At some point in life, we’ve all wished to have a superpower that would let us read the minds of people.
Well, that superpower is buyer intelligence.
A sales superpower!
Buyer intelligence reveals what your customers like, their buying habits, traits, and even what will make them hit that Buy Now button.
Let’s dive deep into the importance, benefits, and how buyer intelligence can help you accelerate your sales process.
What is buyer intelligence?
Buyer intelligence can be defined as the process of gathering, evaluating, and analyzing the customer’s personality traits, behavior, and preferences. The interpreted data is used by businesses to enhance their marketing and sales strategies to fit the needs of their potential leads.
Key components of buyer intelligence:
- Demographic data: Insights into the buyer’s age, gender, location, education, and income to comprehend the audience group and target accordingly.
- Behavioral data: Information that is collected about potential buyer’s interaction with a business, both online and in-person, is called behavioral data.
- Psychographic data: Studying customers based on their psychological characteristics like personality traits, values, preferences and goals.
- Purchase history: Data referring to a customer’s past transactions with a business or retailer.
- Engagement data: Observing how customers interact with a business. The metrics include customer retention rate, churn rate, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Average Order Value (AOV).
Importance of Buyer Intelligence
Today, understanding customers at a granular level has become crucial as the flow of a successful sales cycle demands unique personalization and customer experience.
By comprehending demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and engagement data, sales reps will be able to optimize strategies and deliver better sales pitches that can close more.
- Enhanced customer understanding
Building a relationship with the customer is the key to unlock business opportunities. B2B Sales process that didn’t have a connection with the buyer is long gone. Today, B2B customers expect a beneficial relationship.
Buyer Intelligence can make customer understanding seamless, allowing you to know your buyer even before any interaction. This will help you craft a confident pitch that resonates with the buyer.
- Personalized customer experience
Personalization is the golden ticket to stand out in the crowded B2B space. Buyer intelligence secured through demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and engagement data will enable you with enough information about the target customers.
These insights help in customer segmentation and tailoring your sales strategy with personalized content and increase customer satisfaction.
- Better sales targeting and prioritization
Identifying and skipping uninterested prospects gives you a massive advantage, because sales reps can lose a lot of time on these prospects and slow down sales.
Buyer intelligence gives you the ability to create a hyper-targeted prospect list and learn if they’d be interested in your business. It delves into deeper analysis and enables you to further refine your segmentation and gives you a hyper-personalized set of prospects.
- Optimizing marketing strategies
By leveraging behavioral data, companies can fine-tune their landing pages and products to achieve maximum possible interaction from a target customer.
Behavioral data is a pack of actionable insights that comes in two types:
- Online behavioral data:
Data items like page views, page navigation, online downloads, ecommerce transactions, social media engagement, newsletter signups, and shopping cart activities are all online behavioral data.
- In-person behavioral data:
Business transactions, customer card use, onsite event visits all fall under in-person behavioral data.
Knowing how target customers interact with your brand or similar brands assists you in optimizing and improving your marketing strategies that agree with the behavioral data.
- Shortening the sales cycle
Buyer intelligence can lend a helping hand to shorten the sales cycle. One of the key benefits of injecting information on B2B buyers into your sales cycle is that it offers a clear window into the preferences of your target audience.
By knowing their current preferences you’ll be able to segment your audience and focus on the prospects who directly fit your business model, accelerating the whole sales process of your company.
- Predicting future behavior
Sales reps can forecast the future behavior of prospects through their past transactions and take actions that build better sales strategies.
For example, if the prospect has taken trial subscriptions for two products that offer different solutions solved by your product, you can analyze when their product trial ends and pitch your product as an alternative for both.
- Increased upselling and cross-selling opportunities
Expanding the average transaction size is something that can be achieved easily with buyer intelligence. It equips you with the data to identify which products or services are relevant to your prospects and pitch solutions that complement their existing purchase.
This not only increases the chances of identifying upselling and cross-selling opportunities but also discovers greater revenue opportunities.
- Improved customer retention and loyalty
Customer retention and loyalty is extremely pivotal to assure long-term success of a business. With buyer intelligence, you’ll be able to identify engagement patterns that make the customers stay and the drainers that make them leave a business.
These insights allow you to make better engagement strategies that improve customer retention and design winning customer welfare programs to hold customer loyalty.
- Data-driven decision making
From which lead to progress to which product-line to expand, make data-driven decisions. Buyer intelligence strengthens your business functions with data, eliminating the game of assumptions.
Data-driven decisions reduce risk and assist you with resources to build performing strategies.
- Staying competitive
Have a competitive edge in every possible way. You will have the ability to anticipate target market insights, respond faster to customer needs, and stay ahead of your competitors.
These state the importance of buyer intelligence in business growth.
Benefits of Buyer Intelligence
Buyer intelligence adds value to your average sales teams by driving data. There are a number of benefits from integrating insights on B2B buyers into your strategy.
- Customer-centric approach
Buyer intelligence can align your business into a customer centric approach that lets you understand why customers are purchasing a certain product.
This allows you to evaluate your go-to-market strategy from buyer’s views and frame a strategy that can relate with the requirements of the customer. Also, positioning yourself as a customer-centric brand increases brand value and reliability.
- Improved lead scoring
Buyer intelligence improves the accuracy of leads scoring with prospect data based on their behavior, interest level, and likelihood to convert.
It transcends mere names and job titles, and adds more to the decision-making process, propelling a faster sales cycle. This leads sales reps directly to high-quality leads accelerating productivity with efficiency.
- Efficient budget spend
Different channels work for different customers. One may prefer a call, while the other may prefer an email or even an ad.
Both sales and marketing teams can understand what works for their prospects and focus their funding directly to get better results. This also has reduced wastage and better overall campaign performance.
- Clear customer journey mapping
Buyer intelligence reveals a clear customer journey from first customer interaction to purchase to post-purchase behaviors that has happened before.
This helps you refine your customer journey strategies and get the right content and touchpoints making it a smooth customer experience.
- Cross-functional alignment
Marketing, sales, and customer service team, all are brought under the same page with a unified set of customer data.
This ensures that teams coordinate and approach with the same tone that is preferred by a prospect, leading to consistent customer interaction that fuels business growth.
Buyer intelligence can elevate your sales process and is a tool that is not just a nice-to-have anymore. Buyer intelligence has become a necessity, and you need it.
Gain your superpower!
