Customer Intelligence refers to the unique information that gives vendors, salespeople, and account managers insight into why customers buy from them. Customer intelligence reveals how companies make decisions, which topics interest them, which events influence the timing of sales, and other triggers that comprise the customer experience.
If your business relies on a subscription model, you need to keep as many customers as you can, and you need to grow accounts as often as you can. Return business doesn’t come with the cost of acquisition – a factor that makes it even more attractive. While customer intelligence is readily available, it’s not easy to find and track. Customers are dynamic; they get new jobs, they shift ownership of vendor accounts within their organizations, they lose and make money. Your customers are changing all the time, and you need to stay as up-to-speed as possible about any movement that could change the sales situation.
When determining how to keep track of your customers, you need to follow a few types of information:
News Alerts reveal trigger events that create new business needs or opportunities. News alerts serve as actions that trigger sales. When news affects customers that have already purchased your products or services, new needs and opportunities arise. For example, a company that expands sales operations in a new geography may need additional services or products from an organization that sells them sales enablement tools.
People Alerts reveal when people that you follow experience change that creates or eliminates business needs or opportunities. For example, if the CFO to whom a financial software company sells moves to a different company, he or she may desire the same financial software at his or her new organization. An understanding of individuals’ moments of note, such as job shifts or news mentions, helps salespeople time and target deals.
Social Media Insights offer an alternative to company and people alerts that can be easier and quicker to track than individual and organizational news. Companies and their employees tend to be the first to spread news that pertains to their business, and following their posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks can offer first hand knowledge of key business drivers to salespeople and account managers.
Engagement with Customer Marketing such as form fill-outs or clicks through emails, landing pages, websites, marketing content, etc., reveals customers’ relationship drivers and gives companies insight into customer interests and needs. Organizations with detailed information about customer behavior online can accurately target new customers and maintain long lasting relationships with existing customers.
Benefits of Customer Intelligence
Because Customer Intelligence reveals the insights that shape the customer experience, Customer Intelligence allows companies to predict prospect behavior and catalyze upsells and renewals. Customer Intelligence can also predict why new customers may develop interest in products or services, how to target them, how to optimize for organic discovery, and how to position marketing campaigns to draw in prospects with a high likelihood of purchasing.
If you’re not tracking customers today, take a look at InsideView Relationship Manager. We built the application to enable easy customer tracking, and though we’re a little biased, it’s the best CI solution on the market.