What is Relationship Intelligence?

Relationship Intelligence technology generates actionable insights based on relationship data of clients, colleagues and partners. The data from your email communications, phone calls, meetings and other sources are all processed and analyzed by Relationship Intelligence technology built from data science methodologies. The output of Relationship Intelligence is data-driven insights that support a company's or an individual's capacity for understanding, planning for, problem solving around, and communicating in the most effective manner to drive productive outcomes.

Although Relationship Intelligence is not based on “EQ,” it is connected to that concept through a simple idea: if how you treat people is key to closing deals, then you should be able to learn from the past to help you do better in the future. SalesforceIQ is leading the industry in developing Relationship Intelligence technology to enable businesses to run more effectively.

What Makes Up a Company’s Relationship Intelligence?

So how can you leverage technology based on purely unstructured data? How do you start assessing your organization’s use cases for Relationship Intelligence?

First, you have to understand the concept of your relationship graph, which encompasses data from every touch-point: conversations, phone calls, emails, and in-person meetings. Every day it changes, and everything you do affects it. Your relationship graph lives in multiple dimensions, and this is especially true when you combine it with your teammates’ graphs. These graphs contain the building blocks of Relationship Intelligence.

Establishing Relationship Intelligence for your organization depends on making sense of the signals hidden in all of the noise, finding the patterns that can make a difference, and changing behaviors (and outcomes) for the future. At a very basic level, this means identifying the patterns that lead to success and eliminating those that lead to less favorable outcomes.

What Can Relationship Intelligence Do For Customer Relationship Management and More Importantly, My Business?

Relationship Intelligence technology can help strengthen your business’ relationship management in various ways. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution powered with Relationship Intelligence will look across your’s and the company’s relationship data to analyze, interpret and surface information that is relevant to the customer relationship; if executed and utilized well, this intelligence will help you accelerate your sales or business cycle.

An IDC report found that:

Users spend on average 7.36 hours per week trying to find information and on average 8.15 hours per week trying to find people or experts. —DC Workforce Transformation Survey, 2015.

Small and growing businesses can’t afford to spend time searching for information on a customer. Having a CRM system alleviates the customer data management piece, but Relationship Intelligence technology enables proactiverelationship management. For instance, a commonly overlooked Relationship Intelligence is the days since last customer contact. A sales professional empowered with this information in an immediate and easy view can quickly prioritize which accounts to reach out to first and improve the relationship. If coupled with automatic follow-ups set to a regular cadence, your sales team can gain huge productivity efficiencies.

Relationship Intelligence technology in your CRM can show exactly who and when a sales rep needs to reach out to, without ever scraping through his or her inbox to figure out when was the last point of contact. Relationship Intelligence can also analyze the relationships within the company and present connection discovery. Deals are won much easier if you have an inside connection to the business lead, and a smart CRM tool will identify existing relationships between team members’ networks for business growth opportunities.

SalesforceIQ CRM suggests tasks to follow up and identifies closest connections based on your company's network — all powered by Relationship Intelligence technology

Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day, your company’s relationship capital is the most important component in sustaining and growing your business. Whether you’re a small business liaising with ten new leads or a large enterprise managing thousands of customers, deals are closed between individuals and therefore your CRM solution should reflect the relationships and dynamic communications of those deals.

The possibilities are endless as to how Relationship Intelligence technology can support and grow your business and the market is ripe for smart technology to help professionals navigate through the flood of data that is out there. The question now, is your business is ready to utilize Relationship Intelligence?