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How to set your revenue team up for success and drive revenue with the right tools and information in 5 steps.
With the dramatically accelerated digital transformation of B2B sales due to both new technology and the Covid-19 pandemic, customer relationship insights have become more mission-critical than ever to enterprise revenue teams. The desire for the utmost transparency into engagement dynamics and relationships with contacts, buying groups, and accounts is at an all-time high and stakeholders want to be more and more involved in every step of the process. Gone are the days of ‘let’s test and see.” Today, every dollar needs to show impact and ROI. Even before the solution is implemented.
That’s why big tech purchases continue to increase in complexity, including a growing number of people being involved in the process. In fact, Forrester’s 2021 B2B Buying Study shows the number of buying interactions for one such sale rose from 17 in 2019 to 27 in 2021, and purchase decisions involving four or more people increased 14% in the same time period. In 2022, the same B2B Buyer Insights Survey, over 80% of respondents said complex purchases now involve between two and nine departments. Further adding to this blossoming complexity are more recent market dynamics like record merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, the great reshuffle of the workforce, and an assumed impending global Recession.
In this blog post, we will explore how revenue teams can boost revenue by focusing on a data-driven approach to managing their book of business.
Taking a Data-Driven Approach to Revenue Generation
But despite every new and heightened challenge in B2B sales, greater and deeper customer relationship insights have been proven to boost net-new sales opportunities, increase cross-selling with existing clients, and improve the productivity of key players while driving cost efficiencies. This data is also a critical component in optimizing the overall buying experience to better guarantee conversion, account growth, and retention. Plus, a solid data-backed sales strategy and foundation has also been shown to improve CRM adoption, enhance overall data quality, turn sales reluctance into opportunity, and facilitate M&A activity. It has even been shown to indirectly enable organizations to be compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and equivalent global data privacy regulations.
The fact is, in today’s B2B landscape, the more data-driven your approach to revenue generation, the more likely you are to navigate through the ever-increasing complexity of that sale with confidence and maintain a healthy business and bottom-line. Plus, the more likely you are to not only win business today, but keep growing your key accounts in the future.
Introhive’s uniquely powerful Customer Intelligence Platform has been proven to provide our clients in complex sales organizations a whopping 495% ROI, translating into a Net present value (NPV) of $11.37M. These findings are the result of our recent Total Economic Impact Report, completed by Forrester. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with an investment in a Customer Intelligence Platform like Introhive, Forrester interviewed four Customer representatives with experience using the platform—aggregating the interviewees’ experiences and combining the results into a single composite organization that is a global B2B organization providing a breadth of professional services with 3,000 employees, 20,000 clients and $1.0 billion in revenue per year.
Here are the 5 steps to building and maintaining a robust data foundation for meaningful and ongoing revenue generation through Introhive, regardless of economic climate and other market challenges.
STEP 1: Laying the Groundwork through Data Collection
First things first. Introhive works with you to identify the key sources of data relevant to your organization and your revenue team. This includes CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, customer support systems, and social media and web analytics. Then we continue to lay the groundwork for a strong data foundation for revenue generation through the implementation of best practices including consistency in data entry, integration of data sources, and automation of data collection—all of which Introhive provides to both simplify data collection and improve data accuracy.
While getting the data into your CRM system is relatively easy, getting relevant insights out of that data tends to be far more complicated. Introhive’s seamless CRM integration capabilities ensure that a constant, real-time flow of actionable, and relevant customer insights is channeled to the right people at the right time. To accelerate the sales cycle and uncover “white-space” or “multi-thread” opportunities, the tool allows organizations to see exactly ’who knows who” and where the strongest customer relationships are. And our Smart Sync tool helps maximize productivity by automatically syncing new contacts and activities directly into your CRM based on established rules.
Through seamless CRM integration, Introhive also helps your organization present a united front by avoiding any duplication of efforts; helps solve the problem of user adoption; accelerates revenue growth even during a recession; increases sales productivity; minimizes attrition; and supports more seamless succession planning that avoids the loss of key accounts when salespeople—especially star salespeople—move on.
