Revenue Intelligence for Marketers: Uses, Benefits, and More

Imagine a magic sphere. It shows you the best ways to grow your business and generate income, knows which customers you need to approach and which sales deals will be closed successfully. 

All you have to do is listen carefully to this magic sphere. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Now, what if I told you something like this already exists?

Revenue intelligence – although not as cool as a real magic sphere – unlocks all the insights I just mentioned.

But how does it do this?

In its simplest terms, revenue intelligence is a data-driven way to sell. With revenue intelligence, you essentially gather data from different sources and analyze it to optimize the revenue generation process. 

In this article, I’ll tell you all you need to know about revenue intelligence is, why it is important, and most importantly, how it works. So for all that, let’s take a closer look at this magic sphere.

What is revenue intelligence?

Revenue intelligence is the collection of sales and product usage data from your current customers, and prospects and then analyzing this data for maximizing growth opportunities. 

Revenue intelligence can pull data for analysis from the following sources:

• Email clicks and opens
• Downloads from sources such as e-books or whitepapers
• Conversion analytics
• Progression of deals

and more.

The primary goal of income intelligence is to work smart, not hard. Revenue intelligence allows you to connect the dots and make sense of your data in a way everyone can understand. This way, your sales team will have the insights to see every possibility in deals. Based on these insights, your sales team can determine sales tactics and increase their productivity by analyzing buyer behavior.

Why does revenue intelligence matter?

“Well, revenue intelligence seems helpful. But why do I really need this?”

You might have a question like this. The best way to understand how vital revenue intelligence is to understand how it can affect your SaaS company.

Let’s imagine a scenario together. 

Your sales team is working on a very important deal. Everything is going well, and you are confident the deal will be closed. You’re done with the demos, have been communicating with the lead for months, and even got some paperwork ready. 

But it’s been months – and you finally realize this deal will never be closed.

All those months of effort? Well, time only moves in one direction.

Now, let’s assume you have revenue intelligence in your arsenal. In such a case, you could generate countless insights all the way from your marketing campaigns to communications with sales to maximize the chances of closing a deal successfully, in the most profitable way, without spending months on it. 

The benefits of revenue intelligence

Another way to understand the importance of revenue intelligence is to identify the benefits it will bring you.

Here are the top benefits of revenue intelligence:

Increases efficiency

Companies today rely on interdepartmental data. Insights from revenue and sales, in fact, are essential for all departments, from marketing to customer support. 

How, you ask?

Let’s illustrate this with an example. 

Say your sales teams use revenue intelligence to determine which prospects and leads you to need to focus on. In doing so, they can understand which potential customers are ready to make a purchase and which need a little more time in your funnel. In the light of this information and insights, your marketing team increases your chances of success by pushing the right campaigns to the right leads.

Your customer support team will also know how to effectively communicate with prospective and existing customers to maximize the chance of a lucrative working relationship.

Prevents data silos

Revenue intelligence tools eliminate the problem of data silos by automatically capturing and aggregating data on a single dashboard. This platform serves as the single source of truth for all customers, and all departments extract insights with this data. Since this data is collected and analyzed automatically, all teams in your SaaS company can look from the same window and meet at a common point. 

Mitigates the risk of lost sales opportunities

You probably already know that clarity is everything in sales processes. No sales professional wants to waste their time on a sale that won’t happen. However, outdated, inaccurate or disjointed data can cause miscalculations. 

Revenue intelligence uncovers all the insights into sales opportunities. With accurate targeting, sales teams can more easily see opportunities and take action accordingly. And with insights, marketing teams can personalize campaigns for users. Thus, the sales and marketing teams work harmoniously, paving the way for the company to achieve maximum profit.

How does revenue intelligence work?

Revenue intelligence takes all the raw data from the tools that you collected your data and turns it into insights that drive your revenue. With these insights, you can improve your business health, eliminate pipeline risk, and make accurate predictions about future sales. 

You can leverage revenue intelligence in many different ways. The process might go like this: First, you talk to your sales team and let them understand why they need to add revenue intelligence to their workflow.

In the light of all this information, you determine what is the most suitable way forward for you and your team. Using the right metrics here is key to keep track of the process to track and increase revenue.

Here are some metrics you should track for this:

• Lifetime value: Lifetime value, or customer lifetime value, is a measure of the profit your customers generate for your company over the time they engage with your company and product.
• MRR: MRR stands for monthly recurring revenue, and it is a measure of the predictable monthly revenue of a business
• ARPU: ARPU stands for average revenue per user, and it’s the average amount of revenue generated by each active user over a given period of time.

