Aberdeen on “Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling”

Top-performing sales organizations are meeting the challenges of identifying the most likely buyers of their products and services through the deployment of sales intelligence solutions that introduce a wide variety of data streams to their front-line staff. By empowering their sellers with better information about their prospect companies, markets and individuals, these firms are able to maximize their chances of hitting quota, and at the same time create efficiencies within the sales operations environment. As companies continue their search for the elusive “360-degree view” of their prospective clients, harvesting all the scattered information from social networking (free) and other content providers (paid) about these prospects can potentially be beneficial for the purposes of deploying more finely targeted sales and marketing campaigns.

By augmenting records in a customer relationship management (CRM) or sales force automation (SFA) system with this content, companies are building more complete profiles of their current customers and prospects through the information that is readily available on the internet. Still, selling teams continue searching for ways to reduce the amount of time sales representatives spend uncovering relevant company or contact information before following-up with the leads in the pipeline. As a result, the use of aggregated business directories and supporting technologies are helping to alleviate the pressure to acquire new and profitable customers, without increasing the cost of identifying and selling to these prospects.