Additionally, Introhive’s AI-powered contact enrichment leverages public, first-party, and 3rd party paid data leading to 90%+ data accuracy which in-turn helps sales and marketing teams do more, by doing less. Further, our robust relationship mapping tools like the Relationship Portal and Relationship Search help uncover the path of least resistance by finding warm introductions within your firm’s existing relationship networks. Essentially, these tools work to unify and tap into your collective network to identify revenue opportunities by transforming your system of record into a system of intelligence with complete visibility into “who knows who.”
STEP 2: Ensuring Data Quality through Data Cleaning
Data cleaning is imperative to maintaining data quality and ensuring meaningful, actionable insights can be drawn from said data. Introhive’s dynamic data cleansing and validation tools (like Cleanse™) help eliminate common and costly data quality issues like duplicate records, missing or incomplete data, and inaccurate data. Our automated data deduplication, data normalization, and data validation tools all ensure your sales teams are working with only the most accurate, up-to-date, and actionable customer intelligence data. This leads to a faster, more efficient, and overall smoother sales cycle with greater revenue generation.
STEP 3: Establishing a Centralized Repository through Data Storage
Secure and organized data storage is another key element to building and maintaining a strong data foundation for maximized revenue generation. After all, if your relationship data is decentralized and difficult to access, it will be equally difficult to derive any meaningful insights from said data. Data decentralization also increases the likelihood of effort duplication which wastes valuable time and resources and turns clients off in the process.
Introhive’s CRM integration and data storage solutions solve these problems by facilitating seamless data management across all of your customer relationship touchpoints. Plus, our unwavering commitment to top-tier data security and compliance with industry standards provides an additional layer of security and peace of mind for you and your clients.
STEP 4: Unlocking Insights for Revenue Growth through Data Analysis
Access to reliable client data is critical, but even more so is the ability to transform this data into actionable insights that drive sound, strategic decision-making and revenue generation. Introhive’s Integrated (and customizable) Customer Intelligence Dashboards democratize access to visualizations and analytics, and bring transformative intelligence to all Introhive customers, regardless of the technical resources at their disposal. With these dashboards, Business Development and Strategy Leaders are able to easily and consistently spot early warning signs and risk with accounts, monitor the growth of important relationships, and reveal opportunities to drive net-new and cross-sell revenue. Our advanced reporting and predictive analytics also keep you one step ahead of the game with a clear view into the data patterns that identify risks and opportunities while you can still do something about them.
STEP 5: Cultivating a Data-Driven Culture
Having the best data and the best tools to manage, analyze, and action that data in a meaningful way is critical, but it’s not enough if your organization doesn’t have a strong data-driven culture that prioritizes that data and those insights in decision-making and sales strategy. That’s why it’s so important to foster a data-driven mindset and culture within both your revenue team and your organization as a whole. We help you promote data-driven decision-making and leverage Introhive’s tools for ongoing improvement by consistently proving ROI and optimizing our platform and tools to fit your needs and move that needle.
The Bottom Line
There is no doubt that building and maintaining a strong data foundation is key to the success of enterprise revenue teams in driving revenue growth and overall business success. Introhive offers all of the tools and support you need to do just that.
Our robust and seamless CRM integration capabilities help you lay the groundwork through automated data collection that is constant, updated in real time, relevant, compliant, actionable and always channeled to the right people at the right time. Then, our dynamic data cleansing and validation tools like Cleanse™ help ensure your data is always clean, compliant, and reliable.
Introhive also supports centralized data storage to eliminate duplication and make it easy to efficiently pull meaningful insights from your data anytime you need it. Additionally, our Integrated (and customizable) Customer Intelligence Dashboards democratize access to visualizations and analytics critical for actionable data analysis for all team members.
We even help you cultivate a data-driven culture by providing a wealth of information and guidance/resources, regular innovation and optimization of our platform; tools; and strategies, and measurable results that can be duplicated again and again.
Connect with us to learn more.
