on when, how and with whom to engage. As opposed to just providing a lead, the recommendations provide context and guidance on approaching customers and decision-makers with timely, relevant and compelling messaging. The secret sauce is the ability to digest massive amounts of data and transform it into something intuitive that a sales rep can execute.

• Comprehensive: Integrates the reams of internal and external data about customers and prospects. For example, it’s great to know that someone downloaded three whitepapers from your website, but it’s much better to know who that person is and how this information will help their company succeed with an important business decision.

• Prioritizing: Makes calculated trade-offs (i.e., incremental sales X likelihood of close) on which accounts/contacts to engage now and which ones to leave for another day. Selling time is a precious resource which must be aligned to the best account opportunities.

• Justified: Provides data-driven justifications as to why a sales rep should pick up the phone and call a high-likelihood account. One of the biggest advantages that Sales Intelligence provides is the context behind each customer’s unique story and underlying needs. Sales reps are far more likely to engage on data-driven recommendations if they know the ‘why’ and ‘how’, not just the ‘what’ and ‘when.’

• Social: Connects people and to help sales reps engage with new contacts (i.e., through warm referrals across social networks), reduce meeting prep time (i.e., by sharing knowledge and sales collateral/presentations), and maximize the chances of closing the deal (i.e., by referencing the most relevant and comparable similar selling situations).

• Mobile: Delivers intelligence within the evolving mobile workflow of field sales. It almost seems like companies are leap-frogging handheld devices and migrating straight to iPads. Mobile delivery is an essential ingredient for Sales Intelligence.

Sales Intelligence is fast becoming a ‘must-have’ for B2B sales organizations, and has enormous potential to foster data-driven decision making at the front lines.

Is your team benefiting from Sales Intelligence? We look forward to hearing your story.

<< Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 >>

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We were delighted to be asked to present at VMware’s Annual Partner Exchange earlier this month.  The conference brings together over 3,300 of VMware’s partners from sixty-three countries, with a primary goal of educating and enabling partners for success with VMware.

The conference agenda was packed with role-based sessions oriented towards both sales and technical professionals across a wide spectrum of topics, products and focus areas.  Specifically, we were asked to present on ‘Enabling a Prospecting Culture’.  Our presentation, delivered with VMware’s head of North American Sales, Mike Clayville, discussed the strategies, tools and tactics used at VMware to drive their highly successful prospecting culture.  

Mike began the presentation by stressing the importance of “Fishing Where The Fish Are”, the key to a successful prospecting culture.  “Fishing Where The Fish Are” essentially means sales rep must quickly find accounts which are ready to buy & focus efforts on those accounts. 

Mike then turned over the microphone to us, to articulate how salesPRISM sales intelligence software finds the “fish” & is a key enabler to VMware’s strong prospecting culture.  Our section of the presentation focused on three topics:

• How salesPRISM integrates internal and external data sources, then predicts the accounts that are most likely to buy. 
• The importance of how salesPRISM dynamically generates talking points, to help sales reps engage customers in contextual conversations. 
• Most importantly, we demonstrated use cases for VMware’s partner sales representatives, and the significant results that were achieved.

The impact of the presentation is best illustrated by a question that a partner sales leader asked us before Q&A even began, “What do I need to do to get this?”  Clearly, the audience saw the value in driving a strong prospecting culture, and how salesPRISM enables companies to “Fish Where The Fish Are”.

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We were delighted when our sponsors at ADP asked us to participate as a featured partner at its Global Sales Operations Conference earlier this week. The conference brought together Sales and Sales Operations leaders from all ADP Business Units, encompassing a variety of roles including CRM development, data management, and sales training. As a featured partner, Lattice Engines was asked to present to attendees in the Partner Pavilion.  Our presentation, entitled “Turbo-charging Sales Operations with Data and Predictive Analytics”, discussed how Sales Operations becomes the Hero when their sales teams are empowered to target the most attractive account opportunities, at the right time, with contextual messaging that resonates with decision-makers. The presentation focused on describing actual sales use-cases, and the ease with which sales operations can deploy and maintain our sales intelligence software.  Here’s our own Greg Leibman, in-action, having a great discussion with some ADP colleagues at the Lattice Engines booth.

Of course our booth would not be complete without our Lattice Engines Rubiks Cubes – a favorite among parents with young kids.  Want a Lattice Engines Rubiks Cube?  Comment on this blog post and we’ll send you one. 

Overall it was a great day of sharing and learning as well as to see and hear ADP discuss their experience with our sales intelligence software.  What was especially rewarding was seeing a number of sales reps who had recently become sales operations managers.  Some fo them were pilot users of our software, and they also came forward to share their experience and thoughtful feedback.  Thanks to ADP for bringing together all their Sales Ops teams from around the world.

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