Trade researchers have discovered {that a} typical salesperson solely spends a few third of their time really promoting. The remaining is often spent researching prospects, logging actions, and organizing to-do lists.

When time is cash, gross sales professionals can’t afford to waste treasured hours doing one thing that may very well be automated. They want details about their clients quick — with sufficient time to behave on it in significant methods.

Firms are investing billions in enterprise intelligence (BI) to assist resolve this downside. However turning knowledge from an asset to a enterprise end result takes a particular technique. We interviewed three UK-based know-how firms — Pink Sift, ActiveOps, and Stone Group — as they carried out high-quality BI instruments and achieved outcomes that went past expectations.

Investing in Enterprise Intelligence

The world of gross sales has modified. With shifts in purchaser habits and developments in gross sales and advertising and marketing know-how, it’s reported that over 70% of UK-based salespeople really feel BI instruments are essential to closing offers.

On this period of perception gross sales, as consumers do extra analysis on-line, a “rinse and repeat” promoting mannequin is way from efficient. Fashionable gross sales groups want to fulfill clients the place they’re within the shopping for course of, and so they’re utilizing BI to do it.

For gross sales professionals, BI finds the corporate and phone info that fuels personalised gross sales prospecting, correct territory planning, and extra environment friendly buyer upselling. BI defines a clearer image of the place a prospect is of their shopping for course of, enabling gross sales reps to interact in a extra personalised method and improve their probabilities of closing the deal.

A Complete View of Prospects

When you promote to a broad viewers, the problem will not be about discovering sufficient prospects, however relatively narrowing your focus and prioritizing which of them to pursue first. That’s exactly the place London-based cybersecurity agency Pink Sift discovered itself. The corporate’s gross sales group needed a greater understanding of their whole addressable market (TAM) to keep away from losing time reaching out to incorrect or irrelevant accounts.

As an alternative of specializing in particular industries, Pink Sift’s technique targeted on utilizing web-based alerts to establish which accounts to prioritize — a job that was beforehand accomplished with guide analysis. They have been in a position to totally automate the method of information gathering, cleaning, and supply through the use of ZoomInfo’s Enterprise API in Europe. The system enriched Pink Sift’s Salesforce knowledge in actual time, giving the complete gross sales group an instantaneous enhance in productiveness.

“If we are able to spend 30% extra time making ready our strategy than our rivals, as a result of our competitor was spending that point on the lookout for contacts, then we’ll win extra typically,” says Nadim Lahoud, vp of development at Pink Sift.

After automating the method, Pink Sift’s group was in a position to entry dependable knowledge on firms and contacts straight in Salesforce, plus intent alerts when an account confirmed coordinated curiosity and updates from the online when firms have been making information. With a extra full image of every account, the group engineered a classy lead-routing system that mechanically despatched essentially the most related accounts and contacts to every rep.

Related Messages on the Proper Time 

Most gross sales groups wish to cut back any hurdle a purchaser could face to allow them to shut the deal sooner. Studying-based tech firm ActiveOps isn’t any exception. As they deliberate for his or her subsequent section of development, the gross sales leaders realized they wanted an outbound gross sales technique that was as seamless and environment friendly as doable.

ActiveOps understood the significance of dependable enterprise intelligence, particularly after having beforehand used a instrument that supplied poor-quality knowledge, which led to excessive bounce charges and low engagement. By integrating high-quality enterprise intelligence from ZoomInfo’s SalesOS platform into its tech stack — together with intent knowledge, firmographics, and company hierarchy — ActiveOps enriched its database and every engagement platform with correct info. This ensured that each contact report was segmented correctly, permitting the gross sales group to ship extremely related communications to every one.

“We recognized the proper accounts and linked with key prospects, utilizing strategic and tailor-made messaging, at precisely the proper time,” says Michael Cupps, senior vp of promoting at ActiveOps. “We needed to push extremely participating content material out to prospects from our frontline gross sales reps, with our reps being in management, and so they can do all of that from throughout the platform.”

Since ActiveOps started investing in high-quality enterprise intelligence, the corporate’s lead-to-opportunity ratio grew by 27%.

Broaden Globally with Confidence

Go-to-market success in a single nation doesn’t at all times translate to the subsequent. When your plans contain worldwide enlargement, enterprise intelligence about every target market is important.

Already strongly positioned within the UK, Stone Group was eyeing enlargement throughout EMEA (Europe, Center East, and Africa) when the corporate realized there have been important gaps in its current buyer database. To know the overall addressable market in every goal nation, Stone Group turned to ZoomInfo, whose breadth and depth of intelligence proved unparalleled. 

“We realized in a short time that ZoomInfo was leaps and bounds forward of the competitors,” says Jack Woolman, director of gross sales operations and enterprise intelligence at Stone Group. “We not solely have perception into our whole addressable market, however superior filters and search capabilities that permit us to slender down our target market to who is actually the most effective match and most probably to purchase now.”

The outcomes? Stone elevated its UK buyer base by 10%.

As these examples present, the facility of contemporary knowledge can rapidly assist companies worldwide simplify their gross sales processes, prospect with larger relevance, and scale into new markets. In an financial atmosphere the place development counts greater than ever and effectivity is at a premium, the neatest leaders are more and more trying to knowledge and automation to set their companies up for the subsequent era of success.