Revenue Intelligence: Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore this Powerful Strategy

In the world of sales, two things are paramount:

• Demonstrating consistent results
• Driving revenue

The thing is, as your competitors grow and their strategies evolve, the task becomes more difficult. And the more you win, the more they shift to compete.

So how do you stay competitive? Through data-driven decision making. And that’s where revenue intelligence comes in.

Revenue intelligence takes all the data you’ve collected from your sales and marketing efforts, and transforms it into actionable insights to improve your win rate and drive more revenue. 

Let’s take a closer look at what that means and how you can incorporate it into your sales enablement strategy.

What Is Revenue Intelligence?

Revenue intelligence is a system in which you gather and analyze data related to revenue, and your ability to generate it. 

Common sources of data for revenue intelligence include:

• Lead generation
• Consumer behavior and preferences
• Competitive intelligence
• Market trends
• Sales pipelines

By synthesizing this data, you can better understand the state of your sales funnel, answer questions about your revenue stream, and identify opportunities for growth or improvement.

What Are the Benefits of Revenue Intelligence Solutions?

Revenue intelligence solutions empower your team to make more informed business decisions, and help you avoid making strategic mistakes. 

Think of it this way. If you had to estimate your current pipeline values without analytics, how accurate would you be? 

Would you: 

• Overestimate, later forcing your team to scramble to make up the difference
• Underestimate, causing unnecessary stress to your team as they take on additional work

In either case, your sales team probably wouldn’t be positioned to do their best work. 

With revenue intelligence, you won’t have to rely on intuition to know where you stand. Instead, you’ll have an objective picture, painted with data. And this picture will show you exactly which activities you need to focus on to hit your goals.

How does it work? 

It uses predictive analytics to analyze sales and product data, to answer key questions and provide actionable insights into your sales process. 

Like any analytics, the insights you get depend on: 

• The question you’re asking
• The data you’re using to find the answer

For example, with a more detailed understanding of customer behavior and market trends, you could:

• Identify products and services in high demand
• Optimize your pricing strategy
• Develop more targeted sales and marketing strategies

These learnings are particularly important for sales teams. Revenue intelligence can help them identify high-value prospects, which products or services more effectively drive growth, and the best strategies to achieve them. 

Revenue intelligence tools can also help you: 

• Ensure you spend most of your time on activities that drive revenue
• Make more reliable revenue projections
• Identify bottlenecks in the sales funnel
• Optimize the sales process to improve conversion
• Reduce the time it takes to close deals

In other words, used effectively, revenue intelligence helps sales teams and marketers get results.

How Revenue Intelligence Can Support Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is all about making sure your sales team has the tools and resources they need to succeed. It helps sales teams stay aligned with marketing, increase productivity, engage productively with customers, and improve their processes with data and analytics. 

So what does that have to do with revenue intelligence?

Simple. Revenue intelligence is all about digging deep into your sales and marketing data, to find out how to drive revenue more productively. Then, you can apply what you learned to sales enablement, helping your sales team hit their goals more easily.

What Is A Typical Revenue Intelligence Workflow?

When you put it all together, a typical revenue intelligence workflow usually looks like this:

1. Set goals: Establish high-level business and revenue objectives. Then, identify specific, incremental goals your sales team can accomplish to support these objectives.
2. Collect Data: Gather comprehensive, accurate data from various sources, and if necessary, integrate it. This could include sales data, customer feedback, market research, and more. 
3. Analyze the Data: Use AI and other analytics tools to identify patterns, correlations and trends in your data. 
4. Interpret Data: Based on the findings from your analytics, identify opportunities for revenue growth and improvement. To do this, you’ll need to understand the impact of your insights on business operations. Then, moving forward, make informed decisions based on what you learned.
5. Implement Changes: Once you’ve interpreted the data, it’s time to implement your learnings. This may involve adjusting pricing strategies, marketing campaigns, or sales processes to improve performance.
6. Monitor and Evaluate Progress: After you apply what you learned, keep monitoring to track your progress. This way, you can make smaller scale adjustments and improvements as you go, or even set new goals.

Overall, revenue intelligence is about knowing what you want to accomplish, using data to plan your path forward, analyzing your progress, and improving as you go. That means that it’s not a one-and-done process. Instead, executed well, it’s cyclical, and continues to support your sales team’s growth and evolution over time. 

Getting Started with Revenue Intelligence

To get started with revenue intelligence, you’ll need three essential ingredients: 

• Specific, measurable goals
• Data from many different points across the sales process
• Analytics to process that data

Sounds doable, right? Let’s break it down.

Setting Revenue Intelligence Goals

When it comes to revenue intelligence, goal setting is key. Luckily, it doesn’t look all that much different from a typical revenue-oriented goal-setting process. 

