The most basic aspect of striking a conversation with someone is to converse about something that would interest them. Yet, in a B2B business scenario, we are too focused on what we would like to sell rather than trying to know where a customer stands in their business journey, what their priorities are at that given point in time and more. All we do is, go after the leads assigned to us on our CRM.

CRM is a Component, Not an All-Compassing Solution

Most of us in sales and marketing chase numbers, we want to improve the sales conversion rate on the accounts in our CRM. What a CRM does for you, is the consolidation of data about your customer and you also manage customer calls, communication, and sales from a single CRM console. But - do a generic, hit-or-miss kind of pitch without knowing where the customer or prospect is – in their buying cycle.

1. Enabling Better Customer Engagement

If you look at it a little closer, we tend to become intrusive more often than the CRM enabling you to give your customers a good customer experience (CX). This is one of the areas where predictive intelligence can make a difference. Predictive intelligence can help you glean into customer signals from various sources external to your IT environment and combine it with your CRM and marketing automation to enable meaningful engagements from within your CRM console.

When discussing the topic with Karthik Thenalur, one of the co-founders of Fiind, he shared, “We need to go way beyond the deployment of traditional CRM, we need to be enabling a seamless customer experience along the customer journey, with the help of the right data. If we can get the right data at the right time, then the onus is on us to deliver.”

2. Intelligence for Contextual Personalization

Be it your marketing campaign or a sales pitch, the one that resonates at a personal level elicits a response, maybe a favorable response at times. Being in the era of digital transformation, we are not too far from knowing what to say to each prospect. Predictive intelligence can help you with the points to pitch for each prospect so that it the message resonates with them.

3. Identifying the Right Customer

Marketers need to be able to predict and respond to live customer dynamics in the moment. They need to anticipate changes in consumer sentiment that lead to shifts in market trends – whether it’s at a global level, or down to a single customer. With the help of predictive intelligence, you can segment your leads based on their buying signals such as where they are in the buying cycle, is there a product-fit, are they an account to be pursued now or should you nurture them a little longer, etc. Thus, your energies are focused on the right accounts at the right time, and your conversion percentage goes up.

4. Predictive Upsell and Cross-Sell

One of the biggest questions that keeps account managers awake is – what product do I upsell and to which customer? More importantly when? When Amazon began recommending products to its customers in an uncanny way, it had a 29% increase in sales. You could personalize your recommendations and thereby upsell and cross-sell for each account in your CRM with the right product at the right moment by integrating predictive intelligence tools directly into your CRM.

5. Predictive Lead Generation

Once you have most parts of your sales funnel working well without leaks, it is time you consider predictive lead generation. It means you could generate net new leads similar to the customers in your CRM that you have already closed deals. Generate leads based on ones having a great product-fit, need for the product, their IT environment, their current stage in the buying cycle and more.