3 Questions to Assess Your Sales Intelligence IQ

In 2018, Salesforce found that high performing teams were 1.5x more likely to base forecasts on data-driven insights. In order to access 100% accurate data on your sales team and provide the insights necessary to optimize performance, it is critical to adopt a sales intelligence platform at your organization.

Sales intelligence tools fall under the category of sales enablement software. There are countless solutions on the market promising to improve performance and increase revenue. However, sales intelligence is unique because it provides unprecedented insights into the daily rep behaviors predictive of revenue that would be otherwise overlooked – or instead, guessed or estimated – by managers using error-prone manual data entry.

So, why sales intelligence? Implementing sales intelligence means using every data point produced by your sales team to your advantage. To learn more, below are a few questions and key features to let you test your knowledge of this category of sales tools and see what they can do for you.

What’s Your Sales Intelligence IQ?  

TRUE or FALSE: Sales Intelligence requires reps to report their daily activities to feed reports for managers.

FALSE! With a sales intelligence platform, 100% accurate data is captured automatically, in real-time, to give managers full knowledge and understanding of the daily phone activity of their reps. Your sales team’s daily activity is a company asset that is either being applied to drive business, or not contributing to the top line. Sales intelligence provides the ability to capture and measure, and then multiply the successful behaviors of reps for even the largest, dispersed sales teams.

If you aren’t going into battle with all your weapons, how can you expect to come out on top? Call activity data is the most valuable asset a sales manager can utilize. However, most data available to sales managers is not only unused but also inaccurate due to manual entry and human mistakes. Therefore, using call activity data generated by a sales intelligence system is integral for sales managers to accurately set goals and for their teams to successfully achieve those goals.

TRUE or FALSE: Sales Intelligence may result in higher turnover rates as managers can easily spot struggling reps.

FALSE! In fact, it’s the opposite. The accurate data provided by a sales intelligence platform allows for better informed coaching and training initiatives, and as a result, higher rep performance and lower turnover rates. Managers can identify reps who are struggling but, rather than letting them go, they can use the data of high performers to demonstrate a recipe for success – and therefore improve performance and rep retention.

Any sales manager knows that onboarding new team members is both time consuming and costly. With sales intelligence, below average reps can be trained using the data of high performers, instead of being let go, and new hires can be brought up to speed more quickly and efficiently. With the data provided by sales intelligence, managers can better train reps from the get-go.

TRUE or False: Sales forecasts will be more accurate with Sales Intelligence.

TRUE! If you think of forecasting as a recipe; eyeballing ingredients will probably turn out okay, but the precise measurement of ingredients is a recipe for success. The same goes for sales; sure, managers can base forecasts off of gut instinct and manually-reported, guesstimated data provided by reps – but it is a real gamble that those numbers will materialize at the end of the quarter. In contrast, the data provided by sales intelligence is almost a guaranteed recipe for success as there is no room for human error or skewed measurements.

Implementing Sales Intelligence

One of the most valuable aspects a sales intelligence platform can bring to your team is visibility. Nowadays, with more teams working remotely, keeping your reps on the same page when it comes to goals and numbers is more important than ever. As a manager, sales intelligence can only make your job easier and help deliver better results. Setting accurate benchmarks, identifying key KPIs, and managing to a standard has never been easier. If you are looking to improve rep performance and accurately, predictably help your team hit its numbers this year, you should absolutely be considering a sales intelligence solution. .

Learn about Gryphon’s Sales Intelligence Platform and how it can increase rep performance at your organization by up to 30%!