With the buzz of offices reopening, it’s no surprise that many of us are excited to get back to some of our old routines. For me, I can’t wait to meet everyone who’s joined 6sense’s BDR team over the past 18 months in person (finally)!
This past year was a unique time to be a seller, one that we’re all unlikely to forget when we look back on our careers. But now that “normal” is closer on the horizon than ever, we’re faced with a new decision:
Do we go back to our old approaches to selling, or are some of the practices we relied on the past 18 months worth keeping around?
While the goal is still the same — building pipeline and finding predictable revenue growth — why change what’s been returning big results? Here are several digital selling practices I believe are here to stay.
Show Up On Time
Efficiency is one of THE most important aspects of being a top performing BDR. Knowing how to structure your day and where to spend your time is critical for hitting both your goals and the company’s.
My team starts their days looking at their BDR Prioritization Dashboard to see which accounts are hot, qualified, and ready to buy.
At 6sense, we “drink our own champagne,” as the saying goes, and continuously use 6sense’s own intent data and predictive analytics capabilities for our own work. This eliminates guesswork for our sales teams and enables us to see where prospects are in their buying journeys. We’re able to prioritize the accounts that are showing the strongest intent to buy, too.
This ultimate clarity empowers us to know when to engage an account at precisely the right time — and not after the account has already had a conversation with the competitor.
Having all of this data in one dashboard view saves BDRs time in their day. And after all, in sales, time is money!
Use What You Have
Here’s another must-use sales strategy to keep long after the pandemic has ended. It certainly makes sense to personally engage the anonymous accounts I was describing above (after uncovering and prioritizing them with a revenue technology platform like 6sense), but what about the prospects who are on your website right now, raising their hands? They require the same personalized experience!
Joint customers of Drift and 6sense see tons of value by tailoring their Drift playbooks based on a website visitor’s company and buyer intent. This partnership helps you identify the company (or account) the visitor is associated with and personalizes their chatbot interactions.
BDRs are notified when an account they’re assigned to is on the website, presenting a timely opportunity to spark that conversation through Drift, potentially booking a meeting right then and there.
When an opportunity knocks, you answer!
Find the Gold Nuggets
Sellers learned quickly in 2020 that sending an email with “these unprecedented times” in the opening line wasn’t going to cut it. Not only were those emails buried with hundreds of others just like it, but there was nothing unique to them to make it relevant or personal to the prospect.
Doing research on an account shouldn’t be anything new; that’s just good prospecting. But personalization is more relevant than ever. By following a prospect’s updates on social media, you can find out what’s important to them, providing the crucial gold nuggets you need to create a unique, hyper-personalized message that resonates with them and creates a meaningful connection.
Here are a few suggestions:
- Engage with a thought leadership post they made on LinkedIn, then refer to it again in your outreach
- If you pick up on their hobbies from their personal bios, then find some common ground and use it
- If you see they’re speaking on a panel at an upcoming event, show your personal interest in the topic
- If you come across their blog, use their blog name as the subject line to hook them right away
In the age of social media, there are endless opportunities to make a personal connection with someone. You just have to do your research.
Getting Creative Pays Off
In this ever-changing industry, a good seller must be adaptable. But a great seller knows how to anticipate — and leap ahead — of change and capture prospects’ attention from the get-go. Make that first conversation valuable for them. Drift’s LinkedIn video capabilities can help you do that.
These experiences are very much like phone calls and emails you’d normally send, but adds another level of engagement by providing members of your team with a face and a voice. Plus, you can personalize your initial greeting and make it meaningful for each prospect.
It’s easy to record these videos. Your team’s computers should have everything they need to get started: a webcam, a microphone, things like that. Encourage them to keep their finished product short — 60 seconds should be enough to open the door to another, longer conversation.
Tools like Drift Video integrate with LinkedIn and further streamline the process. They track success metrics, too. These days, my team generates more meetings over LinkedIn, even as everyone works remotely.
Conclusion
None of these digital selling methods are necessarily new, but they’ve definitely become more relevant and impactful in the past 18 months.
BDRs must constantly experiment with new selling tactics, take note of what’s working well, and pivot where necessary. This is a required skill of any good seller, and I encourage my team to share the creative ways they get meetings booked with one another on a weekly basis.
And what they’re doing is working! 6sense achieved a record-breaking year in 2020 for customer, employee, and annual revenue growth. Our customer base and retention rate went above and beyond the industry benchmarks, and we were able to achieve 100% revenue growth for the third year in a row. This meant we were also able to double our full-time headcount!
With results like that, these digital selling best practices are ones that should be here to stay.
