Learn More About Lead Intelligence Software
What is Lead Intelligence Software?
One of the major challenges faced by salespeople is keeping customer and prospect data up to date. Another important issue is to find relevant information about opportunities without spending too much time gathering and analyzing large volumes of data. To address these challenges, lead intelligence software helps companies optimize their lead management process by using external and internal data and insights.
This type of software does not provide lists of leads nor does it manage the entire lifecycle of an opportunity. Therefore, it cannot replace lead generation software. For this reason, lead intelligence software always integrates with other sales and marketing solutions.
Key Benefits of Lead Intelligence Software
- Improve lead conversion and closing rates
- Optimize the lead management processes
- Reduce the time spent to qualify leads
Why Use Lead Intelligence Software?
Lead management software provides functionality to capture and generate leads but does not always help with choosing the opportunities that are more likely to convert into sales. Lead intelligence software fills this gap by enriching leads with additional data that is not included in standard lead management software.
Improve sales and revenue — Lead intelligence software helps sales and marketing teams focus more on selling and spend less time on manually managing leads. Also, the information provided by lead intelligence solutions are used to identify new opportunities for upselling and cross-selling to existing customers.
Increase productivity — CRM and sales products require a lot of manual work and data entry, which hurts the productivity of the salespeople. Traditional lead management tools are no exception, but lead intelligence helps address this challenge by providing curated customer data that users don’t need to gather, clean, and analyze.
Enhance customer satisfaction — Other than increasing sales, lead intelligence software is used to learn more about prospects and customers, which leads to long time business relationships. Customers who feel understood and respected tend to be happier, more loyal, and more likely to become advocates for the products and services they acquire.
Who Uses Lead Intelligence Software?
Anyone involved in sales and marketing can benefit from using lead intelligence software. This software type is particularly important to companies that are having a hard time finding valuable leads. A few examples are providers of expensive products and services or businesses from niche industry segments.
Sales teams — To be productive, salespeople need to identify the leads that have the most potential to convert into sales. Even with other types of software such as lead capture and lead generation, sales teams spend a lot of time on manual tasks to qualify leads. Lead intelligence software facilitates sales activities by providing additional information about prospects and customers, increasing the chances of closing a sale. The sheer volume and complexity of this data may be overwhelming, which is why lead intelligence software delivers structured insights that are easier to use.
Marketing — While the main purpose of this type of software is to help sales teams close deals, markets also use it to deploy personalized campaigns. Better targeting generates new sales opportunities. Marketing professionals use the insights it provides to optimize their strategies, better understand demand, and adapt to market changes.
Small business owners — Since many small businesses don’t have dedicated sales teams, their owners are usually in charge of finding new opportunities. As sales are not their only responsibility, small business owners need to quickly and efficiently find prospects and the information required to convert them into customers.
Kinds of Lead Intelligence Software
Depending on how the software is sold and used, there are two main types of lead intelligence software.
Standalone — Some products focus exclusively on lead intelligence and can only be acquired and used separately from other solutions. These tools need to integrate with lead capture and lead generation software and with CRM or sales solutions. Standalone lead intelligence products enrich and optimize leads generated by other products, and transfer the best opportunities to the solutions used by the sales teams. This option is most beneficial to companies with robust CRM and sales software and only need supplemental functionality for lead intelligence.
Part of a larger system — Lead intelligence functionality is often provided as a module of a system that includes other features for sales, marketing, or lead capture and analysis. This is a good option for companies that need to replace outdated or limited CRM systems and improve their lead management processes.
Lead Intelligence Software Features
The functionality provided by lead intelligence software varies from one product to another, but usually includes the following features. Some products also include the advanced features mentioned below.
Data management and enrichment — Since lead intelligence software uses many types of data, it needs to manage data sources, allow users to import and export data, and perform data synchronization between multiple systems. The most common data sources used in lead intelligence are software systems such as CRM and sales, social media, and databases containing contact information and other details on companies and their employees.
List building and management — Salespeople categorize leads based on multiple criteria, such as customer type, industry, location, and so on. These lists are improved using lead intelligence data, which allows users to verify and recategorize them. This allows sales and marketing teams to better target prospects with similar characteristics.
Lead scoring — An increasing number of lead intelligence products use predictive models for lead scoring and qualification. This allows users to assign ratings to leads based on their potential to generate new business opportunities. A lead score can change and lead intelligence data provides valuable data to update scores with the latest and most reliable information.
Profiles — Sales and marketing professionals define profiles of ideal customers which they use to define and implement lead generation strategies. Lead intelligence software provides valuable information to identify the prospects that are a close match to the ideal customer profile.
Alerts and notifications — As lead data gets updated frequently, users need to know when changes occur. For instance, when a prospect switches jobs, sales teams may want to approach the prospect to check if the new company could be a potential customer. Similarly, when a decision maker involved in sales negotiations leaves a company, leads can be compromised and salespeople need to take corrective actions.
Workflows — Workflows define what steps are necessary at each stage of the lead intelligence process. For instance, leads are assigned to salespeople based on predefined criteria and workflows. When lead details change, the opportunity may be reassigned or moved to another stage. Since manual changes are time consuming and prone to error, workflows help users automate the processes using business logic. The system should allow administrators to override changes made automatically, but only when approved by a manager.
Search — Since lead intelligence software uses large volumes of data, it is important for users to easily find relevant information. Search functionality is therefore critical and should include features such as autocomplete, advanced filters, and intelligent search (ranking by relevance and display similar results).
Other Features of Lead Intelligence Software: Browser Extension Capabilities, Social Media Integration Capabilities
Additional Lead Intelligence Software Features
Verified data — Most public data isn’t always validated by objective third parties to ensure that it’s accurate. For instance, contact information found on social media networks may be out of date or misleading. To address this challenge, providers of lead intelligence software verify the information by contacting companies and confirming their contact details and other business data types.
Developer APIs — Lead intelligence software needs to integrate with other software, and vendors cannot always provide connectors or APIs for each solution used by their customers. Instead, vendors allow users to create custom APIs for easier integration with any compatible system.
Potential Issues with Lead Intelligence Software
Integration — Unless they are part of a suite, lead intelligence software solutions only deliver optimal results when they can exchange data with other systems. While vendors provide integration and APIs with the most popular CRM and sales solutions, integration with other systems may be challenging. Thus, buyers may need to make additional investments in customized integrations, which are not included in the standard cost of lead intelligence products.
Specialization — Since lead intelligence products were created for B2B sales, some of them may specialize in industry sectors such as manufacturing or retail. This specialization provides more accurate opportunities for the active companies in these industries, but may not be very useful for other industries.
Compliance — Since lead intelligence software relies on large volumes of customer data, this type of software needs to comply with privacy and security regulations. Ideally, buyers shouldn’t worry about these challenges, and vendors should provide information compliant with all applicable regulations. Buyers need to ensure that vendors do their due diligence and do not expose private or business data.
