How Sales Intelligence Can Help Your Marketing & Customer Service Efforts by Ins

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How Sales Intelligence Can Help Your Marketing & Customer Service Efforts
by InsideView

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Regardless of the type of business you are in, the ability to find more business is the key to success. In today's competitive world you need to employ advantage gaining techniques that both attract and retain customers in your sales pipeline. To do this efficiently, you need to equip your salespeople with the latest sales intelligence available and a mindset for going above and beyond your clients current expectations.

To continuously grow your business, you need to constantly evolve the ways you discover new business. In that same breath, you need to optimize your sales process so that you can complete more deals.

Nowadays with the sheer amount of customer intelligence available online, if you don't have some sort of relationship management program in place then your most profitable opportunities are simply slipping through your fingers.

In the future, CRM will automatically source new, qualified leads and lead enrichment will be completely automated. However, you need sales intelligence tools to do this today.

Using sales intelligence to create targeted solutions

Because sales intelligence allows you to search for prospects that fit your target criteria, you can also learn which markets have the best opportunities. Traditional marketers aim to create buyer behavior by telling buyers what they want and need. Modern marketers aim to learn what customers really want and alter their products to fit customer needs. Sales intelligence tells you what your prospects are doing online. Shouldn't that guide your marketing plan? Why try to force customers to buy something they don't need when you could sell them exactly what they want?

For example: Let's say you offer professional writing services focused on white papers. While analyzing your sales intelligence you discover that your clients use social media staples Facebook and Twitter to market themselves to their customer base. As a writer, you realize that you can add the service of writing the posts and tweets your client will use to promote the white paper.

Not only can this type of targeted solution immediately be offered to your existing clientele, but according to how well it's received, it can then be offered up as a new way of leading prospects into your sales funnel. Once there, you will have the opportunity to offer them the rest of your products or services.

Looking for the up-selling opportunity

With the cost of obtaining new clients reported to be five times that of simply better serving your existing clients, it is no wonder why up-selling is such a profitable outlet for today's successful businesses.
Sales intelligence can prepare you to go into a sale with a future up-sell in mind. It's very rare to sell a customer everything you ever wanted to sell them in a single go. Most accounts grow as customer-seller relationships evolve. It's a natural progression, and you can lay the groundwork very early on in your sales process.
The key to up-selling is knowing what your prospects need. Your goal is to identify some issue that they wish would go away and offer a solution. For the sake of edifying your clients, you want to offer your solution in varying degrees. By this we mean offer your packages at a variety of price points. This way they can see the value of your solution. In addition, be sure that they not only know the value, but the benefit your solution brings to the table. If your solution could help to boost someone's sales, figure out how much that might be over a year and include it in your marketing message. Finally, follow through. That might at this point sound clich?, but at this point in the game if you are not in it to win it you're just playing.
To find more opportunities through sales intelligence visit: http:/.insideview.com/