Today's B2B selling game is no joke. Revenue teams have it tough trying to navigate digital selling, changes in buying behavior, and a volatile market. In an effort to adapt and compete, organizations are increasingly throwing money at sales technology, embracing the revenue operations model and touting revenue intelligence capabilities.

The sales tech space has become crowded as revenue operations, revenue intelligence, and sales engagement start to converge as categories, Forrester noted earlier this year.

The rapid changes are particularly confusing for marketers focused on delivering value and understanding content engagement. After all, marketers today have the greatest influence over buyers: Nearly 85% of B2B purchasing decisions take place before buyers engage with vendors.

Part of the tech confusion stems from a muddled definition of revenue intelligence. Plenty of companies claim to have it when, in reality, their solutions offer only sales enablement table stakes.

So, what is true revenue intelligence? What do revenue teams, including marketers, need to accurately assess deal health and help their organizations win?

Partial Revenue Intelligence

Forrester defines revenue intelligence in part as solutions that "capture human engagement activity between buyers and sellers and automatically upload that data to CRM platforms." It's no secret that commercial teams love that data because it offers clarity into pipeline and deal advancement. What most don't realize is that most of the data is partial—it's limited and incomplete. Sales leaders think they have revenue intelligence when what they really have is partial intelligence.

For most of today's solution providers, revenue intelligence consists of data on sales rep activities—emails, calls, and meetings—and feedback from reps on those meetings. In other words, the intelligence is reliant on what reps recall and manually log into their CRMs.

Although those insights are helpful, they don't capture the full customer lifecycle, and they certainly aren't enough to close deals in the current challenging digital selling environment.

Compounding matters is that most sales technologies have yet to assemble customer insights into a single platform for revenue teams. So, the data is siloed—it can't be easily accessed, interpreted, or applied. It's little wonder nearly half of the sales professionals surveyed for LinkedIn's 2021 State of Sales report identified incomplete data as their top data challenge.

True Revenue Intelligence

Marketers who want true revenue intelligence need content engagement data. A crucial indicator of deal health is how buyers engage with sales content—the when (before, during and/or after the sales cycle) and the where (which medium—website, presentation, and/or meeting follow-up content).

Content intelligence can reveal what's most important to buyers, and stakeholders care about whether and which deals will likely close. Yet, only 35% of sales teams track the effectiveness of their content, according to G2. The missing piece of revenue intelligence in most marketplace solutions today is content engagement data.

Platforms that claim revenue intelligence capabilities need to get that granular—combining content engagement data captured in sales enablement platforms alongside buyer intent, conversation intelligence, and sales engagement data. Solution providers should take particular note, because the real power of revenue intelligence lies in having all of the insights together in one centralized hub. Bouncing from system to system makes it extremely difficult for commercial teams to assess overall pipeline health. When marketers and sellers use one integrated tech stack, they have visibility into every buyer touchpoint to see what's resonating and moving deals forward, so they can share more of it, as well as accurately identify what's likely to close and replicate sales wins.