How to improve sales forecasting with revenue intelligence

By Tom Pisello | September 15, 2021

Today, Mediafly is excited to announce the release of Revenue360, a unique revenue intelligence solution that marries sales activity, buyer intent, and content engagement data in one unified dashboard for a 360-degree view of deal and account health. 

What is Revenue Intelligence?

Revenue operations (RevOps) is the alignment of software, systems, processes, and data across all revenue-generating teams within a company. This includes, for example, sales, marketing, and customer success. Gartner Inc. predicts by 2025, 75% of the highest growth companies in the world will deploy a RevOps model to drive growth through operational efficiency and keep all teams accountable to revenue. 

Revenue intelligence software supports the RevOps model by intelligently capturing sales activity and intent data and providing prescriptive insights across the full customer lifecycle.

According to Forrester, revenue intelligence solutions capture human engagement activity between buyers and sellers and automatically upload that data to CRM platforms. The AI engine analyzes the data to deliver insights, provide dynamic guidance, and supply inputs on deal management, forecasting, and other revenue-generating activities. 

Why Do I Need Revenue Intelligence?

Your company’s sales forecast influences everything in your organization including hiring, resource allocation, revenue projections, and production capacity decisions. Yet, 80% of sales organizations miss their sales forecast by 25% or more. 

According to Miller Heiman Group, the top causes of inaccurate sales forecasting include a lack of predictive data and sales technology limitations caused by insufficient planning and integration. 

Revenue intelligence solutions in the market today help to solve the predictive data challenge, leveraging artificial intelligence to capture and analyze:

Sales Activity Data

Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, Salesforce, and SAP, track sales activity like lead scoring, order history, and customer interaction records. 

Meanwhile, conversation intelligence solutions including Gong and Outreach capture real-time insights from sales meetings and calls to help revenue teams optimize customer engagement.

Buyer Intent Data

Sales technologies such as 6sense and Demandbase aggregate behavioral signals to enable revenue teams to identify buyers in an active buying cycle.

Content Engagement Data

Sales enablement and content management platforms like Mediafly allow revenue teams to capture content engagement data such as who viewed a specific piece of content, for how long, how often, whether they shared it, and with who. Mediafly’s Content Impact reports also tie specific content assets directly to revenue.

This last data set is something many sales organizations fail to consider, but it’s a critical piece of the revenue intelligence puzzle. As buyers become increasingly digital, they’re doing more self-service research and relying less on sales reps to provide the information they need to make a purchase decision. A new survey from market research firm FocusVision found that the average B2B buyer’s journey involves the consumption of 13 pieces of content. 

That means what happens in the sales meeting is no longer the best indicator of whether or not the sale will close. Today’s revenue teams must also understand how buyers consume content outside of sales meetings to accurately determine opportunity health.

Where Revenue Intelligence Falls Short

While all of these technologies help sales organizations identify what deals should close and what customers should renew, the fact remains they are disparate solutions capturing data at different points in the buyer journey. And bouncing from system to system makes it hard to obtain a clear understanding of overall pipeline health.

Aggregating all of this data in one place would solve the lack of predictive data and sales technology limitation challenges plaguing today’s sales organizations. But no solution has offered a holistic view of sales activity, content engagement, and buyer intent data in one place – until now. 

Mediafly’s New Revenue Intelligence Capabilities Offer Revenue Teams a 360-degree View of Deal Health

Mediafly is the first sales enablement solution to introduce revenue intelligence capabilities. Revenue360, Mediafly’s new revenue intelligence solution, leverages our best-in-class content analytics and deep integrations with popular sales technologies to combine content engagement, buyer intent, and sales activity insights in one dashboard. 

Aggregating data from previously siloed technologies, Revenue360 helps revenue leaders accurately assess opportunity health, improve forecasting and drive deal wins. Instead of relying on partial insights obtained during sales meetings, revenue teams that leverage Mediafly’s revenue intelligence solution can capture account activities and content engagement across multiple channels (from the website to the sales meeting to meeting follow-ups) to provide a holistic view of the deal pipeline and obtain prescriptive next steps. 

Revenue360, Mediafly’s new revenue intelligence solution is now available in limited release. To learn more, visit our Revenue360 resource page.

Tom “The ROI Guy” Pisello is an entrepreneur, speaker, and author of the book Evolved Selling™: Optimizing Sales Enablement in the Age of Frugalnomics. He joined the Mediafly team in 2018 through the acquisition of the company he founded and led, Alinean Inc. In his role as Mediafly’s Chief Evangelist, Tom is responsible for developing new practices for sellers and marketers to communicate and quantify business value to increasingly frugal buyers. He also leads Mediafly’s Advisory Services group in helping companies evolve their selling practices from transactional to value-led. Outside of the office, he is the proud father of two daughters.

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