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What is Revenue Intelligence and How is it Changing Marketing Reporting?
Revenue intelligence is a new way of working for marketing and sales professionals. We explore what it is and how you can adopt it to ensure your business is ahead of the curve for 2022.
There’s no doubt that revenue is always front of mind for sales and marketing teams, there’s no doubt. It’s our ultimate end goal when we’re looking at trying new channels, creating new content or sharing new ad types. So, why don’t we use it when it comes to reporting back on, and optimising our campaigns?
Well, there are some hurdles in regards to data matching and collation to get over first.
This blog will help you understand:
Revenue intelligence is a data-centric process that collects, collates and manages data from your sales, marketing and customer success teams. Revenue intelligence automatically builds a holistic view of your sales pipeline and marketing sources to help your teams make data-driven decisions.
Without revenue intelligence, your teams would be left guessing with disconnected data and missing pieces of the puzzle.
Revenue intelligence allows you to connect the dots and make sense of your data in a way that everyone can understand.
🚀 Pro Tip
Not sure how to get the data you need to make data-driven decisions about your marketing? Read our guide to marketing attribution to learn how you can do it yourself.
We know it can be hard to keep up with these new terms. But revenue intelligence is one that’s going to continue to grow in the future. The best way to prepare your business is to implement revenue intelligence sooner rather than later.
As competition rises between companies and new technologies help advance outputs, businesses are right to expect more out of their sales and marketing teams. But how can revenue intelligence help you optimise your business? We have it down to these three main reasons:
Without revenue intelligence, you’re relying on what data you get automatically within your CRM. And we can say with confidence that it’s not much.
While your CRM is great at managing your leads, it’s not great at pulling data out about your leads. And why would it be?
Your CRM isn’t linked directly to your website. So, actions a lead or user takes on your site won’t get passed over to your CRM.
Related: How to integrate your CRM with Google Analytics
Unfortunately, that means you miss out on data like:
With revenue intelligence, you can fill in the gaps.
Does your sales team call leads? If so, they probably ask them, “how did you hear about us?”
And while you’ll get some insight, how accurate is it going to be? A lead could have seen a PPC ad for you but told your sales rep, Google. That doesn’t help your marketing team understand how their paid advertising is driving leads. And because of the disconnect between your CRM and your website, there’s no way to work around this.
🚀 Pro Tip
If you’re using an attribution tool like Ruler Analytics can! Read more about how Ruler tracks leads from your paid efforts
And that’s just one example. When your lead source isn’t set automatically, it can easily be changed. That means a lack of information for your marketing teams and inaccurate data for your sales team too.
When you’re relying on manual input of data on your leads and opportunities, you can bet it’s going to be stale.
Your sales team wants key information that will help them close leads. And marketing wants data that will help them optimise their campaigns to drive more of the same.
Without revenue intelligence, it’s hard to achieve either of those goals.
Related: How to achieve sales and marketing alignment
So by now, we bet you’re wondering how to implement revenue intelligence, and how it all works?
Let’s walk through how it works with Ruler.
Ella is searching online. She lands on your ranking blog organically and reads it.
Now, without revenue intelligence tools (or a marketing attribution tool), the only way you could view Ella is as one session that occurred on a particular day via Google Analytics. Ruler, however, is tracking Ella. It has captured her original source as well as which pages she’s engaged with. Of course, as she’s not a lead yet, she’d be an unknown user in Ruler.
Ella returns a few days later via a direct search. She browses your site, landing on key pages but doesn’t convert.
Ruler again tracks Ella, storing this session’s data along with her previous session data.
A week or so later, Ella returns. This time via an organic search to a blog on your site. This time, she converts via a CTA banner on your blog, downloading a piece of content from you.
As she’s converted, i.e. she’s given her email address in exchange for a piece of content, Ruler fires all of the data on Ella over to your CRM.
At this point, your CRM (without Ruler) would have this information:
And that’s it!
If you had set up form fills as an event on Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager, then you would also see which channels drive those eBook downloads, but you can’t get more granular than that with these tools.
But what about if you had revenue intelligence in place?
At the point of a new lead, the data in your CRM looks very different.
You’d have:
Plus, in Ruler, you’d have the full customer journey to date.
But it gets better when revenue is involved.
Let’s return to Ella’s customer journey. She’s downloaded an eBook and so is sent a specific email campaign promoting your product or service.
She clicks on the link and calls your business. On that call, she converts.
Now, without revenue intelligence, it would be a bit like this…
Your sales team would field the call and close the sale. They’d ask Ella, “where did you hear of us?” and she might say “Google”.
⚡️ Pro Tip
Why asking ‘how did you hear about us?’ on its own, isn’t enough. We looked at our own inbound lead data and correlated how users said they found us, compared to how they really found us.
Read the report on self-attribution here.
And she wouldn’t be wrong.
But you don’t know exactly which page started her customer journey. And, there’d be no credit to the email campaign that led to her picking up the phone.
With revenue intelligence in place, all of that data would be at your fingertips.
Related: How to track marketing leads
And, even better, when the revenue is added to Ella in your CRM, Ruler would scrape it and fire it to your analytics tools. There, it’s accurately attributed meaning you have clear revenue reports where you need them.
If you generate leads, then yes.
If you tend to see long, complicated customer journeys, then also yes.
While Google Analytics can take you part of the way when it comes to understanding how your marketing impacts your bottom line, it doesn’t give you a full picture of what’s going on.
With revenue intelligence and marketing attribution, you can see exactly where leads that result in revenue are coming from.
It means you can quickly and easily optimise your outputs for what you know is working. And, it gives you the freedom to test new initiatives and track results quickly, and accurately.
So, what are you waiting for?
Get started with Ruler Analytics and start making more out of your data. Book a demo with our team to see the data in action. Or learn more about how you can track your full customer journeys and every touchpoint in play, then download our guide.
