Use Digital Intelligence to Gain a Competitive Sales Edge w/ T.A. McCann [Episode 169]

In today’s episode, T.A. and I discuss how sales teams can leverage real-time intelligence about the digital activities, and successes, of their competitors to become smarter and more competitive sellers.

T.A. McCann is a serial entrepreneur and a co-founder of Rival IQ, a digital intelligence gathering tool which enables you to analyze your performance, gain critical insights and beat your competition across social media, SEO keywords and website content.

Rival IQ has been helping understand competitors for 3.5 years. The company spans over 40 countries with over 400 customers. This solution was built for digital marketers to compare themselves quickly to other enterprises on a variety of different platforms.

It’s simple. Add your URL and insert the company’s URL you want to compare to, then the magic happens behind the scenes. Rival IQ will take a screenshot of your competition’s major web pages; it will find the top SEO keywords and their general SEM, check out all of their social media platforms and will get and rank all of the content. The process of gaining all of this useful knowledge usually takes less than 5 minutes with Rival IQ, but could take hours upon hours to research.

Digital marketers utilize this program to automate their process of reporting, receiving and understanding of new content areas, and monitor all of the content in a 24 hour cycle. Every day the program checks if there is anything new going on that you should be aware of and will send you alerts.

Rival IQ has made exporting data simple and easy using a CSV or PowerPoint format. This program isn’t just for marketing and is also geared for salespeople. The alerts, which are powerful for sales reps, will continuously look for changes and inform the sales rep so they can reach out to the potential buyer and offer them suggestions based on those alerts.

Rival IQ starts out at $200 per month and will give you valuable ways to connect with your customer or prospect. This product in combination with other tools that analyze companies’ changes in technologies can give sale reps and corporations an interesting perspective on what their clients are doing. Mighty Signal is a program that does the same thing, but primarily for mobile apps.

T.A. is a board member of FullContact, a contact management company that effectively creates a connection for everyone you interact with, enhances it with social media profile, syncs to all of your platforms, and de-dupes all of the contacts to have a socially enhanced book of contacts. There is also an API format that you can check out on the website.

Rival IQ’s most valuable tool at the moment is a program called Intercom, a customer platform with a plethora of different products for live chat, feedback, marketing, and support.

LEARN MORE ABOUT T.A. MCCANN

What’s your most powerful sales asset?

Customer Advocacy

Who’s your sales role model?

Nathan Cowan

Name one book that every sales person should read.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

What’s your favorite music to get you pumped up?

The National

What’s the first sales activity you do every day?

T.A. looks at how the most recent successful customer closes with knowledge of how closely they match the perception of the personas they are selling to.

What’s one tool you use for you now sales management that you can’t live without?

Intercom