Buyers now control the sales process and actively avoid sales conversations. Sales leaders with all the right contact data still fail to convert leads because they can't initiate meaningful conversations. With no way to initiate a conversation with a prospect, sales leaders can have all the usual contact information and strategies in place and still fail to convert their leads.

Relationship intelligence helps sales leaders navigate this tricky situation by giving them cues about when to reach out and engage a prospect to close the deal.

But what exactly is relationship intelligence and how can you apply it to your own business? We've identified the key relationship intelligence signals that drive pipeline and the specific ways revenue teams use them to close deals faster.

Here’s what they had to share.

What is relationship intelligence?

Relationship intelligence identifies which buyers are in market and ready to engage by tracking signals like job changes, buying group composition, and past relationships. It shows you the warmest path into every account based on real connections and context, not generic scoring.

Relationship intelligence combines accurate contact data with buyer signals—job changes, buying group composition, past champion relationships—to show you exactly who to reach, when, and through which connection. It identifies opportunities your CRM can't see on its own.

• Get actionable insights like recent job changes

• Create a relational map of prospects in an organization

This helps sales reps find the warmest path to a target account and allows them to work out a personalized strategy to engage with the lead and convert them into a customer — all while saving hours on manual data entry.

For instance, if you want to know the best path to take to reach a potential customer, you can leverage relationship intelligence technology to determine if someone from your organization is already connected with them or if they know someone who works at the same company.

This way, there's potential for you to connect with a champion who will advocate for you and help you to get a warm introduction to the target account instead of spending hours trying to build a relationship with a cold lead.

Relationship intelligence offers additional benefits beyond these. It’s quickly becoming a must-have for organizations wanting to improve sales efficiency and hit revenue targets on time.

How relationship intelligence benefits B2B outreach

Relationship intelligence is crucial for demand generation and revenue teams because it helps them move away from a one-size fits all approach and allows them to find more effective inroads to their target accounts. In turn, this boosts their chances of reaching their revenue goals.

How can relationship intelligence do all that? The process is straightforward. Relationship intelligence works by:

1. Bridging the buyer-seller gap in B2B sales

With so much high-quality information readily available to potential customers online, the gap between them and salespeople is growing wider. Leads often prefer to do their own research, which means you need to adjust your strategy for approaching them. Educating them about your product requires a more sophisticated approach. Now, you have to consider what they may already know about it.

For example, if every deal maker (or decision maker) in a buying group is armed with an average of 4-5 pieces of information about your product or service, and every buying group is made up of at least 6-10 members, that leaves a lot of room for conflict and confusion.

Additionally, deal makers now avoid engaging with sales reps — they only spend 17% of their time talking to potential suppliers. And, if they’re considering multiple suppliers, they spend only 5-6% of their time with each sales rep, according to a Gartner report.

The fix: revenue teams should spend less time pitching and more time providing context that helps buyers make sense of what they've already found online.

In other words, sales reps should try to provide personalized content to help prospects and stakeholders make sense of the information they find online if they want to increase the likelihood of a sale.

To create content that resonates, revenue teams need to understand what prospects actually care about at each stage. Relationship intelligence provides that understanding through data, not guesswork.

"Relationship intelligence helps create content by leveraging data-driven insights to uncover patterns in customer behavior. With the right relationship intelligence tools, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customer's journey. This then enables them to develop more personalized content strategies that can effectively engage and convert prospects."

"For example, at girokonto.io we use relationship intelligence tools to track user engagement through each stage of their journey with us. This [relationship data] helps us identify areas where customers may need additional information, enabling us to tailor our content according to the needs of our customers and ensure that we are providing the most relevant content for their specific requirements", says Lisa Dietrich, Partner at girokonto.io.

2. Building credibility and rapport with B2B prospects faster

Complex buying journeys and an unwillingness to interact with salespeople represent just some of the challenges that have made closing deals more challenging for sales reps.

Many economists and financial experts are hinting at a recession and the overall financial ecosystem looks unstable. To counter this, companies have been cutting budgets and focus only on essential purchases.

For revenue leaders, this means three specific challenges:

• Establish a connection with prospects

• Keep them engaged

• And hit your sales goals

The solution: research the prospect and their organization deeply, using relationship intelligence and intent data to understand their actual needs.

Research the prospect and their organization using relationship intelligence and intent data to uncover specific needs beyond basic firmographics.

“Doing your homework shows your customers that you care and separates you from your competitors and helps you build rapport and credibility faster,” says Shari Levitin, best-selling author, and sales coach, in this LinkedIn article.

Research also backs up this fact — while 76% of top performers say that they always conduct research before reaching out to prospects, buyers cited “not knowing my company and its needs” as one of the biggest deal-breakers when making a business purchase.

This is where relationship intelligence data comes in handy. It helps your team understand your prospect and anticipate what they need before they need it. This positions them to engage your prospect and build a more human relationship with them.

“Relationship intelligence helps in prospecting by providing you with detailed insights on customer interactions across channels, including email, website visits, social media activity, etc. This allows you to build up a comprehensive view of your prospects’ interests and behavior. With this data-driven insight, you can better understand who is likely to be interested in your product or service, as well as when and how best to approach them during their buyer’s journey”, says Lisa.

3. Shortening the B2B sales cycle

Two of the biggest factors in long sales cycles are prospects’ reluctance to engage with salespeople and their hesitance to make a purchasing decision.

