If you are in sales, you likely ask a few questions of yourself and your team. Chief among them: How can you take your sales team to the next level? How can you gain actionable insight and prepare your team to succeed better?
Revenue intelligence is the answer to this question. With the right data and tools, you can build a revenue intelligence team that makes accurate sales forecasting, builds engagement scores, and determines which sales methodologies work best for specific clients. However, building a team to manage this revenue intelligence can be challenging. Here are some tips to help you manage this process.
What Are the Roles of a Revenue Intelligence Team?
The role of revenue intelligence is to provide enhanced data analytics, identify key trends, strengthen forecasts, and help your sales team members close deals faster. Your team must also understand how to use artificial intelligence, given its increasing prominence in sales.
So, what does this mean for your revenue intelligence team roles?
- Revenue intelligence must enhance and support your sales team. Your sales team members are busy. Their time is limited, and the demands on their attention are high. Your staff must understand data and provide useful information to sales team members.
- A critical component of revenue intelligence is closing deals faster. Your team must develop the insight that allows your sales team to do that.
- Team members must gather critical, real-time data on potential customers. They should use this data to help sales team members determine the best mix of products and services from a potential prospect.
- Different prospective members may require different approaches. Businesses utilize an array of sales methodologies when closing deals. Revenue intelligence team members should identify which deals work best.
The roles of revenue intelligence are vast and changing. First, as a sales leader, you need to understand how revenue intelligence fits into your sales team.
What Are the Responsibilities of a Revenue Intelligence Team?
Each business will deploy revenue intelligence in different ways. However, there are a few constants across most businesses regarding revenue intelligence. These responsibilities include:
- Sales forecasting: Revenue intelligence team members must monitor real vs. expected revenue. These requirements mean team members must have up-to-the-second information at their fingertips. This data enables your team to make accurate recommendations and ensures that team members can recommend specific actions to close potential forecast gaps.
- Engagement scores: A data-based engagement score can be critical in determining which prospects are close to closing. Such a score can also alert a sales team when they may risk losing a prospect.
- Opportunity management: With limited resources, a sales team needs revenue intelligence to guide them about the most sensible opportunities. This broad-based pipeline management is critical to deploying a sales team’s time and money.
- Sales methodologies: Some methodologies are more successful than others. Revenue intelligence team members can help determine which sales methodologies work best. They can also use different methodologies to determine actionable next steps for prospects.
Other team members may have different roles. Other examples include tracking deal movement, meeting key performance indicators, or beating quotas. You need a platform that you can customize to fit your needs. Fortunately, Next Quarter provides all of these functions and much more.
What Skills Do You Need on Your Revenue Intelligence Team?
Hiring teammates with the right skill set is critical for the long-term success of your revenue intelligence team. Therefore, you should consider the following attributes for potential team members:
- A robust understanding of technology: Platforms like Next Quarter are intuitive. Your team members must understand how to use technology and interpret data.
- Excellent communication skills: Each sales team has different pressure points. Your team should understand how to communicate critical information to the sales team.
- A deep understanding of analytics: Your revenue intelligence team must understand how to read and interpret numbers. If your team member obtains data that may impact a sales target, they’ll have to know what that data means and how your sales team can deploy it.
The right technology is a requirement for any sales or revenue intelligence effort. However, you must also hire team members with the right skill set.
Partner With Next Quarter
Getting revenue intelligence right means you have to hire the right people. It also means you must use the right technological tools. Our revenue intelligence module is native to Salesforce. As such, you can integrate our platform to operate within your already existing technology. You can also work with our Account Growth and Financial Clarity modules, all available in the Next Quarter platform, to further enhance your business.
Ready to learn more? Reach out to our sales team to book a demo and learn more about what features we have to offer.
