Sales Intelligence Software Guide
Sales intelligence software is a type of technology designed to help businesses understand their customers better and increase sales. It can provide insights into customer behaviour, preferences, buying patterns, and trends in the industry. The software can also be used to identify potential new customers, track the success of marketing campaigns, and monitor competitor activity.
Sales intelligence software typically collects data from multiple sources such as customer surveys and transactional records. This data is then analysed and presented in a user-friendly format so that users can easily make sense of it. It enables companies to get an overall view of their customers which allows them to tailor services to fit specific needs or target specific segments with tailored products or services.
The software offers many features such as segmentation capabilities which allow companies to create different groups based on their criteria; reporting capabilities which enable companies to monitor performance; analytics tools which analyse the data in order to draw conclusions; predictive analytics which provide insights into future trends; competitive intelligence which tracks what competitors are doing and how they are succeeding; lead generation tools which identify potential leads that may be interested in certain offerings; integrated CRM systems allowing companies to manage customer relationships more effectively; marketing automation tools making it easier for marketers to design campaigns, set up automated emails or messages targeting customers or prospects with content tailored for them.
In addition, sales intelligence software can help improve customer service by providing feedback about customer experience with products or services. This helps businesses understand what areas need improvement.
Overall, sales intelligence software provides valuable insight about customers that can be used to inform decisions about marketing campaigns, product development strategies, pricing models and more. Companies who use this kind of technology have seen increased revenue from improved understanding of their clients' needs and wants along with personalized service that meets those demands resulting in higher customer satisfaction levels leading to increased repeat purchases over time.
Sales Intelligence Software Features
- Lead Identification: Sales intelligence software enables users to identify leads that are most likely to convert, based on their past purchase history, demographics and other customer data. This feature helps sales teams quickly discover potential customers and focus their efforts on the prospects most likely to become paying customers.
- Contact Management: Sales intelligence solutions provide users with contact information for each lead, such as company name, website address, email address and phone number. This allows sales representatives to contact leads more efficiently and effectively.
- Pipeline Tracking: Pipeline tracking is a feature provided by some sales intelligence platforms that enable users to monitor the progress of leads through their entire sales lifecycle. It allows them to identify opportunities for improvement or areas where additional resources may be needed in order to close deals faster.
- Insight Reporting: With insight reporting, sales teams can get detailed insights into their performance as well as trends in the industry that can help them make better decisions when it comes to targeting leads and closing deals. This feature provides valuable data that can help organizations boost their overall efficiency and optimize processes.
- Trends Analysis: Using trends analysis tools provided by many sales intelligence solutions, businesses can gain a better understanding of buying patterns in their specific sector or industry so they can adjust their marketing strategies accordingly in order to increase conversion rates.
- ROI Calculations: Sales intelligence software can help users calculate the return on investment (ROI) of their sales campaigns, allowing them to make informed decisions about future marketing efforts. This feature provides invaluable data that enables sales teams to maximize their profits and increase overall efficiency.
- Lead Scoring: Using lead scoring tools, organizations can rank leads based on their likelihood of converting. This feature allows sales reps to prioritize their efforts and focus on the prospects most likely to become paying customers. Lead scoring can help organizations reduce time and resources wasted on leads that don't convert.
Types of Sales Intelligence Software
- Sales Alert Software: This type of software provides users with automated alerts that notify them of important changes in customer accounts, such as new purchase orders or changes in a customer’s contact information.
- Lead Scoring Software: Lead scoring software helps sales teams identify their hottest prospects and prioritize follow ups. It collects data from multiple sources, evaluates it to set out thresholds and creates a priority list for the sales team.
- Opportunity Management Software: Opportunity management software helps sales reps automatically track opportunities through different stages of the sales process and manage their progress throughout. It captures updates from customers and helps reps stay informed about deals moving forward.
- Account Relationship Management Software: This type of software offers insights into what is going on in existing accounts by collecting data from multiple sources and presenting account-level trends or patterns over time. It identifies key people, past interactions, content shared with customers, etc., enabling sales teams to make more informed decisions about how to best engage current accounts.
- Pipeline Management Software: Pipeline management software allows sales reps to visualize the whole pipeline at once, staying organized by creating opportunities tabbed by stage or category for more accurate forecasting and better resource planning.
