Why This Is Important

Given the increasing size of buying teams in complex sales situations and with the majority of communication happening online, relationship intelligence is helping shorten sales cycles through the ability to identify and connect with key stakeholders quickly.
Relationship intelligence tools help in instilling trust for new sales in cases where there is no strong relationship established yet between the seller and the buyer.

Business Impact

Relationship intelligence can have a high impact for organizations looking to unlock new accounts, identify key stakeholders and forge a fast rapport through warm introductions and/or referrals. Using existing connections, it helps increase trust and consequently likelihood to purchase, which ultimately results in shorter sales cycles.

Gartner recommendation

• Examine how different vendors assess connection strength to evaluate which vendor fits your organizational needs. Some solutions use email and other communication to build a relationship graph, while others only use an invite to connect on social media as a source of connection.

• Understand your relationship intelligence needs to choose between enterprise resource management (ERM) and social media aggregators. ERM finds relevant connections from within your organization to a target prospect, while social media aggregators find relevant connections from individuals’ social media connections. Referral-AI uses both ERM and social media aggregators.