Why Market Intelligence Is a Must for Your B2B Sales Team

As a B2B company, we at Similarweb experience and facilitate thousands of B2B sales processes every year.

They all have the same basic structure and can be summed up in four distinctive steps.

These are:

1. Research your prospects and get as much relevant information as you can.
2. Listen to your prospects – learn their pain points and how they want to solve them.
3. Show your prospects how you can become a partner for them, and bring value to their day-to-day even after they’ve made the purchase.
4. Give before you take, and nurture those leads even if it’s not yet their time to close.

In this blog post, I want to explore the role Digital Intelligence plays in each of the stages of B2B sales processes.

Before we dive in, let’s examine what we mean by Market Intelligence.

Digital Intelligence is the information that is relevant to a company’s market.

This includes insights into the company and competitor trends.

In this context, the data is used for the purpose of accurately understanding your prospects, their competitive ecosystem, and their clients.

With more and more business conducted online, there is a wealth of data that can be used to better understand our customers and prospects at each point of their lifecycle.

Let’s dive in to see how you can use Digital Intelligence throughout the B2B sales process.

Research Your Prospects

Researching your prospects is a must before reaching out or jumping on a call with them.

You’re going to want to know as much as you can about who they are, what are the potential pains they may be experiencing (even if they themselves don’t know they have them) and how you can match your offer to help solve those pains.

The first thing you can do to prepare for this is to download this checklist – in it, you’ll find a list of all the information you should prepare ahead of your first meeting.

In addition to that, you should find Digital Intelligence data that gives you a clearer picture of your prospects’ current status.

The total amount of visitors to a site has will give you an idea into the health of their website.

Letting them know you can help revert their 20% decrease in traffic will position you as a trusted advisor in their eyes.

Listen to Your Prospects

Once you’re already in contact with your prospects, make sure you listen to them and ask questions that will help you understand the type of value you can create for them.

Then use Digital Intelligence to bring up examples of how you can support them through that.

An example of this can be if your prospect tells you they haven’t grown as much as they wanted in the past year, and that it’s one of their main goals for the upcoming year.

Show their site’s engagement metrics and how they need to be improved in order to increase conversions.

Tell them how you can help better these metrics and achieve their growth goals.

Bring Value to Your Prospects

The best way to continue bringing value to prospects is to share insights throughout the sales process.

Whether it be competitive intelligence or industry benchmarking – your prospect wants to see what you can teach them about their business that they don’t already know.

In this case, we see our prospect is performing significantly above industry benchmarks for organic traffic (which is great) but could better optimize their referral and paid search traffic.

A great way to engage with them is to offer an effective way to increase their traffic from these channels where they fall behind.

Nurture the Relationship With Prospects

It’s important to nurture prospects with relevant and timely insights that will help them realize the value you can provide.

Setting up triggers is one way to make sure you don’t miss any events that might make your prospects more likely to engage.

If they suddenly see a sharp increase in traffic from a country where they don’t currently ship (let’s say New Zealand for the sake of this example), you can reach out by offering them shipping options there.

Other types of events that can trigger an opportunity for reaching out are new rounds of funding, hiring, and growth in website traffic.

In Summary

Leaning on Digital Market Intelligence can really give your B2B sales team an upper hand throughout every stage of the sales process.

Using it will allow you to show your prospects how valuable you can be to them, and how effectively you can solve their pain points.