Revenue Intelligence is the new BI? Why are sales areas becoming data centers

For years, companies have invested in BI to understand what was happening, with dashboards, reports and cross-bases.It worked to a certain extent.The problem is that much of the data that really matters never reached any system, getting stuck in conversations and exchanges.

In sales meetings, calls and message exchanges, the customer says everything: real objections, competitors that he is evaluating, decision deadlines, budgets that have not yet been approved. These are pipeline data, competitive intelligence and timing.

What goes into CRM is what the salesperson remembered to type after the meeting, in the midst of numerous other tasks. That is, it is a partial and even outdated cut of reality. And it is on this cutout that managers make forecast, CS prioritizes accounts at risk and CROs project the next revenues. 

It is there, in front of these weak points, that Revenue Intelligence appears with the ability to transform business interactions into structured data that feed strategic decisions, transforming the entire sales and revenue cycle of a company.

While BI is based on information already recorded, Revenue Intelligence captures data at the moment it is born, either in a customer speech or in patterns that only appear when you gather hundreds of conversations and can see what is really happening.

In addition, this intelligence is not only for sales.It connects what the customer says in prospecting with what the CS needs to know for retention, connects the pattern of objections with the content that marketing should produce. That is, it is an intelligence shared between teams that often operate in a segmented way.

B2B companies with complex sales generate an immense volume of unstructured data every day.Each business interaction contains valuable information about the market, competition, customer buying behavior and possible procedural bottlenecks.The challenge is that often this data is treated only as part of a conversation.

When you start structuring this data with security and integration into the systems that already exist, the sales area starts to function as a data center in the strategic sense: a place from where insights that guide strategic decisions of the entire company come out.

However, it is very important to note that data without security is not active, it is risk. Whenever we talk about capturing conversations, the question about security is immediate (and legitimate). The conversation with the customer may be the most sensitive asset of a commercial operation, treating this data with the same rigor that it is a financial basis is the minimum that any serious company should require of the tools it adopts. 

Finally, the best information about your customer is already in your company, in the conversations and exchanges that happen every day. The question is what you are doing with them. Always remembering that encryption and compliance with the LGPD are not differentials, they are requirements. Any platform that treats Revenue Intelligence seriously needs to take this as a starting point.

Thais Sterenberg's she is CEO and Co-Founder of Elephan.ai, the most complete revenue intelligence platform for B2B companies. Expert in Growth and revenue, post-graduate in Marketing (ESPM), the executive is a former Danone and Nestle, was a partner/CMO of Fix and built from scratch the B2B Growth of QuintoAndar. She also works as a teacher and mentor, in addition to being a co-founder of the Women of Growth ecosystem. She was recognized as Top 10 Female Founders to Watch (Aurora Tech Awards).