Here’s how it works: 

1. Define your business objectives: What are your organization’s high-level revenue goals? Once you know that, map out how revenue intelligence can support those goals, such as making your sales process more efficient, optimizing your pricing, etc.
2. Identify your KPIs: Now that you know how revenue intelligence can support your business goals, set KPIs to measure your effectiveness. For example, you could measure conversion, churn, deal size, or win rate to name a few. 
3. Set specific goals for each KPI: In other words, what is your threshold for success? For example, a 10% reduction in churn, or a 15% boost for your conversion rate.
4. Break down each goal into smaller initiatives: These are the activities your team needs to accomplish in order to achieve your KPIs. For example, to increase conversion, you might optimize your pricing strategies, or rework your website content to move customers along the sales funnel.
5. Define your metrics and milestones: In other words, how will you define success for each initiative? Establish key milestones to hit, and how you’ll measure your progress toward each one.

So why are these goals so important?

In short, it gives you a framework to focus both your work and your analytics. With specific, measurable objectives, you can:

• Plan activities that drive the right results
• Ask more targeted questions of your revenue intelligence
• Identify roadblocks early—and overcome them

Collecting Data for Revenue Intelligence

Once you’ve set your goals, you’ll need data if you want to measure your progress. For your revenue intelligence to deliver reliable, accurate insights, you’ll need to analyze data points from across your entire sales and marketing funnel.

This includes things like:

• How (and how many) people find and interact with your site content
• Your email open and click through rates
• How closely your team adheres to your sales playbook
• Conversation analytics
• Deal progression
• Competitor intelligence 
• Forecasting based on previous conversions

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Any data you can collect  that informs your target customer’s journey to conversion may be helpful.

But you can’t just stop there. It’s not enough just to have the data. It also needs to be accessible, and prepared for analysis. 

That’s where data integration comes in.

In many organizations, data is siloed across different tools and teams, making it difficult or time consuming to access and analyze. 

By bringing that data together in one central, organized location, you can ensure:

• All of your data is clean—meaning that outdated, duplicate, or unreliable data has been removed
• All teams have easy access to the data they need
• Data is structured in a consistent, easily analyzed format

In other words, you won’t waste time tracking down the data points you need, because it will all be available right in front of you.

Analyzing and Interpreting Revenue Intelligence Data

Next, it’s time to analyze your data and interpret your findings. 

While it’s possible to assemble a team of expert data scientists to analyze your data manually, AI-powered revenue intelligence tools like Kompyte can make that process easier.

Here’s how that might work:

Let’s say your team is already using both Kompyte and Salesforce. In Salesforce, you might manage your opportunity pipeline, your CRM, and day-to-day sales activities, while doing competitor analysis, analyzing your market, and creating Battlecards in Kompyte.

In revenue intelligence, you’ll need to analyze all this data together, to paint a more comprehensive picture of your pipeline.

With Kompyte’s two-way Salesforce integration, you can: 

• Connect your won and lost opportunities from Salesforce to your competitor research in Kompyte
• Do more comprehensive win/loss analysis to improve your sales process
• Use your win/loss analysis findings to create more impactful Battlecards
• Easily access your improved Battlecards from within Salesforce CRM, so your sales reps can reference them quickly

By putting this data together, you can learn exactly how many deals you’re losing to competitors, and even more importantly, which ones. Then, use this data to create win-loss Battlecards and help your sales reps improve their win rates.

Win/loss analysis only covers a few data points under the larger umbrella of revenue intelligence. 

Here are a few other ways you could leverage your data to drive revenue: 

• Behavior Analytics: Analyze your competitors’ activities to learn how they impacted your own wins and losses. Then, use your findings to refine your own activities.
• Adoption Analytics: Find out which resources are most helpful, utilized, or underutilized by your sales team to improve your sales enablement.
• Battlecard analytics: Find out which competitor Battlecards are most frequently referenced by your team, and compare that data to your win/loss rates, to identify your biggest competitors.

Once you complete your analysis, it’s helpful to visualize your findings. Visualization means breaking data down into easy-to-understand charts and graphs, so your team quickly grasps all the key takeaways.

Kompyte’s reports do this automatically. For example, here are a few graphs from Battlecard Analytics: 

Data visualization makes it easier for decision makers to understand your research, by highlighting important trends and key takeaways. 

Finally, put your research into action.

How?

Use your learnings to optimize your Battlecards. For example: 

• Empower your sales reps with crucial insights for each competitor, like win rates, sales leaderboards, and your win rate over time
• Identify the Battlecards your team needs most, and focus on creating and optimizing the most impactful ones
• Continue to use win/loss analysis to measure your improved Battlecards’ impact on ROI and sales enablement

Find out more and create your own win loss Battlecards with this free template.

Empower Your Sales Enablement with Revenue Intelligence

If you want to: 

• Improve your revenue generation
• Build a more data-driven sales strategy
• Empower your sales team with the tools and knowledge they need

… then revenue intelligence is the answer.

With it, you can stay laser-focused on revenue growth, setting goals that drive your business forward, and remove obstacles along the way. 

Integrate revenue intelligence into your sales enablement with win-loss Battlecards. Download this free template to learn more and get started.