- Territory Optimization Software: Territory optimization software globally optimizes territories based on specific criteria such as prospects' demographics, recent purchases, previous interactions with a rep, etc., helping optimize resources and maximize efficiency within an organization's territory strategy.
- Lead Management Software: Lead management software helps sales reps keep track of leads from creation, through qualification and nurturing, all the way to conversion. It automates lead assignment processes, provides insight into the performance of campaigns and measures key metrics associated with sales processes.
- Sales Analytics Software: This type of software offers detailed insights into customer behavior and performance data to help teams understand what’s working and what’s not, then focus efforts on optimizing their sales activities in order to maximize results.
- Sales Performance Management Software: This type of software helps managers effectively track and monitor reps' performance to ensure they are meeting goals and providing personalized feedback. It easily outlines areas in which each rep can improve, helping to increase overall sales performance.
- Social Selling Software: This type of software provides sales reps with insights into their social media connections and identifies prospects that may be a good fit for the company. It helps reps identify potential customers who are actively looking for solutions, providing them with an efficient way to engage with prospects online.
Understanding Sales Intelligence Software
Sales intelligence software provides a unique set of insights to sales teams. These tools help to eliminate any manual labor involved in developing and refining lists of prospects for sales targeting.
Not only do these tools work to reduce the labor involved, but they also save time on creating lead lists with all of the data. These two advantages alone are desirable to sales teams, yet there are many additional reasons why sales intelligence software is a must-have solution to enhance the sales process.
Sales Intelligence Software and CRM
The capabilities in sales intelligence software may overlap with elements of your current CRM software, especially if you store your contacts and assign the best times for customer contact in your sales intelligence software. The truth is that sales intelligence is an asset to any existing customer relationship management software for quite a few reasons.
Sales intelligence is more dynamic because it guides your sales team to customer contacts who are at various stages in the sales pipeline. A sales intelligence solution narrows the focus to a particular subset of prospective customers. In addition, sales intelligence makes cold calling more effective because it offers extensive contact information for executives at a targeted company.
Many platforms integrate with CRM software so that your sales team can update and edit data records inside of the sales intelligence software interface. The integration offers contextual data about the contacts that can be found on the CRM system.
When researching insights for your company's sales pipeline, or if you are already using CRM software, look for a solution that can efficiently work with your CRM platform.
Working with a sales intelligence software solution will help save your team from having duplicated work, and your system will be much more comprehensive because you will have all of your contact information and insights in one centralized location.
Cleaning Data
Data cleansing is a useful feature to have in sales intelligence software because it can improve the health of your prospective customer information. It allows your team to consolidate or eliminate customer contact records that are wrong or duplicated, formatted incorrectly, or incomplete. Many sales intelligence software platforms will pinpoint these types of files when your data is imported. It alerts you to errors before it becomes a more significant problem, such as when all of your records have been imported.
It's essential to maintain the integrity of your data health, and it's best to choose a sales intelligence software solution that gives you reliable data cleansing options.
Integration with Social Media
Many tools provide browser extensions and plugins to import social media connections into the sales intelligence software. These can work as additions for existing prospect data, or they can be completely new lead sales lists.
These extensions and plugins are perfect solutions for sales teams wanting to import customized target lists based on prospects who have an existing relationship through social media. Lead generation software can also overlap with the functionality of these particular prospecting features.
Prospecting for Technology
If you are curious about what software your prospect company is using, there are a few sales intelligence solutions that can help your team identify it. It allows them to download lead lists based on the specific software they are using, giving your business a competitive advantage.
These features are useful in notifying users as to when a business stops using the particular software too. Your team can assign when and why these notifications will display, as with a notification appearing when a prospect's software contract expires.
If your business provides software solutions, you may want these features so that you can move on opportunities to sell your prospects on your software.
Sales Intelligence Software Benefits
- Increased Efficiency: Sales intelligence software allows companies to quickly and easily gather data, analyze it, create reports, visualize results and identify patterns. This enables users to make decisions faster than ever before and save valuable time.
