Strategic deals can be seen as a team sport, much like a relay race where each member must sprint in a carefully coordinated fashion to ensure the team’s victory. An integral element of teamwork is a unified platform that keeps everyone on the same page. Several companies are adopting strategies such as opportunity management to manage the sales pipeline at every stage which involves identifying, tracking, and managing potential sales opportunities. 

Strategic planning, data analysis, and relationship-building are some of the important tools to choose the best opportunities to pursue. No organization can afford to have scattered deal information that can lead to wasted hours and miscommunication. Relationship intelligence can be the most powerful tool in the process of opportunity management that enhances efficiency and improves collaboration by creating automated processes to view, analyze, and implement all relevant information.  

Read More: Complete Guide on Sales Methodologies to Win Large Deals

The Growing Relevance of Relationship Intelligence

Key account relationship intelligence is much more than the information and data about your contacts and extends beyond phone numbers, job titles, and pain points. It’s an invaluable repository of the timeline of client interactions, their budgets, and their choice of service or product. Relationship intelligence also includes gauging client sentiment in order to truly understand the nature of your business relationships. 

An efficient relationship mapping software platform will capture and extract information about all your contacts, analyze it, and share intelligent insights to manage those business relations. It goes beyond traditional customer relationship management software and interprets disparate data to enable better business decisions. 

In any strategic deal, ‘opportunity’ is the stage between spotting a lead and actually closing your deal.  It’s crucial and your sales team must put their best foot forward to introduce your product and convince your prospect to close the deal. Even before they interact with different stakeholders, your team must be armed with a unified plan and must have access to all relevant information.

Let’s look at how tapping into relationship management can enable better opportunity management for strategic deals:

5 Benefits of Tapping into Relationship Intelligence in Opportunity Management for Strategic Deals

1. Keeps everyone in the loop

It’s convenient for any team, large or small, to track key deals when the relevant information is visible at a glance and everyone is on the same page. With the help of relationship intelligence, you can leverage tools that keep everyone on the same page through automation and extensions that support existing workflows. These tools also offer certain advanced filters to help you discover opportunities by setting specific criteria. This can enable your team to take the necessary steps to fast-track these prospects in the sales pipeline. You can also maintain a record of all your sales collaterals in a centralized repository. Members of your sales team can access and edit these documents that are available to anyone who might need them. 

Relationship intelligence platforms not only store important information but they go a step further by monitoring and analyzing the data fed into them to provide useful insights. These contextual inputs provided by AI-powered tools assist sales professionals in spotting opportunities and creating more meaningful interactions with customers. 

2. Improves communication and collaboration
A complex and multi-tiered process, sales requires careful coordination and collaboration between several teams and stakeholders. From refining sales pitches to making the final offer, it takes the collective efforts of many to successfully close deals. Relationship intelligence provides efficient tools that can be integrated with built-in live chat systems.  They provide an efficient platform for your team to align their sales activities, share updates, and celebrate wins. 

Relationship intelligence expedites and automates many key but repetitive tasks for sales teams and customer managers. This considerably reduces their administrative workload leaving them free to focus on revenue-generating activities. In fact, by using relationship intelligence, every update in the team’s deal view can be automated, transforming the Monday meeting and making the deal progress more efficiently. Your team can also divert their time and energy to formulate sales strategies and create a transparent ecosystem where open communication thrives. 

3. Provides automated deal and pipeline insights

One of the key features and benefits of relationship intelligence solutions is their use of the latest innovations such as Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that can automate many functions and enhance your team’s efficiency. AI tools can slice and dice your sales data to spot trends that can help you forecast future sales opportunities. With automated deal and pipeline insights, your team is in a better position to score more leads.  AI-powered tools can also help your team decode data like industry, company size, and budget to design bespoke communication for leads. Analyzing historical data can be particularly useful to make predictions about future performance.  With these informed learnings, you will be setting more realistic targets and smartly allocating resources, thereby optimizing the pipeline management process. Data visualization enables sales teams to have a clear vision of their networks, clients and stakeholders by breaking down sales data and identifying relevant trends and patterns. With the help of automated pipeline insights, your team can also efficiently conduct partner reviews and LP reporting. Relationship intelligence gives your leadership a 360° view of the entire strategic account management process by helping them understand engagement with clients, tracking the flow of communication between relevant stakeholders, and mapping the influence and power of client contacts.

4. Betters Deal Closure Time and RatesIn the sales realm, it’s highly unlikely that all deals will go through and all leads or prospects will convert. There could be a sizable number of engaged buyers who did not close the deal the first time and offer a chance for conversion the second time. Over a period of time, their business priorities can change and you may be able to win them over. Relationship intelligence can help you identify the most engaged buyers and help you reestablish a rapport with them. By identifying process blockers and trends that lead to lost deals, relationship intelligence can help improve both deal closure time and rates.

Sales teams are constantly seeking strategic intelligence to help them identify gaps, close deals faster, and generate more revenue. With numerous leads to follow up, it’s critical for any salesperson to tap into this intelligence in order to prioritize and meet targets. Relationships Mapping Tools can be a game changer by helping your sales team mine sales data to gain relevant insights about your clients, hasten deals, and achieve lucrative deal rates.

5. Managing long-term relationships for better growth

In the future, sales will be primarily driven by data-driven decision-making facilitated by AI-powered strategies such as relationship intelligence. With piles of siloed data, the way forward is to convert it into actionable insights with the help of relationship intelligence that can help your sales team forge and nurture long-term and lucrative relationships. 

The Org Chart by DemandFarm helps you visualize relationship intelligence and keep track of all your major account relationships.  DemandFarm’s Digital KAM tools helped Duke Energy Corporation create a better sales planning process by building deeper and more meaningful relationships.