Sales Performance Intelligence: What it is and Why You Should Invest in it

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of the highest growth companies in the world will deploy a RevOps model. Top firms invest heavily in RevOps and Sales Ops data analysis as technology lifts the burden of more basic administration tasks.

Sales performance intelligence is one area that has lagged. Now, AI and machine learning tools are demonstrating how to use historical sales data to create both increased revenue and better margins.

This is a brief intro to sales performance intelligence and why your enterprise should be looking to invest in it right now.

What is sales performance intelligence?

Sales Performance Intelligence (SPI) is a specialized type of data analytics that can help your organization better set and exceed sales targets.

Sales performance intelligence typically means using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to improve the performance of salespeople by optimizing incentives, improving forecasting and accruals, and identifying the best opportunities for revenue growth based on historical data analysis.

75% of high-growth companies will deploy a RevOps model by 2025

There isn't a huge difference between sales performance intelligence and revenue intelligence. The exact responsibilities will vary and overlap between organizations.

Sales or revenue intelligence has similar aims and uses AI to analyze speech patterns and other prospect and rep behavior throughout the sales process. It uses that data to evaluate potential customers to help sales better identify and reach their targets.

The Benefits of Sales Performance Intelligence

With the market evolving faster than ever, sales teams are under more and more pressure to deliver against a huge number of variables. To succeed in this environment, sales leaders need the right information to help them understand what is going on in their business in real-time.

Sales performance intelligence helps sales teams understand how to improve individual salespeople's performance and the entire departments' processes for better results over time.

Here are a few reasons why investing in sales performance intelligence is critical for the modern sales organization:

Learn More About Your Competitors

By tracking competitor activity using data analytics, you'll have access to information about what they're up to so that you can respond accordingly with new campaigns or product updates before they gain traction in the marketplace.

More Accurate Predictive Forecasts

Almost every company uses sales performance to shape its marketing and product development strategies, but not everyone has the data or tools necessary to do it effectively.

With a predictive analytics tool, you'll be able to view what's coming down the pipeline and anticipate market fluctuations, giving you the time to proactively respond with pricing changes, new products, SPIFs, or other incentive plan design changes.

Better Decision-Making

The right insights are powerful. They help sales managers see into the future and make decisions based on facts rather than hunches, which helps increase revenue.

It's tough to stay on top of the whirlwind just from reading reports. But with sales performance intelligence, you can see what matters in real-time, so not only are your decisions better, but they're also more informed and can have an impact faster than before.

Faster Change Management

The modern business landscape is changing faster than ever, with new go-to-market strategies and completely new arenas emerging all the time. Customer preferences are changing faster than ever.

The increasing complexity of the sales process, the involvement of non-traditional sales roles, and ever-complicated pricing models make agility very expensive for large businesses.

Sales performance intelligence platforms automate many of the most time-consuming data collection, validation, and processing that sales operations teams in large organizations currently spend most of their time doing.

Relieving them of the burden of data handling and basic admin frees them to analyze and strategize on the SPI platform's insights.

The benefits of sales performance intelligence are so compelling that any large enterprise with growth plans is looking to invest in the technology. In an increasingly varied and changeable business landscape, investment in sales and performance intelligence tools will be a key differentiator between top-performing firms and the laggards.

Finding The Right Sales Performance Intelligence Solution For Your Organization

If you're unsure what type of sales performance intelligence solution your organization should invest in, several resources are available to help out.

Besides our free resources, we also recommend you talk to companies that have already invested in SPI tools, including current customers, of any solutions you are considering. But before making any decisions, we recommend completing a five-year ROI evaluation on whichever solution you choose.

That will help you gauge whether it provides enough value back to continue investing time and resources into building up that area. The true cost of many enterprise software solutions is far higher than many consider at first, particularly in sales compensation.