- Improved Customer Insights: With sales intelligence software, businesses can gain more insight into their customer base in terms of regional demographics, buying & purchasing behaviors, customer preferences & interests and much more. This helps them build accurate customer profiles which they can use to target specific customers better.
- Enhanced Campaign Performance: Sales intelligence software helps marketers understand how their campaigns are performing across multiple channels such as email, social media or web traffic so that they can optimize their marketing efforts accordingly.
- Streamlined Lead Management: Sales intelligence software provides detailed lead management capabilities which allow user to monitor the performance of each individual lead in order to better target their efforts for greater ROI.
- Accurate Forecasting: With sales intelligence software users have access to a range of metrics which enable them to accurately predict future performance and set realistic goals for the business.
- Improved Data Security: Sales intelligence software also ensures that data is stored securely and accessed only by authorized users, thus reducing the risk of data breaches.
- Cost Savings: Sales intelligence software is cost-effective because it eliminates the need for manual data collection and analysis, leaving more resources for other tasks.
- Competitive Edge: Sales intelligence software gives businesses a competitive edge by allowing them to act quickly on opportunities and stay one step ahead of the competition.
Reasons to Use Sales Intelligence Software
- Sales intelligence software gives your sales team the contact information and insights they need to target sales opportunities and enhance every aspect of the sales process. Get industry-specific talking points on every prospect and market before your sales team picks up the phone.
- No more manual processes that take time and work when your team can source internal and external prospects from useful sources like social media, website traffic, technology usage, market data, and organizational structures.
- Capturing these types of data is essential for ensuring your prospective customer information is accurate. Sales intelligence software solutions can be used to organize lead insights and activity, track lead interactions, and gather relevant data from many different public sources so that it can be imported and organized into one centralized database.
Even More Reasons to Use Sales Intelligence Software
One of the best features of sales intelligence software is that it allows your team to create lists of prospective customers based on a targeted search for contacts. Your sales team can target a particular set of prospects based on many different factors ranging from technology, market, revenue, and others. You can create a more precise search with this set of filters to find the most profitable prospects and remove leads that don't match specific criteria. The software will ultimately save time and resources for your sales team.
Having the ability to gain insights on your prospective customers before the first contact increases the likelihood of a sale for your team. Knowing what kinds of technology they use, their corporate position, and market trends can increase engagement. A robust sales intelligence solution can help your sales team identify and record these insights.
Some sales intelligence solutions can gather prospect and user social data to gain a list of connections for your sales team. They can use this to leverage those connections when securing enterprise or large organizational accounts.
Real and authentic relations are critical to successful sales with larger accounts. Because of sales intelligence software, sales professionals can see the connections between them and their targeted prospective customers.
Updating contact records is essential to avoid stagnant data. Prospects may change positions within a company and take on new roles, contact people change, and locations of businesses can change. Sales intelligence solutions allow your sales team to update contact records easily.
Who Uses Sales Intelligence Software?
Your sales team is the perfect audience for sales intelligence software tools. They use it to create lists of prospects and gather the most accurate information on prospective customers that result in a highly successful sales strategy.
Recruiters have a lot to gain from these tools as well. While this software solution is not directly designed for recruiters, there are a lot of tools that provide useful information they can use to identify potential employees. With sales intelligence software, recruiters can locate professional and personal information, industry achievements, and other vital requirements necessary for finding the perfect candidate.
Marketing teams can also use the curated lists of prospective customers to find the best markets to target. The software has relevant and specific data geared towards markets, locations, and demographics. This gives marketers the advantage when planning marketing campaigns.
Here's a list of the types of users that use sales intelligence software:
- Sales Executives/Managers: These users utilize sales intelligence software to better understand their target market, track current sales opportunities, and identify new leads.
- Marketers: This type of user leverages intelligence from the software to craft targeted campaigns that reach the most receptive audience. They also gain insights into competitor marketing strategies and use this data to refine their own efforts.
- Business Analysts: Business analysts leverage sales intelligence software to measure customer behavior, build predictive models, and develop strategies for long-term success.
- Customer Service Representatives: Customer service representatives use the data gathered through sales intelligence software to provide better customer service and support by understanding customer needs and preferences more accurately.
- Account Managers: Account managers use the insights provided by sales intelligence software to better manage existing accounts while identifying prospects who could become profitable customers in the future.
