OK, you’ve steadily built up your sales team with a set of top-notch account execs to go out and find great prospects and close deals.  Now it’s just a matter of watching the revenue rain down, right?  In the world of B2B sales, we tend to emphasize the role of the individual seller, and while much is due to the tenacity, savvy and experience of the people on the sales team, their performance can be made more predictable, repeatable and potent by providing them with the right tools and resources.

Aberdeen Group recently published a research brief on best-in-class sales intelligence strategies, showing how organizations can “most effectively leverage customer data and sales operations best practices to maximize the performance of their teams.”  Using research surveys, Aberdeen analyzes the respondents across a set of sales and company performance metrics and then groups them into 3 categories: Best-in-Class (top 20%), Industry Average (middle 50%) and Laggard (bottom 30%).  Then, they compare them across these categories related to their implementation and usage of sales intelligence.

The results show that best-in-class companies use sales intelligence to their advantage, giving their sales teams an edge that positively affects both sales performance and company revenues.  Here are a couple interesting findings from the research:

CRM becomes much more powerful when integrated with external data sources. 

Organizations across all categories are likely to have a sales-focused repository for account, contact and sales opportunity data – but clear differences are seen when organizations are asked about integrating third-party content into CRM/SFA, with a 4x difference between Best-in-Class and Laggards.

Have a process to analyze, leverage and unify sales data

Having processes to analyze, leverage and unify sales intelligence data are “more frequently in place among Best-in-Class firms, that enable an effective deployment of CRM, sales intelligence, and all related data platforms.” 

Best-in-Class companies have superior individual and team attainment of annual sales quota, sales forecast accuracy, company revenue growth, and customer retention rates. 

This shows that having a sales intelligence strategy not only helps the top sales performers, but elevates the overall sales team “for the ‘B’ and even ‘C’ members to improve their contribution.”

The survey research also included a number of organizations using Data.com as their primary source for sales intelligence.  When compared to the overall survey population, these customers clearly out-performed on all the sales-centric metrics.  Check out the full set of results and learn how you can create the foundation for your sales team to perform at a higher level by downloading the research brief.