If you’re like most manufacturers, you’re struggling to get true value out of the sales information in your CRM. One reason is the data just isn’t in there. Despite the capacities of Salesforce, humans fail to enter the data required to really power your sales org, and without the data, your CRM can’t deliver.
This has a significant material impact on your business. MIT Sloan Management Review estimates that “the cost of bad sales data is an astonishing 15% to 25% of revenue for most companies.”
Since no one has been able to get people to sufficiently populate their CRMs over the last 20 years, the answer lies not in trying to change human behavior. And besides, you didn’t really hire your sales reps for their manual data entry skills, did you? There has to be a better way.
The answer is in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the work that humans just aren’t doing (and shouldn’t have to do in the first place).
Today, enterprise manufacturers can unlock operational productivity and access unprecedented actionable insights through “revenue intelligence.”
What Is Revenue Intelligence with AI for Sales?
Revenue intelligence is an AI-driven, data-centric process that gathers, syncs, and manages data across all your customer-facing teams (sales, marketing, and customer success) to drive revenue.
Maribel Lopez, principal at Lopez Research, defines this as insights, “…that weren’t possible before artificial intelligence. For customer-facing teams, this is a game-changer.”
Dana Therrien, Service Director, Sales Operations Strategies at SiriusDecisions exclaims that “revenue intelligence providers are leading the charge of delivering on the promise of what sales force automation was supposed to do.”
This is delivered through a revenue intelligence system that leverages AI to automatically capture all contact and activity data from customer-facing teams, creating a “single source of truth.”
Manufacturers can use a revenue intelligence system to overcome challenges that up until now, have been nearly impossible to solve.
Looking for even more on Revenue Intelligence? Click here to read our latest article, where we discuss the first-ever Forrester Revenue Operations and Intelligence Wave and how People.ai is the only vendor in the Wave focused on delivering trustworthy data and insights for large enterprises.
3 Problems that Sales AI and Automation Solves
1. Uncaptured Data
Up until now, organizational analytics were at the mercy of the sales, marketing, and customer service reps who were responsible for the drudgerous task of logging all of their contacts, engagement data, and activities into the CRM. While, in theory, this happens after every point of contact with a customer or prospect, it almost never happens in practice.
More than half (55%) of salespeople admit that they don’t store lead and customer data in their CRM. Sales reps who do already spend almost 30% of their time each week manually entering data.
Most orgs still rely on this incomplete data for sales reporting, capacity planning, and sales forecasting. This results in missed forecasts and revenue left on the table — revenue that competitors can capture to reduce your market share.
A revenue intelligence system automatically captures all contact and activity data from customer-facing teams involved in the sales process and populates the CRM in the right opportunities, in the right accounts. It eliminates manual data entry and creates a reliable, accurate CRM.
People.ai customer and manufacturing technology company PTC, for example, was able to unlock 75,000 marketable contacts from their sales teams’ inboxes and automatically upload 266,000 activities to CRM.
2. Siloed Data
Data that is successfully captured is often siloed in marketing, sales, or customer success. As a result, on average, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics according to Forrester.
The notorious lack of collaboration between sales and marketing means that your company misses out on customer trends and opportunities, and doesn’t use a “single source of truth” when it comes to interactions with customers. Data gets stored in different locations (sometimes on a spreadsheet on a rep’s desktop) and isn’t useful for organizational-wide analysis or planning.
A revenue intelligence system eliminates siloes by capturing all data across functions in real time and pulling it into a single platform that serves as a single source of truth for your entire organization. With this trustworthy data, everyone gets on the same page and uses the same data sets to make better enterprise-wide decisions.
3. Outdated Data
With every moment that passes, your CRM grows stale with outdated data.
The average B2B organization’s database typically doubles every 12 to 18 months, and with contacts in the typical database containing critical errors, your CRM quickly becomes an expensive, unreliable mess with missing contacts and activity data. People change jobs, change titles, and often don’t update LinkedIn until a few months into a new job.
A revenue intelligence system automatically tracks and updates changes in contacts’ public data (email, title, phone, address) in real time so that your CRM stays up to date and your marketing team and sales reps can trust the data in the CRM to be right when they plan a campaign or make calls.
Success is Waiting for Earlier Adopters
AI strategy advisor, Vikram Mahidhar, stated in a Harvard Business Review article, “By the time a late adopter has done all the necessary preparation, earlier adopters [of AI tools] will have taken considerable market share — they’ll be able to operate at substantially lower costs with better performance. In short, the winners may take all and late adopters may never catch up.”
If you aren’t collecting customer activity data, you’re falling behind. This isn’t just about competing, it’s about survival. Whoever starts collecting and acting on data first WINS.
Luckily, People.ai’s five-step process for successful go-to-market (GTM) transformation in manufacturing makes it easy to keep up.
The People.ai Enterprise Revenue Intelligence System
People.ai offers the industry’s leading enterprise revenue intelligence system using AI for Sales that puts your CRM on autopilot and provides actionable intelligence across your CRM and business intelligence tools. With People.ai, sales, marketing, and customer service teams can realize the full selling capacity of your manufacturing enterprise.
Learn more about how you can capture and leverage data with the power of AI for sales and People.ai solutions.