- Operations Managers: Operations managers use sales intelligence software to monitor performance metrics such as revenue growth or cost savings across key areas of their business, allowing them to adjust operations accordingly.
- Data Scientists & Engineers: Data scientists and engineers rely on sales intelligence software to uncover hidden patterns within vast amounts of data so they can build better AI models.
- Profit & Loss Analysts: Profit and loss analysts utilize sales intelligence software to track performance at the individual level, so they can identify areas needing improvement and adjust their strategy accordingly.
- Investment Bankers: These users leverage sales intelligence software to make smarter decisions when investing in new companies or initiatives. The data gathered through the software helps them better assess risk versus reward before committing capital.
How Much Does Sales Intelligence Software Cost?
The cost of sales intelligence software can vary widely depending on the features and complexity of the product. At the lower end, basic sales intelligence software typically costs around $20-50 per user per month, while more advanced versions with features such as predictive analytics and marketing automation can cost upwards of $200 per user per month. For larger organizations, many companies offer enterprise pricing models that can reduce overall costs. Additionally, some vendors may offer discounts for annual contracts rather than monthly subscription fees.
When considering a purchase of sales intelligence software, it’s important to research all available options and consider the specific needs of your organization before making a decision. Speak with different vendors to get a better understanding of their product offerings and compare prices in order to find the best value for your money.
What Integrates With Sales Intelligence Software?
Sales intelligence software can integrate with a variety of different types of software, including customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation platforms, analytics tools, data warehouses and extraction tools. CRM systems are used to help manage customer relationships and their interactions with a company's sales team. Marketing automation platforms are used to automate marketing tasks such as segmentation and email campaigns. Analytics tools provide insights into customer behavior on various channels and allow companies to measure the effectiveness of their sales activities. Data warehouses and extraction tools collect data from various sources in order to generate insights that can be used for sales forecasting or other operations. All of these types of software can be integrated with sales intelligence software in order to gain an overall understanding of customer demand and enable sales teams to better target their efforts.

Sales Intelligence Software Trends
- Automation of Data Gathering: Sales intelligence software is increasingly leveraging automation technologies, such as AI and machine learning, to gather data from various sources and analyze it. This allows sales teams to quickly access the information they need to make better decisions and target the right prospects.
- Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics capabilities are becoming more common in sales intelligence software, allowing sales teams to anticipate customer needs and behavior, as well as identify potential opportunities in the marketplace.
- Real-time Insights: The ability to get real-time insights into customer data is an important trend in sales intelligence software. With these insights, sales teams can stay on top of buyer trends and adjust their strategies accordingly.
- Integration with Other Systems: Sales intelligence software is also becoming more integrated with other systems, such as CRM and ERP systems, which allows for a more seamless flow of data between different applications and platforms.
- Improved Collaboration: Collaboration between sales reps and other teams has become much easier thanks to improved functionality within sales intelligence software solutions that allow for a more unified workflow across the entire organization.
- Greater Customization Options: With more customization options available for sales intelligence software solutions, companies can tailor their solutions to fit their needs precisely and ensure that data is presented in a way that makes sense for them.
How To Choose the Right Sales Intelligence Software
- Identify Your Needs: Determine what kind of sales data you need to track and analyze, and identify any special features or capabilities that would be useful.
- Research Options: Check out product reviews from reputable sources online, ask colleagues and contacts in your industry who use similar technology, and compare different platforms side-by-side to determine which one is most suitable for your purposes. Use the comparison tools on this page to compare sales intelligence software by pricing, user reviews, integrations, features, and more.
- Try Before You Buy: Ask for a demonstration of the software so you can get a better feel for the user experience and see how it can potentially fit into your existing workflow without having to commit financially up front.
- Compare Prices & Terms: Make sure you understand all associated costs, including both upfront fees as well as any recurring charges or subscription plans that may be required. Also evaluate any additional services offered by vendors such as setup assistance, customer support, etc., which could affect cost over time.
- Reevaluate Regularly: It’s important to keep up with new developments in sales intelligence software so that you’re always using the best possible tool for your needs - don’t hesitate to switch if something better comes along!