Sales intelligence: Actionable insights that drive GTM growth

Go-to-market teams at companies across industries fly blind far too often.

Your BDRs run plays that don’t land. Your GTM leaders push initiatives without knowing what’s working. And RevOps is stuck piecing together reports that don’t tell the full story.

Sales intelligence flips that script—and provides a competitive advantage.
More specifically, it gives you the full, 360-degree view—what’s happening across reps, buyers, and deals—so you can spot what’s working, double-down fast, and, just as importantly, cut what’s not before it becomes a drag on growth.

The issue is not all sales intelligence tools actually help your sales, marketing, and enablement teams act on data and insights (let alone quickly). They tell you something happened, but not why—and certainly not what to do next.

What you need are actionable insights into your entire sales process that:

• Tie content, training, coaching, and buyer engagement all together
• Show you where deals stall and the reason behind their stagnation
• Help you coach with precision and invest in what moves the needle

With the right sales intelligence tools embedded in your GTM tech stack, you can see how your sales professionals are actually selling—and what your best reps do differently.

As long as you have accurate and reliable data, an AI-powered, data-driven approach can surface patterns in rep behaviour, content usage, and what buyers respond to.

That means marketing, enablement, and sales can finally row in the same direction. Going to market gets faster, smarter, and more aligned, and reps win more of the time.

Every enterprise sales and revenue team needs that edge, because when you can see what exactly drives performance and impacts business success, you can scale it.

What is sales intelligence?

Sales intelligence refers to the ability to see everything that contributes to or detracts from go-to-market performance across your GTM teams and, in turn, revenue growth for your business. It connects the dots between buyer engagement, rep behaviour, and business outcomes so you know what works and where to focus.

Sales intelligence isn’t just interactive dashboards or static reports. It’s real-time, actionable insight that helps you lead with facts, not gut instinct. The best sales intelligence goes beyond activity tracking and gives you visibility into execution.

With proven sales intelligence software, you can get answers to questions like:

• Are your sales representatives using the right content across the entire sales cycle?
• Can sales enablement see which sales professionals are actively utilising their content?
• Are your sales leaders and managers instituting the right types of sales plays for reps?
• Do marketing’s efforts around lead generation help to build strong sales pipelines?
• Is your entire GTM team delivering relevant messaging that’s leading to high win rates?

That’s the level of clarity go-to-market teams like yours need to move fast, fix what’s broken, and scale what wins within your respective sales process so your sales teams can better turn potential customers into high-paying clients.

“Marketing, sales, and customer success teams tend to work in entrenched silos with their own processes and metrics, few of which have a meaningful impact on the bottom line,” Boston Consulting Group recently wrote.

With the right sales intelligence platform, you don’t have to worry about these silos persisting. Instead, your GTM operation gets a unified, comprehensive view of where things are going well in your sales process and what needs repair.

5 FAQs about sales intelligence tools

Improving GTM performance clearly requires exhaustive sales analytics to make further headway with your organisation’s sales strategies. But we also understand you likely have a lot of questions regarding what specifically sales intelligence tools can do to streamline your reps’ sales performance and boost revenue growth.

With that in mind, here are a handful of frequently asked questions go-to-market leaders and decision-makers like you have about the increasingly adopted sales tool.

Why is sales intelligence so important for B2B sales success?

Sales intelligence shows you what specific actions and activities lead to desired results and missed targets so your sales team can ultimately close more deals—and faster. Without accessible, always-up-to-date sales intelligence, your GTM teams waste time on the wrong plays, messages, and prospecting opportunities.

How do sales intelligence tools improve sales team performance?

Leading sales intelligence platforms make go-to-market performance fully visible. You can get rich insights into which reps are executing, what sales collateral is landing, and where deals tend to go off-track. That makes it easier to coach up low-performing reps, fix gaps in your GTM efforts, and scale what works.

What are must-have sales intelligence features for GTM teams?

The top sales intelligence solutions provide real-time data into customer engagement, sales-asset usage, and rep activity. No vanity metrics are offered by these tools. Instead, you only see what’s spoken in conversations, shared in content, and shown through buyer behaviour and how it influences revenue outcomes.

Are there now AI-powered sales intelligence tools on the market?

