Imagine closing prospects the moment they’re ready to buy. With real-time data, now you can!
It gives you a heads-up on key changes, such as M&As, job moves, or team growth. Your team stays ahead — ready to reach out and start selling, fast.
So what is real time data, how does it work, and how can you implement it without a complex data infrastructure? In this article, we’re exploring all this and the benefits of using accurate B2B data for real time sales.
What is real time data?
Real time data refers to immediate and continuous access to information about sales activities, customer interactions, and market trends.
Sounds complex, right?
Here’s what it means for your sales and marketing teams:
With up-to-date insights, you can make smarter decisions, personalise your outreach, and build stronger relationships.
That’s because sales data gives your teams timely insights into their performance, allowing them to react quickly to changing market conditions, identify opportunities, and address challenges.
Imagine your target account has another funding round or a significant market player acquires it. While previously, they wouldn’t have had the resources to buy your product, now might be the right time to approach them.
Just think of how much more effective your outreach emails could be if you started targeting people recently promoted to a decision-maker role who are in the market for your solution.
With an AI-powered B2B data provider like Cognism, you can! Here’s how to use this powerful tool to find and target high-intent accounts.
Job role: SDR
Improve close rates with intent signals
Use this play to:
Prioritise warm accounts based on frequency and recently of intent
Find economic buyers that land a new gig at a high intent account
Intercept buyers early in their journey and before they explore competitors
Why real time data is important
Real time data is important because it offers numerous benefits for B2B businesses.
What does it have to offer for your vertical? Let’s look at some tangible benefits real time data can provide for your company:
1. Timely sales opportunities
By accessing up-to-the-minute information on customer behaviours, preferences, and buying patterns, your B2B sales team can engage with prospects immediately, increasing the chances of closing deals.
Receiving funding, getting promoted, and increasing team size are real time insights that can trigger your sales activities — emails, LinkedIn messages, or call invitations.
2. Dynamic pricing and offers
Sales insights from immediate data updates allow businesses to adjust pricing based on market fluctuations or competitive moves.
Teams rarely have time to research these aspects. As a result, they can discover competitors offering better products or pricing during their sales conversations with buyers.
With the help of real time data collection, you can keep track of competitor pricing, customer demand, and inventory levels to optimise pricing strategies and make instant adjustments. All this with little-to-no work for your sales team.
Tip! Don’t forget to incorporate robust key management for data security to safeguard all of your sensitive information and avoid additional risks
3. Immediate lead engagement
When a prospect expresses interest or takes specific actions, such as visiting a website or filling out a form, you can immediately engage with them, increasing the likelihood of converting them into customers.
All you need to do is define your sales triggers and actions.
For example, after a prospect visits your pricing page, you can email them to schedule a demo.
Henderson Scott used Cognism’s B2B data and sales trigger alerts to accelerate sales efficiency. They said:
“Within Cognism, you can see if a company is hiring, has been recently acquired or has received a round of investment.”
“Additionally, filtering company size in the platform is great for understanding how business hierarchies are laid out. These are all fantastic buying signals for us.”
Furthermore, with real time data processing, you no longer rely on manual tracking and outreach. It can all be automated to nurture prospects faster.
4. Accurate sales forecasting
You can gain real time actionable insights into sales performance and, as a result, get accurate sales forecasting.
Sales managers can monitor sales data quality in actual time, track progress against targets, adjust sales strategies to meet revenue goals and effectively manage pipeline visibility.
This enables more precise financial projections, and you can further enhance this process by implementing financial modeling software that integrates sales data with financial metrics.
You can also use a tool like Airtable to centralise and organise sales data. This makes it easier to collaborate, analyse, and create dynamic reports for better decision-making and strategic planning.
5. Personalised customer interactions
Instant data offers you the opportunity to personalise customer interactions more effectively.
By accessing real time data analytics on customer preferences, purchase history, and previous interactions, you can tailor-make relevant recommendations and provide a personalised customer experience.
6. Instant sales performance insights
With real time data analysis, you gain instant visibility into sales performance metrics.
In actual time, sales representatives can monitor their performance, such as call activity, conversion rates, and revenue generated. This immediate feedback enables reps to course-correct, improve their sales techniques, and achieve better results.
What’s more, effective reporting solutions make it even easier to track these metrics and spot areas for improvement.
7. Agile sales strategies
By monitoring real time market trends, competitor activities, and customer feedback, sales managers can make data-driven decisions, adjust sales strategies, and seize emerging opportunities.
8. Prompt customer issue resolution
Business intelligence tools that offer real time data services help sales teams promptly address customer issues or concerns.
By tracking customer behaviour, such as feedback, complaints and inquiries in actual time, sales reps can proactively contact customers and help eliminate them.
📞 Book a call with a Cognism data expert to learn more about our compliant data.
How does real time data work?
Real time data means fetching specific actions on the go.
For example, these actions can be anything your customers do on your website or offsite such as visiting your sales pages, checking your company’s profile on LinkedIn, or visiting sites similar to yours.
Before the system stores any information, events are collected. As a result, it makes it possible for sales data to be managed instantly and for predictive analytics to occur.
But don’t worry; you don’t have to be a data analyst or scientist to make real time B2B data work for your team.
Here’s how marketing and sales teams can use real time data for success.
How can marketing and sales use real time data?
Updating your lead records in actual time results in better sales performance and cost savings across your entire business.
Using it helps your sales team unleash specific triggers to initiate conversations instead of running mass campaigns with a low response rate.
There are many ways to use real time big data for better business decisions. Here’s how:
- New company funding — you can learn about the funding a company receives right after the information becomes public. You would typically source this information using a real time data platform like Crunchbase or Cognism. As a result, you can save valuable time and reach out to B2B decision-makers right away.
- Enterprise acquisitions — business acquisitions are a strong growth signal as companies going through the process look for tools and partners who can assist them with the transition. It’s your chance to get their attention before your competitors become aware of the business activity.
- Visiting critical webpages — prospects checking out your pricing or product pages can signal high purchase intent and the sales opportunity you shouldn’t waste. Instead of learning about the lead’s activity days or months after they visit these pages, you can track them immediately using intent data from a real time customer data platform like Cognism. This data type can also help trigger a sales action like an email sequence or sales call.
- Improved lead scoring — using real time data helps improve lead scoring accuracy. Once your prospect performs a critical action on your website or some event triggers an increase in their score, sales reps can react fast and reach leads with a high chance of a conversion.