The art of marketing evolves every few decades. Today, the discipline has undergone a quantum leap fueled by the advances in technology. One factor that has completely changed how businesses perform sales and marketing is the availability of free marketing data. Consumers have become less dependent on product or service information dispensed by marketers.
Data shows that 53% of all online shoppers will perform in-depth research into the item that they want to purchase before settling on the best choice. The customer is not the only entity fully informed about product choices, as well as the best prices and deals in the market.
Your competitor is also leveraging Big Data analytics to stay ahead of the curve. Research shows that 53% of businesses also are into Big Data analytics for business insights. One of the most popular applications for data mining is in sales intelligence data.
What is sales intelligence?
Sales intelligence is a term commonly associated with the modern Customer Relationship Management system. At times sales intelligence denotes tools used in gathering sales and prospects data. It is, nonetheless, a business data harvesting process that combines both competitive and market intelligence data mining.
Market intelligence data will give you the answer to the age-old business question, “what does the customer want”? The data will also highlight where best your product fits in. It will also highlight issues such as the target customer and the market demand for your product or services.
Sales intelligence also avails competitive intelligence data that will reveal your challengers’ market share. All this information is of great value to the sales force and therefore qualifies as sales intelligence. If you are interested, check out oxylabs sales intelligence solution to keep up with the ever changing markets.
How businesses mine market intelligence
The world of Big Data is nevertheless expansive. The running estimate is that there are over two quintillions of data uploaded on different web platforms every single day. A business that requires sales intelligence needs efficient, cost-effective, fast data mining, analysis methods, and tools.
One of the most popular data harvesting methods out there is via a web scraper. Web scraping tools extract information from online sources. The tools are easy to use, and all you need to do it to click on your target website to get them to work.
The scraping tool will crawl, scrape, and download the data to a local computer file or database in an organized and easy to use format. Afterward, your sales team can access the downloaded data for sales intelligence insights.
Web scraping tools use proxies to increase anonymity during data harvesting. Anonymity in data scraping increases data access efficiency, preventing IP bans or blacklisting. The proxy server will act as a protective shield hiding your IP address and issuing their IP addresses instead of other web addresses. Proxies intercept all traffic flowing from or to your web browser and channel it to their servers. Any website tracking or monitoring your web activity will, therefore, only view the proxy’s unique web identifier during scraping.
The benefits of scraping websites for sales intelligence
Mostly, companies are choosing a web scraping solution for sales intelligence to monitor concurrent’ prices. E-commerce shops implement a lot of price changes every day all over the internet. Imagine if you need to oversee the whole market and to get the required information manually. It looks like a very time-consuming job, even for the biggest companies. Businesses use price tracking and price monitoring solutions in an automated way to stay competitive, to monitor every day changing markets and growing consumer price sensitivity. Also, there are other advantages to using web scraping for sales intelligence:
Enhances data quality
As mentioned, there is information overload online. It is humanly impossible to access, read, and apply it all to business-related activities without the use of bots. Web scraping bots can access information whose context is relevant to your sales forces.
Such data is accurate, eliminating misdirected sales messages, inaccurate forecasting, high bounce rates, and wasted time spent on untargeted cold calling. Real-time data scrapers will give fresh, high-quality data that targets the right customer.
Gives insight to customer intent
Every business needs to understand real consumer intent before embarking on marketing and sales strategies. Awareness of customer intent is the Holy Grail of sales and marketing. Sales intelligence can deliver intent data from different online platforms such as social media or reviews and highlight the products or topics that a potential customer is interested in.
Spotting buy signals
Articles, publications, press releases, webinars, report downloads, or email newsletter clicks are all excellent sources of buying signals. Your sales intelligence mining tools can access all these data sources in real-time mode and deliver fresh insights to your sales team. This data gives a sales team the green light to enact their strategies effectively.
Lead generation
Sales intelligence can also keep your sales funnel filled with leads. The data collected from the process will help your sales team to identify a potential customer. Also, a business can use these insights to create a customer profile when designing a service or product.
The customer avatars help the sales department focused and discover more about the niche they are in and what their strengths are.
Conclusion
There are endless applications for sales intelligence. The data’s ability to assist sales teams in making higher sales as well as increasing their positioning potential is priceless. Access the best real-time web scraping tools and start your business’s sales intelligence data mining strategy.