While your salespeople can use many workarounds to pique prospect interest, detecting customer indecision proves more challenging and causes a loss of sales in 40-60% of cases. In fact, indecision causes your team members to lose more deals than competitors do.

Most salespeople think this indecision stems from the prospect’s unwillingness to change the status quo. They want to keep their tools and processes unchanged. But research from Harvard says otherwise.

According to the study, biases cause customers to want things to remain as they are, even when better alternatives are available.

But indecision itself is due to omission bias, which, in this context, means the customer’s desire to make a decision is inhibited by a fear of loss. For example, a wrong decision about a new product or service could cost the company money or even their decision-making powers.

This means FUD tactics won't work. You need to qualify leads based on buying potential and decision-making ability, not just interest level.

Instead, you’ll need to qualify your leads based on their buying potential and their ability to make a decision. That way, you can focus on qualified leads.

Relationship intelligence can make all the difference in these cases. It augments a rep’s relationship skills, accelerates the lead qualification process, and shortens the sales cycle by identifying hot leads and finding opportunities to build quality relationships with them.

"Relationship intelligence enables teams to focus on high-value leads that are most likely to close quickly by providing detailed customer profiles with insights into past activities, behaviors, and preferences. This allows sales teams to better understand their leads and engage with them in a personalized way."

“Additionally, automated processes powered by AI-driven insights can help qualify potential leads faster, allowing reps to dedicate more time to closing deals,” says Robert Hoffman, Marketing Manager at CashbackHero.

In short, relationship intelligence helps data-driven teams hit their revenue goals faster. But to make the most of it, you need to understand the various signals your relationship intelligence tools provide and how to use them.

Understanding relationship intelligence signals and how to leverage them

Monitoring relationship intelligence signals helps your sales team gain a deeper understanding of your prospects and what they’re looking for in a solution provider. This information will allow your team to create experiences tailored to the prospect’s needs and, ultimately, close the deal.

Here are the three relationship intelligence signals that matter most for pipeline generation:

1. Engagement

Lisa Dietrich, Partner at girokonto.io believes engagement metrics are some of the most important relationship intelligence signals to monitor. Here are three of the metrics she recommends you keep an eye on when assessing potential prospects:

• Website interaction frequency: Tracking how often prospects visit your site.

• Email open rates: Seeing how often prospects open emails from your business.

• Social media activity: Keeping an eye on the type of posts prospects interact with most.

Tracking these signals shows you which prospects are actually engaged and ready for conversation, so you can prioritize outreach to accounts most likely to convert.

“This [engagement data] can also give you valuable insight into their level of interest and help you make informed decisions about how to move forward,” says Dmytro Kondratiev, CEO, and Legal Board Advisor at LLC Services.

2. Sentiment

Sentiment data refers to the emotional tone or attitude of prospects toward your salespeople when they interact with them.

Your reps can obtain this data by analyzing responses to the emails they send to prospects or by reviewing the comments and replies prospects leave on your company’s social media posts.

“Sentiment data reveals whether prospects are receptive or skeptical, allowing your team to adjust messaging before concerns become objections.”

For example, if your sentiment data shows that your prospects are exhibiting a positive sentiment, you can analyze the interaction or social media post to create similar posts.

On the other hand, if your prospects show negative sentiment, you’ll need to step back and consider how to do things differently.

3. Customer job changes

During the pandemic, many companies canceled in-person events like seminars, workshops and conferences, and employees were forced to work from home.

Simultaneously, a new trend called the Great Resignation emerged in which numerous employees quit their jobs to seek other opportunities.

Job changes remain frequent, creating both risk (losing champions) and opportunity (following them to new accounts).

Some professionals want to continue working remotely, while others may be on the search for better pay, benefits, or work-life balance.

This makes it hard for sales reps to keep track of who works where, causing them to miss out on warm leads at new companies, like customers who used your product or service before moving to a new employer. Tracking job changes lets sales reps follow champions to new accounts and identify warm paths into target companies—exactly what UserGems automates to multithread deals and continue selling effectively.

An example of an organization that optimized its job tracking relationship intelligence data and multiplied its revenue is Ceros. Ceros is a fast-growing software company that helps marketers and designers create and publish interactive content.

Like other companies, they had to get creative with demand generation after in-person events became unavailable which contributed to one-third of their pipeline.

So, they started using UserGems to track job changes and find warmer paths into their target accounts.

The result? They saw a 20X ROI in closed-won revenue in the first quarter after adopting UserGems. To read more about how Ceros used UserGems to fast-track its revenue, check out our Ceros customer story.

The right insights save time and boost pipeline generation

Relationship intelligence is all about drawing meaningful insights from customer data to help your team find a better path to reach prospects and seal the deal.

It’s a must-have in this information-rich era as it allows you to build credibility with prospects and shorten the sales cycle.

Engagement and sentiment data are some of the most important signals to track if you want to create personalized experiences and speak to the prospect’s needs.

But another essential signal to look out for is job changes, as it allows you to increase the number of warm leads in your pipeline. And that's where UserGems comes in.

Why UserGems

UserGems is a pipeline generation software that helps revenue teams generate and protect revenue efficiently. With UserGems, companies can track and automate outreach when their champions change their jobs, and capture the buying groups to find the warmest path into every account.

Companies like Mimecast, Greenhouse, Medallia use UserGems to reach their revenue goals, quickly and efficiently.