When it comes to winning deals and retaining customers, access to market intelligence is everything. However, a staggering 42% of sales reps say they don’t have enough information before making a call to win trust and build credibility. Indeed, sales reps average 440 hours each year trying to find the right content to share with prospects and customers.
The struggle to quickly cut through today’s ever-increasing volume of noise is real, given that over 7.5 million blog posts, 500 million tweets and thousands of press releases are published daily.
With 59% of practitioners saying their markets have gotten much more competitive — a 16% increase since 2020 — capturing, analyzing and activating information has never been more critical to gain a competitive edge.
WHY AUTOMATION IS CRUCIAL
Utilizing technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to continuously find and vet new content sources on the web is decidedly more practical than tying up valuable time sales reps could use to make calls. Unlike standard search engines, AI leverages robotic process automation to dedupe, score, filter and categorize insights from online sources in real-time.
An automated approach also better aligns sales and marketing, helping companies become 67% better at closing deals.
On the flip side, sales and marketing misalignment is estimated to cost businesses $1 trillion each year in decreased sales productivity and wasted marketing efforts, while sales teams who work closely with marketing see 41% greater growth in reaching their quotas.
GETTING THE RIGHT INSIGHTS AT THE RIGHT TIME
FirstRain leverages AI and integrates with your CRM to enable sales reps to view relevant news associated with specific accounts of interest. Real-time, account-level insights push into their regular workflow, dramatically reducing time spent in pre-call research.
To stay up on the latest industry developments, FirstRain’s Market Insight Channel allows users to filter for relevant news associated with specific competitors, market categories or topics that relate to the company’s strategic roadmap. Access to this information helps with decision-making, both to head off threats and act on potential opportunities.
USING FIRSTRAIN TO INCREASE COLLABORATION
For a Fortune 100 telecommunications company, FirstRain has become a valued resource to drive employee collaboration. The company organized its portal into three primary sections: Customers, Competitors and Markets, with customized sales and marketing intelligence for different user groups. Each page gets real-time analytics on specific business lines, allowing users to:
- Focus on personally relevant trigger events for every account
- Track only competing business lines of a large company
- Uncover developments for key customer industries based on specific product lines to identify emerging sales opportunities and risks
Since using FirstRain, the company has:
- Increased usage on their portal pages, driving collaboration and shared insights
- Better identified emerging markets, sales risks and opportunities, enabling managers to react quickly to maintain a competitive advantage
- Expanded knowledge of critical events impacting enterprise accounts, giving sales reps more reasons to call and strengthen relationships
Want to learn more about how FirstRain can help your company stay ahead of the competition? If your company is an IgniteTech customer, you already have access to FirstRain through the IgniteTech Unlimited program. Book a call with your Client Adviser to get started.
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