As any marketing or sales professional will tell you, uncovering actionable insights to land or retain customers is worth its weight in gold — and equally hard to come by.

Whether you are hoping to land new customers, retain your existing base or explore new markets, here are seven key insights we’ve identified that are table stakes to increase customer engagement, identify opportunities and drive revenue. Equip your marketing and sales team with this intelligence, and you’ll be in a better position to achieve business success.

#1: KNOW WHOM TO CALL

This may seem like a no-brainer, but it is an essential starting point — and often exceedingly hard to nail down — when pursuing new customers or supporting existing clients. Staying on top of management changes and other activities is a must-do to stay connected.

#2: ACCESS BACKGROUND INFO

Having a good understanding of your prospect or client’s products and services (before engaging them in a conversation) can make or break a business relationship. Doing your homework shows that you are genuinely interested and can support your customer or prospect’s needs.

#3: MONITOR DAY-TO-DAY ACCOUNT DEVELOPMENTS

Too often, marketing and sales turn a blind eye once a prospect becomes a customer. Monitoring developments within existing accounts is vital to identify upsell opportunities and expand current contracts.

#4: IDENTIFY KEY INDUSTRY TRENDS

While it is one thing to have a good understanding of prospects and customers, it’s entirely another to assess their future success. Staying on top of industry changes helps identify positive and negative trends, demonstrating you are knowledgeable and care about future growth.

#5: UNDERSTAND MARKET COMPETITORS

Understanding the competitive landscape further sharpens your knowledge, whether for your own business or that of your clients and prospects. Keeping a watchful eye can help to identify and address potential threats before they hurt sales.

#6: TRACK TARGET MARKETS

Expanding market share is all about identifying and attracting new customers. Keeping an eye on both established and new companies in your markets can help you more effectively target them to create new business opportunities.

#7: MONITOR SOCIAL AND EMAIL FOR REAL-TIME INSIGHTS

Gaining real-time insights from social posts and email correspondence is one of the latest tools marketers and sales reps have in their intelligence toolkit. Leveraging this insight can help you quickly uncover and identify deal-breakers and accelerators.

CONSIDER ADDING ANALYTICS TO YOUR TECH STACK

To take full advantage of data gleaned from these top insights and more, organizations should consider integrating a customer and industry business insights solution, such as FirstRain, into their marketing and sales tech stack. FirstRain’s ML- and AI-powered analytics dynamically categorize and aggregate global enterprise data sources (including web and social) to deliver insights relevant to each user.

FirstRain aggregates data into easy-to-grasp visualizations, highlighting trends & clusters, anomalies, dynamic linkages and connections that flat-list news-based services cannot provide. It’s:

• Adaptive – Enables users to explore global business sectors and segments in real-time to reflect each dynamic market
• Discerning – Utilizes cognitive technology that mimics the brain’s capacity to draw relationships, transforming events into key hypotheses and actionable insights
• Personal – Develops priorities in sync with the user, guiding data collection and presentation for only relevant information
• Flexible – Configured to workflows and platforms driving your business and integrated seamlessly across multiple endpoints

WHAT DO USERS THINK ABOUT FIRSTRAIN?

“If you want your customers to know that you care about them, have personal insight into their business and are up-to-date with market trends, set yourself apart by using FirstRain.” 

— Hector Mendez, Service and Support Manager, Cisco Systems

“The big data analytics of FirstRain’s solution provided intelligence to Microsoft’s market-facing teams that allows them to better understand and act on the business objectives of their customers, markets and competitors. FirstRain delivers intelligence that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible to find.”

— Jennifer Robbins, Library Program Manager, Microsoft

Ready to learn more about how our FirstRain business intelligence solution can help your entire company transform into customer experts? Book a call with an IgniteTech business intelligence expert today.