There’s more to prospect contact data than phone numbers, job titles, and company pain points.
In your CRM and other communication tools you can find valuable information, known as relationship intelligence, that goes beyond the surface level.
Let’s say a current customer forwards one of your product emails to several procurement officers — this could indicate a change in their spending budget.
But what if I’m already using sales, lead, or market intelligence? Do I really need to add another type of intelligence to my data strategy?
Relationship intelligence broadens your outreach potential by connecting the dots that are laid out by other types of intelligence. Using your CRM system (and supplemental data from a provider), you can find new opportunities close to those you’re already working with.
What is Relationship Intelligence Data?
Relationship intelligence is a type of data that’s stored in CRM databases, and it’s used to gain new insights on current and potential customers. Data points in relationship intelligence come from company interactions, or in other words, customer-facing communications.
Companies can use relationship intelligence to append records within their existing database and clean inaccurate data — and possibly create a new organizational chart.
Relationship vs. Customer Intelligence
Relationship intelligence creates family tree-like branches between professionals, and at each end are bits of customer intelligence.
Customer intelligence is customer-centric, while relationship intelligence is connection-centric:
Benefits of Relationship Intelligence Data
By adding on to existing data about sales, leads, and customers, relationship intelligence helps sales reps and marketers to achieve the following:
- Reduce the amount of prospect research.
- Find the right prospects for a deal close.
- Gain deeper knowledge of their prospects.
- Personalize their campaign messages and pitches.
- Reach new buyers before competitors.
- Improve relationships with current customers.
Looking at the list above, it’s no wonder that 77% of B2B sales and marketing professionals believe personalized experiences make for better customer relationships.
Having a one-size-fits-all approach to using intelligence in sales and marketing efforts can drastically worsen their success, so understanding relationships is an important advantage.
Tools to Build Relationship Intelligence
Relationship intelligence tools help fill in the gaps in contact databases and act on new intelligence gained.
Consider these solutions to build relationship intelligence:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
As a staple to any many organizations, a CRM system may have untapped potential. To dig up relationship intelligence, companies can unify customer data storage, integrate with other applications used for customer interactions, and import third-party data.
Data Provider or Data Collector
In-house data collection is ideal for saving resources, but is time-consuming if it’s your sole data source. Time spent on data collection and organization takes away from important sales and marketing-oriented tasks.
If you have room in your budget, data providers can add to your existing database.
Data Visualizer
Looking over lines and lines of data can put anyone to sleep. And it makes it difficult to create a full, 360-degree view of your leads and customers if you can’t see it. Data visualization tools take your data and create graphs and charts, that let people digest information more easily.
Email Automation
Your email inbox is where a majority of communications occur. There is so much information to bank on in your emails, such as job titles, phone numbers, events, and company names.
When your email system is synced with your CRM using a relationship intelligence tool, this valuable data can be easily captured and stored for future customer engagement.
Next Steps in Building Better Relationships with Intelligence
Sales and marketing teams can leverage relationship intelligence from professional interactions, such as emails and account management activity. This can improve sales and marketing efforts by going beyond basic contact information.
Take that valuable information, and put it into your next outreach strategy for more sales opportunities.