Some sales intelligence solutions now have native AI and machine learning capabilities. Highspot acts as an AI sales assistant to surface patterns across deals, reps, and plays and suggest next-best actions for marketing, enablement, and sales teams, all in the flow of their work to facilitate smarter and faster execution.

Do sales intelligence tools fit seamlessly in sales tech stacks?

Best-in-class sales intelligence platforms have customer relationship management (CRM) integrations and connect directly to other business-critical technologies, including sales enablement software, content management systems, communications and collaboration solutions, and email and calendar tools.

Benefits of sales intelligence data

“Data-driven decisions rely on quantifiable information, reducing bias and ensuring choices are made based on consistent criteria versus personal perceptions,” Forbes contributor and business expert Naveen Singh recently wrote.

“In other words, the data doesn’t lie,” he continued.

Your sales, marketing, and enablement data is the lifeblood of your GTM organisation—and sales intelligence tools are the mediums through which you can make sense of that data. Some key advantages the tech provides include:

Complete data accuracy and zero data latency

Sales operations run on real-time, trustworthy data. When there’s no delay in data updates in your (presumably) extensive database network, your GTM teams can respond to what’s happening now, not what happened last week.

Clean, complete, centralised intel across the sales process helps your sales professionals, in particular, stay ahead of buyer behaviour. No more stale reports. No more guesswork.

Just fast, informed action that improves efficiency in every stage of the funnel.

Unified customer intent data and buying signals

When buying intent data that reveals buyer intent signals (based on their recent engagement with reps and company website actions they take) live in one place, sales reps don’t end up wasting time chasing cold leads with sparse CRM contact details.

Just the opposite, in fact: They focus on potential customers who are ready to engage. Unified prospect data gives you the full picture: what your buyers care about, which content they engage with, and how to advance them through the sales cycle.

Actionable insights into all reps’ sales pipelines

Visibility drives better sales performance. With centralised intel—and, ideally, AI-powered insights—your sales leaders can see every rep’s pipeline in detail—what’s moving, what’s stalled, and where support is needed. This helps GTM teams spot patterns, optimise your sales strategy together, and take action fast.

The result? More effective sales efforts, stronger sales development for reps (especially new hires learning the ropes), and better outcomes.

Streamlined lead qualification and prioritisation

Sales intelligence makes it easier for reps to review and rank the right leads. It filters out noise so your sales representatives can focus on the buyers who matter, based on their:

• Engagement data: Sales content analytics that shows where, when, and how many interactions with potential customers occur across the sales cycle
• Firmographic data: Location, industry insights, and other company details tied to a lead
• Technographic data: The software, hardware, and IT/tech infrastructure of a prospect
• Buyer intent data: Information regarding a buyer’s budget, authority, need, and timeline

With this clarity, sales spends less time digging for data and more time closing.

Aligned enablement, sales, and marketing teams

When everyone works from the same data, GTM alignment becomes a reality.

Sales reps, account executives, product and content marketers, and enablement personnel can see what’s working and enhance GTM initiatives together. Your sales intelligence tool helps everyone stay focused on the same active plays, with clear handoffs and shared KPIs, and enables them to adjust on the fly.

Historical and predictive analytics for GTM leaders

Your sales and revenue leaders need to know what happened—and what’s coming.

Getting both ‘look-back’ and ‘look-ahead’ dashboards that offer clear views into past sales performance and future forecast trends, you and other GTM decision-makers can collectively make bold, data-driven calls that keep momentum strong.

Syncing your CRM and sales intelligence tools

No go-to-market team (or company, for that matter) can execute without a CRM. But merely having a customer relationship management system isn’t enough. You also need to integrate it with your sales intelligence software to get the most out of your prospect and customer data sets for proactive sales outreach.

Contact data enrichment for more robust lead records

Consider how Highspot customers leverage our native Salesforce integration.

Highspot Sr. Pricing and Partner Ecosystem Director Mike Brophy recently took part in a webinar to discuss the rich, real-time sales intelligence our enablement platform provides GTM leaders, thanks to our direct Salesforce integration.

“You can combine not only sales and marketing content but also sales training insights within Salesforce,” Mike shared on Highspot’s Unlocking Sales Productivity with AI webinar, co-hosted with Salesforce and Skillsoft.

