Sales intelligence

As a vendor category, third-party data about companies and contacts for prospecting; in plain usage, insight into your own sales.

DefinitionAs a vendor category, third-party data about companies and contacts for prospecting; in plain usage, insight into your own sales.

The term has two meanings. As a product category it is purchased data: firmographics, contacts, buying signals, used to find accounts a business does not have. In plain English it is intelligence about the sales a business already makes. The first cannot see your ledger; the second is built from it. When someone asks for sales intelligence, ask which they mean.

How it is used

As a vendor category, purchased data about companies and contacts for finding new accounts. In plain usage, insight into the sales a company already makes, from its own ledger and activity.

Example

A prospecting database lists 4,000 companies in a sector with contacts. It cannot say which of your 1,800 existing customers buy half of what similar customers buy.

Where it goes wrong

A prospecting database bought to fix retention. It cannot see your customers.

Articles that use this term

Data quality and reconciliation

B2B customer segmentation from the ledger, not from personas

How to segment a B2B customer base from data the company holds: the two or three fields that make a segment useful for norms, size, sector and channel, why behavioural fields like order frequency and product mix belong in the measures rather than the segment definition, the minimum segment size that makes a norm mean something, the test that a segmentation is good, and why personas do not survive contact with a ledger.

16 Sept 20263 min read Wallet share and penetration

Cross-sell and upsell: measuring each from the ledger so they stop being one number

The difference between cross-sell and upsell, how each is computed from the ledger, cross-sell as new product lines at an existing customer and upsell as more of a line already bought, the norm each is measured against, the two lists they produce, and why blending them into one expansion figure hides which of the two a team is good at.

16 Sept 20262 min read Coverage and territory

How to build a sales coverage model from the ledger in five steps

A step-by-step method for a sales leader building a coverage model from data already held: define the touch, build the roll-up hierarchy, compute coverage per rep against a tier cadence, reconcile it to the ledger, and produce the weekly untouched list. Each step with the export it needs, the check that proves it, and the mistake that most often undoes it.

16 Sept 20263 min read Coverage and territory

Sales activity metrics that matter: touches at cadence, not calls per day

Why calls per day and emails sent are the wrong activity metrics, what to measure instead, qualifying touches on assigned accounts against each account's tier cadence, the three activity measures that predict outcomes at most teams, coverage at cadence, touch mix by tier, and first-touch latency, how each is computed from the activity log, and the activity report that a rep can read without feeling surveilled.

16 Sept 20263 min read How-to guides

Sales intelligence from the data you already hold: five sources, one roll-up

What sales intelligence means when it is built from finance, CRM, activity, product and benchmark data a company already has: the five sources, how they join on the client, the roll-up that reconciles them, and the questions a salesperson can then ask that no dashboard anticipated.

16 Sept 20263 min read AI and self-service analytics

Ten questions to ask an AI sales analytics vendor before you sign

A buyer's checklist for AI sales analytics: where each number comes from, whether the model computes or reads, how definitions are versioned, what the roll-up identity is and whether it is checked, how a wrong answer is caught, what data leaves your building, whether names are needed, what happens when the exports change, what the assistant refuses to do, and what you can take with you. Each with the answer that should worry you.

16 Sept 20263 min read