What is revenue intelligence? Your comprehensive guide

Have you heard of revenue intelligence?

It’s an amazing new technology that can handle all the data from your revenue function and give you real-time, actionable insights into your revenue cycle.

While this might seem like an exaggeration, or even a fairytale, revenue intelligence really is a powerful tool in managing and analyzing your data. To learn how you can use it to grow your revenue exponentially, keep reading.

We’ll cover:

What is revenue intelligence?

Revenue intelligence is an emerging technology designed to make the processing of revenue data easier with the help of AI and machine learning (ML).

This process collates all data sources your sales, marketing, and customer success teams use – customer relationship management (CRM) data, product usage information, website analytics, social media insights, marketing campaign data, and anywhere else your teams' store information – and brings them together in one place.

This new source of truth in your organization can track customers along the entire customer journey better than even your CRM.

How, you ask?

By looking at data sources outside your CRM, revenue intelligence can offer insights into how a customer first became aware of your organization.

Did they follow you on social media, before heading to your website? Or did they find you via organic search before following you on social media?

The same is true post-purchase, by looking into product usage data, social media interactions, and engagement with customer communications, you’ll have more insights into when your customers are likely to churn.

If analyzing all that data sounds like a headache, don’t worry.

Revenue intelligence isn’t just an overhyped data storage center – it goes a step further and analyzes all this data in one place. This provides you with detailed analytics and trends with increased accuracy (and less human error).

The AI-powered models allow for advanced pattern recognition and predictive insights, providing you with actionable insights so you can take action to course-correct before your pipeline is affected.

Why does revenue intelligence matter?

The sales landscape is changing rapidly, making it harder than ever to get ahead. It’s no longer enough to use “gut feelings” or “the way we’ve always done it”.

Revenue intelligence provides data that revenue leaders could only dream of a few years ago, allowing data-driven sales, marketing, and customer success decisions to be made at every step of the buyer journey.

This technology allows you to gain advanced insights into buyer signals and churn risks, segmentation and targeting data, and revenue and pipeline forecasting (just to name a few use cases).

And as more and more organizations add revenue intelligence platforms to their tech stack, it becomes increasingly likely that you’ll fall behind by not using this new technology. Think of it this way, if your competitors can predict trends in your marketplace and course correct before you even know they’re coming – your revenue is at risk.

How does revenue intelligence work?

Now we know how revenue intelligence can help, how does this process work, exactly? It’s time to break down the more technical details of what your revenue intelligence software works.

It’s worth keeping in mind that different tools will have slightly different algorithms and may work slightly differently (we’ll get to that later), but typically revenue intelligence programs have these key steps.

Step 1: Data collection

Without data, there’s no revenue intelligence. The first step is to connect up all your sources of data to your revenue intelligence platform so it can be captured in one place.

No source of data is out of reach of revenue intelligence. You can track website traffic, buyer intent, content engagement, email opens/clicks, phone calls, answer rates, messages, callbacks, conversation intelligence, deal progression, adherence to sales playbook, highest-selling products, close rate, product usage, and so much more.

It goes without saying but the cleaner your data is the more accurate your predictions and insights will be, so if you want to get the most of revenue intelligence ensure you implement a data hygiene strategy at your org.

Step 2: Data analysis

Once you’ve set up your data collection, AI and machine learning algorithms will analyze the data, identifying patterns, trends, and anomalies. With this information, your software will transform this mountain of data into tangible recommendations for your business.

Your tool can answer a whole host of questions, such as:

Where should our sales reps focus their efforts?
Which prospects have the greatest impact on revenue?
Which existing upsell/cross-sell opportunities are we missing with our current customers?
Based on our win rates, what’s the value of our current pipeline?
What are our revenue projections for the next 6-12 months?

Step 3: Implementation

With the insights provided, you can start to implement real change in your organization – backed up by real-time data flowing through your revenue intelligence solution.

Whether this is building new sales enablement content, optimizing a newly uncovered bottleneck, revamping your messaging strategy, or following up with your most ‘at risk’ accounts, you’ll have the data to back up your decisions.

The benefits of revenue intelligence in RevOps

Revenue intelligence can make the role of a revenue operations professional much easier and more manageable. From better insights to reducing data silos, let’s look at a few benefits this tool offers RevOps practitioners.

Full visibility of the customer journey

CRM data is the lifeblood of most organizations, but it doesn’t capture all the smaller touchpoints in the customer journey.

As we’ve explained, revenue intelligence is designed to integrate data from multiple sources, covering a wider range of customer interactions such as website engagement, social media interactions, and product usage.

These data points won’t appear in your CRM, meaning you may miss out on crucial data surrounding the top of your sales funnel and the reasons behind churn post-purchase – revenue intelligence provides that visibility.

Better analytics and data

Instead of manually pulling out data, plugging multiple tools into your CRM, or using a makeshift spreadsheet, revenue intelligence offers a simpler solution to your revenue operations needs.

Analyze thousands of data points in the blink of an eye and get recommendations backed up by data to present to your leadership team.

Need to find the bottleneck in your sales process? Or need to spot trends in customer churn? Or maybe you need to know how conversation length affects close rate? Now, imagine what a relief having one solution to all of these problems would be. That’s the benefit of revenue intelligence for RevOps.

