Revenue Intelligence: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?

Think of a typical salesperson. Most people will jump to the image of a slick man in a fedora smooth-talking his way into selling products. Sales tactics have evolved and yet, a lot of modern consumers expect sales operations to be run by men in suits who show up with scripted sales pitches. Of course, the quintessential salesman died out with the rapid expansion of the Internet as companies created landing pages and disseminated information through social platforms. 

Modern consumers prefer doing their research into both the brand and product before they splurge. They aren’t easily taken in by cold calls, email blasts, or in-person visits from sales reps. It has made sales comparatively different but has also created new opportunities for businesses to learn from their mistakes.

It is where revenue intelligence comes in. Revenue intelligence gives you a holistic picture of the status of your sales using relevant data and numbers. Some business owners tend to believe that sales are affected by purely qualitative factors such as brand image, sales pitches, or aesthetics, but this isn’t true. Revenue intelligence uses numbers to show you where you can make a crucial difference and boost your sales game.

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Revenue Intelligence: An Explainer

Let’s take a deeper look at revenue intelligence. Every business has one objective in common: turning a profit. Revenue generation occurs across departments, and various team members utilize different tactics to get sales. Revenue intelligence shines a spotlight on all these sources of revenue, combining operations, marketing, and sales under a single umbrella. 

Revenue intelligence collects data in real-time from past, present, and future deals to show you a bird’s eye view of your sales situation. This data can be used to optimize your sales activity and comes in handy with revenue planning. You’ll be able to understand how and why your revenue generation is at a standstill and where you can improve.

It’s easy to get started with revenue intelligence. All you have to do is, use a revenue intelligence platform and integrate it into your overall revenue tracker. The platform will use scientific tactics to collate empirical and current data and will create predictive models that will help you forecast your sales. You can also format the platform to add trends to the analysis. This will create a richer picture of your revenue generation activity.

Why Does Revenue Intelligence Matter

Revenue intelligence, much like enterprise microservices, represents a way that focusing on machine learning and using data can help develop your businesses. Revenue intelligence uses artificial intelligence to study and optimize your revenue output. It’s a key component when you want to hammer out your business objectives for the upcoming year. Here are some of the other ways in which revenue intelligence can help your business:

1.   Improves your Strategy

According to Spotio, 52% of marketers reported that their outbound marketing attempts were ineffective. A savvy business owner would come up with a way to ensure that his team’s marketing efforts leaned towards success instead of failure.

Instead of spending time poring over multiple customer satisfaction calculations, he or she would work on revenue intelligence to truly understand the problem.

An effective revenue intelligence model would draw connections between numerous marketing activities and show a complete sales picture. This would allow business owners to tweak their existing strategy or create a new one based on what they find. They wouldn’t have to waste copious amounts of money researching distinct factors because everything would be in one place.

Revenue intelligence helps businesses craft foolproof strategies that help them sell in real time. Not only that, but the quantitative data given by revenue intelligence can spill over into qualitative factors too. This means brands can create improved customer service experiences by studying the numbers they get from their revenue intelligence projections.

2.  Automatic Data Entry

One of the most frustrating elements of analyzing data is collecting it. It’s another thing if you have a small business VoIP service set up that collects and displays data on its own.

Let’s say your business uses a more traditional approach, such as cold calling from call centers. These cold calls could be made using software like 8x8, but, whatever technology you decide to use, you should ensure that you use the phone system that’s the most appropriate for your business needs.

While it’s possible to record every single call made, it can be a task for someone to listen to all of them and gather important data while ensuring that they adhere to standard operating procedures that your company has in place regarding data.

Revenue intelligence streamlines this process since the platforms used keep collected vital information, It also removes human error from the mix, leading to accurate and specific data that will help boost your sales. If you’re a business owner, your employees will thank you as they won’t have to manually enter numbers into a database. The automated service will give your employees flexibility and some free time.

3. More Departments, No Problems

Just as revenue intelligence platforms collect empirical and current data, they also collate data between departments that might not connect otherwise. For example, an HR professional might not look through data from the marketing department unless something relevant comes up. These departments won’t share data simply because they won’t believe there’s a need for it.

This is where revenue intelligence comes in. Think of it like enterprise app integration, when all your apps are in one place. When you need to use a specific app, you type it into the integrated software and it’ll redirect you. It’s convenient and efficient. Similarly, revenue generation platforms collect data across departments in a business.

This is incredibly useful as you’ll be able to see how customer service stats affect marketing attempts and how you can create a strategy to make these departments work better together. It enables team building, promotes a culture of mentoring, and brings together team members who might not work together and provides useful insight into the business’ overall revenue stream.

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4.  Accurate Forecasts

No, we’re not talking about the weather. Revenue intelligence models can solve one of the most complex problems that plague sales managers: forecasts. The data contained in revenue intelligence platforms can be used to create extremely accurate projections and sales forecasts. These are backed by hard data, which means you won’t have to go with your gut or make educated guesses.

Since revenue intelligence uses artificial intelligence to collect and analyze data, it’ll use relevant trends and key performance metrics to give you real forecasts. It’ll be easy to provide assistance to any outbound marketer or sales rep who’s falling behind on their targets. You can switch up their cold calling, give them new scripts or get a new small business phone service, depending on where the bottleneck lies.

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5. Coach Your Team

The best thing about revenue intelligence is its use of artificial intelligence. A revenue intelligence platform will record your outgoing sales calls, listen to the conversations, and extract useful and relevant data. This data will help you figure out if something is wrong with your sales tactics. 

It will also help you get a jumpstart on coaching your sales reps on how they can have more effective calls. They can learn how to close deals quicker and provide a more satisfactory customer service experience. Better yet, you can give your sales team access to the revenue intelligence system and have them learn on their own.

This means less confusion among sales reps and an increase in their independent trouble-shooting process. They won’t rely on their managers to teach them what is mainframe modernization, for example. They will know that the company’s revenue generation tools have been upgraded and will improve their knowledge and pitch accordingly. Revenue intelligence can create forward-thinking employees.

Remove Bias with Artificial Intelligence

Revenue intelligence systems are great in that they have no bias when it comes to the data being collected. Many businesses attempt to identify faults in the system with data gathered by employees, opening themselves to human error and possible bias. Your marketing team will likely present different reasons for the bottleneck in your sales funnel while the sales department cites opposing factors.

Machines remove all such biases and depict a complete picture of your revenue stream. You won’t have to sift through multiple accounts of what went wrong in an attempt to fix a seemingly simple issue.

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Not only will revenue intelligence help with determining flaws in your external communication, you might find some gaps in your internal comms channels too. A breakdown between departments in a business can lead to an inconsistent brand image. 

Customers prefer purchasing from companies that have a strong core message that they can relate to. Internal communication breakdowns can hamper the customer service experience. So it may be a good idea to invest in a unified communications platform, such as an alternative to Bitrix24.

Revenue intelligence drives growth across all departments of any business. The transparency and hard data it provides enables business owners to craft effective strategies that boost revenue streams. It does this using real time data, an unbiased insights system and market trends that prove useful when analyzing a tricky sales situation.