The secret of the effectiveness of revenue intelligence is a tool that will allow you to analyze all your data from a single point and access the data necessary for revenue intelligence from a single dashboard.

a single dashboard. 

With the revenue intelligence dashboard, Hockeystack visualizes and clarifies every metric and KPI you need to track when leveraging revenue intelligence. In this way, you can always keep the process under control and follow changes in real-time.

In addition, HockeyStack offers a more detailed analysis by showing you how much MRR and LTV each channel or even each content gives you. In this way, you can follow the effect of your marketing strategies on sales and identify changes you must make to increase revenue. 

Combining the power of revenue intelligence, metrics, and attribution allows you to see exactly where the leads that result in revenue are coming from.

This means you can quickly and easily maximize the growth and optimize the campaigns you run based on your insights. What’s more, it means experimenting with new methods and quickly testing the results of those methods.

Why do marketers need revenue intelligence 

Revenue intelligence removes data silos and gathers all teams around shared insights. Organizations that don’t leverage revenue intelligence often lack integration between their sales and marketing teams. This prevents you from creating marketing campaigns that will encourage users to buy more and increase revenue.

With revenue intelligence, you essentially create a system to automatically collect, analyze and disseminate data, allowing you to create well though-out campaigns based on data. This essentially allows both sales and marketing teams to complement each others efforts using the same tools and data, making revenue intelligence as much about marketing as it is about sales.

Using revenue intelligence to understand customer relationships

Until this part of the article, I mainly focused on the benefits of revenue intelligence to sales and marketing. But the role that revenue intelligence plays in understanding and improving your customer relationships is undeniable.

CRMs are great for managing customer relationships. However, it is not sufficient to just capture the details of the interactions your sales team has with your customers and leave it at that.

For example, your CRM probably won’t be able to provide a plausible reason for a lost deal. Or it will expect you to be content with simple explanations like “bad fit” or “no budget”. 

That doesn’t give you much actionable information, does it?

Does ‘bad fit’ mean you don’t have a product that fits the customer’s needs, or did your sales rep have difficulty understanding the customer’s pain points? If you only try to make sense of your customer relations with CRM, you will never know. 

Revenue intelligence, on the other hand, isn’t just limited to your CRM tools. It allows you to evaluate your sales process from a broad perspective based on all your data. That way, if a sale didn’t happen, you know at what stage of the sales funnel your prospect dropped off and why. 

There is another reason revenue intelligence improves customer relationships: Revenue intelligence uncovers the buying and consumption habits of your users that you may not have been aware of before.

Revenue intelligence relies entirely on detailed analysis of sales and product usage data. Thus, it allows you to fully understand the expectations and behaviors of your customers during the sales process. When you discover all this confidential information about your customers, you can improve your customer relations accordingly.

Unlock revenue intelligence with HockeyStack

Some features of HockeyStack can unlock insights while leveraging revenue intelligence

Let’s take a closer look at these features.

Unified data

I talked about how consolidating data is essential for revenue intelligence. 

With HockeyStack, you can combine all your data with a single tool in minutes without writing any code. In this way, you create an infrastructure for revenue intelligence.

Comprehensive, easy-to-use dashboards

HockeyStack’s comprehensive and easy-to-understand dashboards let you monitor every metric you need for revenue intelligence in real-time. For this, you can use all the metrics you need and that you think will offer more value to your revenue intelligence when you measure them together in your custom reports. Or you can use revenue intelligence report templates that HockeyStack has created for you. The decision is yours!

You can visit the live demo here to see how Hockeystack works for you.

Attribution

Hockeystack’s attribution features are what you need to take your revenue intelligence one step further.

With Hockeystack, you can associate every single piece of data in your CRM with your revenue. This way you can answer questions like:

• How does our customer support team affect our MRR?
• What is the average LTV of a topic cluster?
• Which feature leads to the highest MRR expansion?

and more.

By combining the power of your revenue intelligence and attribution, you can generate actionable insights to optimize your revenue and easily take action towards the goal.

Key takeways

In summary, revenue intelligence lets you know why you’ve successfully closed or failed to close deals, which is the most fundamental way to ensure business success. By automating the collection, analysis, and application of data, you can take a massive load off your sales team and revenue specialists. This way, they can spend more time improving the process and creating new ways to increase your revenue.

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