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Step 2: Prioritize Leads with Sales Intelligence
What makes a deal close fast?
Sales professionals who exceed their number quarter after quarter have a secret. They focus their effort on the deals most likely to close quickly and they nurture other prospects until the time is right.
What makes a deal close fast? You’ve already screened your leads to make sure they are a good fit. Two other factors tend to accelerate a deal.
- There is a compelling event ("buying trigger") driving the sale.
- You have a strong connection to someone in the company who can make introductions and be your champion.
Customize your news feed
Agents gather news stories from over 40,000 sources and sort them into sales-relevant categories. Before doing anything else, it’s a good idea to optimize the news that Sales Intelligence provides so that it’s tailored to your business.
Turn off unneeded news categories
Use the “Manage Agents” screen to turn off any categories that aren’t a trigger for your business.
Turning off the flow of news stories that you don’t care about helps avoid information overload and makes it easier to see critical news stories that might impact a sale.
Add Custom Agents to see stories with relevant keywords
The 18 Standard Agents that come pre-defined in Sales Intelligence cover many common buying triggers. But you can add your own Custom Agents to include news articles with keywords that are specific to your product or service.
Using Insights to Prioritize
There are several ways you can view Insights (news stories):
- Browse news from the Overview Tab of a Company record.
When you are focusing on a single company, you will see company Insights displayed in the Sales Intelligence window when you navigate to an Account or Opportunity page in your CRM.
- Add the company to a Watchlist and get email alerts with the latest news.
In addition to getting a daily (or weekly) email with the latest company news, navigating to the Watchlist screen in Sales Intelligence allows you to scan for companies that have a high number of Agent results (news stories). If you have tailored your Agents, this can be a clue that something is going on that is of interest.
- Use an Agent as a filter when building a Company List to show only companies that have news stories in a certain category.
If you use the Agent filter when building a Company List, you can find, screen and prioritize leads all in one easy step.
Gather all company data
The data tabs give you everything available on the company, including, but not limited to:
- Address
- Company Description
- Financials
- Industry Information
- Family Tree (Subsidiaries & Acquisitions)
- Revenue
- Employee count
- Website
Using Connections to prioritize leads
Like buying triggers, having a Connection in a company can accelerate a deal. You can see a snapshot of your connections on the Overview Tab when you view a company in Sales Intelligence. For a more complete view of your connections to a company, navigate to the People Tab.
As with Agents, you can filter for Connections when you build a Company List. This gives you a head start on finding high priority leads.