Intent data has become a key asset in the hands of B2B organizations looking to increase their sales and revenue success. Providing insights about a target audience’s purchase intent, it is a proven tool which can be used by sales teams to surface new and qualified leads. As per statistics, it can deliver up to 4X pipeline expansion.
If you’re a chief revenue officer (CRO) finding ways to improve revenue, you should make it a priority to train your sales experts on using intent data to its full potential. Intent data has the ability to set your sales team up to win more deals efficiently.
To explain it in brief, intent data is a wide collection of datasets that reveal which companies and people are in an active buying cycle or “in-market” for your solution. Given that 81% of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase online, it’s important to power your sales team with intent data.
Here are some important steps you can take as a CRO to effectively train your salespeople on using B2B intent data.
#1 Using intent data to have a clear picture of prospects
Whether you’re finding, pursuing, or nurturing prospects, it’s critical to have intimate knowledge of your target accounts beforehand. The foremost application of intent data to train your sales team on is gaining key insights about prospects and understanding their needs, interests, and pain points.
This will drastically improve your sales team’s outreach and prospecting efforts, resulting in increased conversion and revenue. Importantly, your salespeople can be trained to use intent data to:
- Catch the buying intent signals or identify the purchase intent of prospects
- Know when a prospect is actually willing or ready to buy from you
- Monitor prospect movement across the buyer’s journey and tailor sales efforts accordingly
- Track the intent surge of prospects and prioritize high-intent, high-interest ones
- Know which topics or keywords prospects are researching right now to better target them
#2 Identifying and targeting qualified leads using buying intent signals
Pursuing low-quality, unqualified leads is a waste of sales time, resources, and budget. As a CRO, you know how crucial time and resources are to your company’s revenue growth. Not to forget, you’re also required to justify the budget allotted to your sales team.
That’s why it’s so important that your salespeople find and target good-fit, ideal leads from the get-go. But how do you ensure that? Well, you can train your sales team to leverage buying intent signals to identify and pursue qualified accounts. Around 70% of B2B tech vendors that use intent data utilize it for prospecting.
Start training your sales reps on using buying intent data to:
- Assign intent-based scores to leads and use them in lead scoring or qualification
- Qualify leads based on purchase intent, interest, actions, or readiness to buy
- Segment qualified leads and run customized, resonating sales outreach or lead gen campaigns
- Understand what triggers the interest and purchase decision of target accounts
- Know what needs, challenges, and solutions to highlight in sales conversations
#3 Creating personalized, well-timed sales interactions with intent data
Did you know businesses that use advanced personalization get a $20 return for every $1 spent? Furthermore, 84% of consumers agree it is very important to treat them like a person and not a number, if you are to win their business. Being a CRO, you know how significant these numbers are in terms of revenue.
Thanks to intent data, your sales team can have context-based, tailored interactions with prospects and at the most opportune time. This is another vital application of intent data you need to train your sales reps on. Once your sales team knows how to use intent data to identify where prospects are in their buyer’s journey, they can tailor their sales pitches and interactions accordingly.
Additionally, you can train your salespeople to use intent data to address the specific needs and pain points of prospects in their sales messaging and content. Your sales team can also learn to better align sales interactions with the specific intent signals prospects exhibit across the internet. Besides, intent-based personalization will help your sales reps to foster meaningful relationships with prospects.
#4 Using intent data to reduce sales cycles and reach decision-makers
Shortening the sales cycle is a great way to quickly progress toward closing a deal or improve your sales campaign ROI. Now, this should get you excited as a CRO. If you want to positively impact your revenue, start training your sales team on implementing intent data to find and connect with prospects already interested in your product.
This will allow your salespeople to jump through the buying stages faster and reduce the sales cycle. Approximately 42% of B2B tech vendors that use intent data utilize it to accelerate deal cycles and 53% utilize it to support sales enablement.
You can also train your sales team to combine intent data with B2B data like firmographics and contact data. Such a combination will not only enable them to find high-intent companies already looking for you, but to also connect with their decision-makers.
In addition, your sales reps can be trained on using intent data to pursue and build relationships with specific stakeholders within a target account. Moreover, they can use intent data to address specific needs or interests of each stakeholder and present your solution or brand in a more effective way. This will work even better for your salespeople involved in account-based marketing.
#5 Track dissatisfied customers and reduce churn with intent data
A high churn rate negatively impacts your revenue. Furthermore, not paying attention to unhappy customers can prove detrimental to your revenue growth. However, you can turn these situations around by training your sales team to leverage buyer intent data to know which of your clients are looking for an alternative solution or a competitor’s product.
Allow your salespeople to extend the application of intent data from lead generation to customer retention. Train your sales reps to use buyer intent signals to identify which clients need additional support or special attention. Buyer intent signals can literally inform your sales team about a client’s research behavior and whether they’re searching for a new solution right now.
Enable your salespeople to make full use of buyer intent signals or alerts. This will help them intercept dissatisfied customers at the exact moment when they’re looking for another solution or to cancel your subscription. With intent data, your sales reps can be at the top of their game to reduce churn and bring back customers who are almost lost.
A Final Word
Intent data is a powerful way to supercharge your B2B sales campaigns and boost your revenue. However, you need to be able to rightly use intent data to achieve the results you’re aiming for. As a CRO, you can take the initiative of training your sales team on effectively using intent data, and the informative guide provided here will help you do that.
Be sure to source your intent data from a reliable B2B sales intelligence company (like this one: https://www.allego.com/learning/sales-onboarding/) that provides top-quality data. Furthermore, see to it that you use a combination of first-party and third-party intent data to create a comprehensive picture of your prospects’ needs, pain points, purchase intent, online behavior, and willingness to buy.
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