What Is Revenue Intelligence? A Complete Guide

The benefits all point to one thing: revenue growth. But let’s get specific:

• 📡 Give sales leaders total visibility into the big picture with fresh data. Revenue intelligence data goes both ways. For sellers, it’s what they need to know and when. For sales and revenue leaders, it’s an accurate, real-time system of record and engagement. It’s visibility into the health of your business. It’s the dataset of your dreams.
  
  
• ⌛ Accelerate sales cycles and cut down ramp time. Show new sales reps where to begin and guide them to the actions that will make crater-sized impacts. Now they can play in the same league as your highest performers and maximize the bottom line. You might think that we’re talking about AI-powered software, and we are, but we’re also talking about something deeper: making life at work better for your people.
  
  
• 📈 Set big forecasts and hit them because you can see the data, trust that deals are in the right stages, and take action. Every team can benefit from collective experience to mitigate risk and keep deals moving through the right stages.

Innovators dream of building technology that’s indistinguishable from magic. Revenue intelligence takes all the raw data flowing through your CRM and transforms it into gold. For sales and revenue leaders that means visualizations and predictions to monitor business health, de-risk the pipeline, and set accurate forecasts. For sellers, that means guidance at every stage of the deal — who to reach out to, what to say, and what to sell.

It’s the next best thing to having a data scientist sit at every sales rep’s desk.

Every company gathers revenue intelligence differently. Basic software helps you go from data to insights. At Salesforce, we like to take it a step further: helping you go from data to insights to action. That way teams don’t need to cross systems to act on what they’ve learned.

When done right, revenue intelligence is like an electric circuit where energy flows uninterrupted. Insights are the current and action is the flame.

And what about metrics?

To get your teams to perform and your revenue to grow, you’ll need to bring metrics forward that used to be invisible — not just whether your reps are hitting their quota, but also how many deals they’re closing (and what kind), how fast they’re closing them, and what products they’re selling.

At Salesforce, we look at metrics like these:

• ⚙ Deal size: How large or small are your deals? Revenue intelligence gives you visibility into the deal sizes in your pipeline, so you can coach your reps to focus on the highest impact activities: closing larger deals.
  
  
• 🚀 Deal velocity: The easy way to grow your revenue is to speed it up. Measuring how fast your team can go from opportunity to close can help you accelerate that process and shrink your sales cycles.
  
  
• 📊 Product mix: What are you selling — and to who, and when? A company can have many different offerings, and it can be hard to know the best mix to offer each customer. Personalize your customer conversations by guiding your reps to sell the most relevant possible products every time.
  
  
• 🤝 Win rates: How many final stage prospects did you close compared to the total number of deals in your pipeline? Accurate forecasting depends on knowing the likelihood of every deal to close. View the win rate history for your products and sales reps to make better predictions.
  
  
• ✍ Custom metrics: Get a running start with the out-of-the-box metrics above. Then as you mature, define and measure unique metrics — like annual recurring revenue (ARR) or annual contract value (ACV) — that match how you manage your business.

Revenue intelligence software is your escape route out of intuition-based sales. Our customers have told us they’ve been selling by going with their gut and forecasting based on how they feel — and they want out.

Here’s a preview of how revenue intelligence software works in Salesforce: