Spanning the scale of insights: finding greater success through sales technology

In a recent webinar with Introhive, Forrester Principal Analyst Anthony McPartlin described the following “scale of insights”—a hierarchy where data is transformed to eventually become guidance. 

Like many technologies, Customer Intelligence is grounded in data. Without a foundation of complete, accurate, up to date customer data, you can’t be a customer intelligent company. You need to capture the data—and it’s critical to maintain it, too—because the information, facts, conclusions, and guidance that is derived from the data will reflect the accuracy of the data itself. In other words, if your data is inaccurate, the insights you’re basing your business decisions upon are at risk of being misleading.

But while clean data is a requirement, data on its own is no more than… data. Having said that, once it is compiled into dashboards and reports, it begins to display facts. You can analyze it to determine and describe areas of opportunity

or weakness. This is valuable, but you can take data much further.

Reaching the top of the scale of insights

Where many companies get hung up is making actual use of their data. They have hundreds and thousands of reports, which are great for back office teams, but require enablement and dissemination of these facts throughout the organization, which is easier said than done for high growth, fast moving companies. 

Sales technology has evolved beyond facts to derive conclusions. It can now analyze troves of historical data to identify patterns of success. Based on these patterns it can analyze in-flight opportunities to derive signals such as the likelihood that an opportunity will be won in the form of winnability scores, or engagement levels with customers and prospects to determine the health of client relationships in the form of relationship scores. 

While these conclusions are extremely impactful, the latest game changer in sales technology is the ability for guidance. This is the pinnacle of the scale of insights, where they become prescriptive, contextual, and delivered to users within their workflow.