Accurate forecasting

If that wasn’t enough, revenue intelligence can produce ultra-accurate sales forecasts using AI and ML algorithms. This system can account for thousands of variables to give you a precise estimate of what deals will close in the upcoming months. Thus creating more accurate predictions than previously possible.

But this solution can do more than predict sales, revenue intelligence can see data trends and use predictive analytics to predict customers likely to churn, which products will best suit prospects, changes in customer behavior, and more.

In a nutshell, it’s a powerful tool for staying ahead of market trends and your competitors.

Cross-functional alignment

Your new favorite data tool can also reduce tensions in your revenue teams by breaking down data silos. Your sales, marketing, and customer success teams can rest easy knowing they all have access to the data they need to succeed.

And as a RevOps pro, you can rest easy knowing you won’t get quite as many requests to share data from other departments. All your teams will have the same data, and even better, can now understand why decisions are made.

For example, when marketing teams complain that sales aren’t following up on MQLs fast enough, you can point them to the data showing how leads were prioritized by the sales team.

How to use revenue intelligence for revenue growth

With revenue intelligence the possible use cases are (almost) endless - so here are a few ways you can start to use these insights to increase revenue growth from the first day your system is up-and-running.

Identify easy wins

The insights revenue intelligence can offer your business will allow you to spot the small changes with huge impact for your revenue growth. AI can see trends that humans can’t, so you might be sitting on $1000s of untapped revenue potential.

Data-driven decisions

No more guessing games or gut feelings, use real-time data analytics to make your tactical and strategic decisions. Because at the end of the day, your business is too valuable to rely on opinions when it comes to generating revenue.

Create a coaching culture

Gain visibility into how your reps behave and what strategies and conversation styles work best for closing deals. Revenue intelligence can even provide insights into how closely reps align with your sales playbook.

Your revenue enablement team can then use this data to build out training programs based around these proven tactics. Then your sales leaders can coach their reps on how to better apply these principles in their calls.

Customer insights

With more data points than just your CRM at your disposal you can gain a deeper understanding of what your customers think about your brand, what their pain points are, and what they love most about your solution.

All this data, positive and negative can help to inform who your sellers prioritize, your market positioning and messaging, and your churn indicators. Helping you to sell more to the right prospects, and keep your customers loyal.

What are the most important revenue intelligence metrics?

Just like any new strategy, tracking key metrics are vital for success (and proving your new tool’s value to your C-suite). So here are a few metrics you should be tracking to keep an eye on the health of your revenue organization.

Deal velocity. The speed deals move through the sales cycle to close.
Open pipeline. Total potential revenue from all currently open deals.
Revenue attribution. Tracks the origins of closed-won deals to specific marketing and sales activities.
Forecast accuracy. Measures how precise the predicted sales are compared to actual sales in that period.
Pipeline coverage. The ratio of total pipeline value to the sales quota
Deal stage progression. Tracks the advancement of deals along the sales cycle.
Deal risk scores. Predicts the likelihood of deals slowing down or being lost.
Add-on opportunities. Opportunities to upsell or cross-sell to existing customers.
Activity metrics. Measures actions taken by a sales rep (eg. emails sent, calls made, etc).

How to identify the best revenue intelligence software

Just like any tool, there are a number of factors and features to consider when deciding which software is best for your business. That’s why we’ve created this handy list of things to consider when searching for your dream revenue intelligence platform.

Does your chosen platform:

Integrate seamlessly with your existing tech stack?
Leverage your existing technology investments?
Have advanced analytics features for deeper insights?
Process data in real-time for immediate action?
Use AI capabilities for predictive accuracy?
Have an intuitive user interface?
Comply with security standards in your industry?
Have a smooth implementation and onboarding process?
Collect data from 3rd party sources automatically?
Clean and consolidate your data for analysis?
Segment data for granular analysis?
Provide actionable insights and data visualizations?

Revenue intelligence vs. similar tools

Revenue intelligence offers a unique look into your business's data and revenue organization. But it can often get confused with other ‘intelligence’ platforms. This section aims to clear up this puzzle.

Revenue intelligence vs. sales intelligence

Sales intelligence is the data and information sales reps use to make informed selling decisions, such as lead generation and qualification insights.

Whereas revenue intelligence takes a broader scope and looks beyond the sales cycle to encapsulate data from the entire customer journey.

Revenue intelligence vs. conversation intelligence

Conversation intelligence records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls automatically, providing your team with insights into which sales tactics work best and how your reps could improve.

Again revenue intelligence has a wider scope than this, looking at many different data sources to provide more detailed insights into which methodologies are working. In short, conversation intelligence just is one set of data that revenue intelligence analyzes.

Revenue intelligence vs. business intelligence

Business intelligence is a powerful tool that looks at historical data across deoartments to provide actionable insights. However, this type of intelligence isn’t limited to analyzing revenue-generating activity.

Business intelligence can be used to improve processes or provide insights into departments that don’t directly impact revenue growth, while revenue intelligence focuses on the revenue-generating side of the business.

Revenue intelligence vs. competitive intelligence

Competitive intelligence focuses on external market insights and indicators to help you to position your product and stay ahead of your competition. This analysis doesn’t focus too heavily on your internal business processes.

Whereas revenue intelligence aims to audit the internal business processes with some additional external market context. Therefore, it focuses mainly on the internal environment but can use competitive intelligence insights for more accurate insights.