“This provides visibility for sales managers to see how your reps are performing—what’s been completed, in terms of training, and what hasn’t,” Mike added.

Then, you can take all that data back to Salesforce, analyse it, and see who’s performing well and who’s not and identify best practices, with the hope you are improving sales behaviours and, therefore, optimising your go-to-market initiatives.

Blended firmographic data and company data for GTM

Merging this wealth of data gives your GTM teams the edge they need to elevate their output. When you combine static info (business size, sector, headquarters) with dynamic prospect data (engagement history, current stage in the funnel, potential deal size), you get a fuller picture of every potential customer.

That means sales reps can better qualify accounts, personalise outreach, and tailor messaging based on what actually matters to the buyer. It also helps sales professionals avoid wasting time on poor-fit leads that will never convert.

For revenue leaders, this boosts forecast accuracy and sharper territory planning.

For marketing and enablement, it leads to more relevant content and campaigns.

And for the entire sales team, it’s a fast-track to greater sales efficiency, stronger alignment, and better sales performance. Real insight. Real action. No guesswork.

The best sales intelligence tools for 2025

You know what the top sales intelligence tools bring to the table for your GTM operation. Now, it’s worth exploring what specific offerings are out there to help your team thrive.

Best sales intelligence tool for tracking go-to-market enablement, training, and coaching activities

Highspot gives GTM teams a clear line of sight from enablement to revenue.

• With AI-powered insights from Highspot Copilot, Highspot Agents, and Conversation Intelligence, you can see how reps perform on sales calls, leverage content and messaging, and what skills need reinforcement.
• Scorecards surface what’s working across content, plays, training, and coaching. For example, our Initiative Scorecard sheds light on progress of key initiatives, like expansion and cross-sell campaigns and product launches.

If you want to track and improve rep behaviour in real-time and continually elevate the quality and ROI of your go-to-market programmes and activities, Highspot is for you.

Best sales intelligence solution for gaining a holistic, robust view of all customers and prospects

• Salesforce, combined with Agentforce, offers deep, contextual visibility into every customer and prospect, helping GTM teams surface relevant insights and take fast, focused action.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 empowers reps and leaders with complete buyer and account context, making it easier to forecast, prioritise outreach, and align sales efforts to strategic goals.

Best sales intelligence platform for providing sales and marketing teams with data on shared campaigns

• HubSpot centralises campaign data, enabling sales and marketing to track prospect engagement and ID which messages and channels drive conversion across the funnel.
• Marketo connects top-of-funnel behaviour to pipeline movement, helping teams pinpoint which campaigns influence high-quality leads and accelerate decision-making.
• Eloqua offers detailed engagement tracking that fuels campaign optimisation, letting teams fine-tune efforts and better support reps with buyer-ready messaging.

Best sales intelligence software that also provides revenue intelligence for go-to-market leaders

• Salesloft gives leaders clear visibility into pipeline progression, rep execution, and cadence performance—linking sales activity to revenue outcomes with clarity and speed.
• Gong captures and analyses customer conversations to highlight deal risk, coaching opportunities, and strategic trends that impact sales performance.
• Clari delivers accurate forecasting and pipeline visibility, giving decision-makers a real-time pulse on GTM health and execution against plan.

Best sales intelligence system for guiding reps’ social selling for high-value accounts

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator equips reps with targeted insights on prospects’ behaviour and account activity, enabling them personalise outreach, gain buyers’ trust, and deepen engagement. Advanced search, lead recommendations, and real-time updates on buyer job changes and interests help reps stay relevant, strengthen relationships, and influence decision-makers early in the sales cycle.

Selecting your sales intelligence software

Our advice is short and sweet: Look for clarity, not clutter. Choose a sales intelligence tool that shows what’s moving the needle and what’s holding your sales efforts back—without needing five other solutions to make sense of them.

Prioritise clean, real-time data and relevance to your GTM motion. (Bonus points if it plays nice with your CRM, CMS, marketing automation, and sales engagement tools.)

Bottom line: Lean into artificial intelligence—heavily. At the end of the day, the right AI sales tools should always lighten the load for you and your team and increase the time to value for your most important GTM initiatives.