Sales intelligence
Data about companies and people you might sell to, such as contact details, company facts and signs of buying interest, used to decide who to contact.
Use this definition in team training or when clarifying a sales note.
Definition
Sales intelligence describes the data and tools a sales team uses to find and rank the people it might sell to. The data comes from outside the team's own conversations: contact details, company facts such as industry, size and location, the tools a company uses, trigger events such as a job change or new funding, and intent data that suggests a company is researching a purchase.
It answers who to contact and how to reach them. Conversation intelligence answers a different question: it reads the calls, texts and emails a team already had to show what customers asked for and what reps promised. The guide to conversation intelligence and sales intelligence compares the two side by side.
Why it matters
The two terms sound alike and are sold to the same buyers, so teams sometimes buy one when their problem calls for the other. A team that runs out of good people to call needs better sales intelligence. A team that loses customers it already reached, through missed callbacks and unanswered questions, needs to look inside its conversations instead. Name the question first, and you avoid a purchase that does not fix the problem.