Let’s play Revenue Team Make-Believe for a few paragraphs.
Let your mind drift to an ideal future state dreamworld where your revenue team is working with clean data (a miracle!), have perfectly mapped messaging & content to buying stages (hallelujah!), have mastered your multimedia output (mon Dieu!), and have even supercharged your social program (zounds!).
Most importantly, you’ve finally leveled-up your sales team so that your reps — with an almost balletic grace — always leverage content, outreach, and engagement in ways that expertly usher buyers through the sales cycle.
It’s the holy grail: You’ve brought messaging consistency and reliability to your entire Go-To-Market effort … and you’ve done it across all digital channels. That’s impressive.
There’s just one problem. You still haven’t covered every channel.
Where Uncertainty Lurks In Sales Interactions
Phone and Zoom calls, text and Slack messages, meetings at trade events, and good old fashioned boardroom presentations are still essential in sales. These real-time, person-to-person conversations play important roles in showcasing expertise and fostering trust. They’re critical for:
- Attracting and priming prospects
- Closing deals
- Fueling great customer experiences
- And doing it all over again with renewal, cross-sell, and up-sell opportunities
But no matter how well-prepped a rep might be for a call, they can’t know everything. And no matter how diligently documented past conversations might be in a CRM, those notes never reflect the real-time, right now sentiment of the buyer or the health of a deal.
This means sales calls and personally written emails can be less predictable or authoritative than the perfectly aligned digital experiences that have supported the sales journey up to this point. (This includes content such as blogs, videos, nurture emails, personalized web experiences, social posts, etc.)
This spontaneity, and ensuing uncertainty, can expose deals to risk when real-time sales conversations aren’t aligned with the rest of your marketing efforts.
Bringing Certainty — and Accuracy — to Sales Interactions
Account-Based Marketing provides a cure to this challenge. When properly applied, it can eliminate these moments of disconnect.
How? Industry-leading account engagement platforms (like 6sense) continuously identify and analyze buyer-intent data in ways that demystify the sales process. These solutions instruct sellers on how to best engage buyers through digital marketing and direct sales touchpoints.
ABM eliminates guesswork. BDRs and AEs no longer have to “feel” their way through sales conversations. This is because the platform has provided critical intelligence about a buyer’s concerns, their stage in the buyer’s journey, and much more.
A Complete Customer Experience
Revenue teams that implement ABM fully align marketing, sales and customer success around the same messages, intel and approach. This organization-wide alignment brings clarity to key moments in sales calls.
Here are ways that ABX technologies help your reps personally engage with buyers:
Structuring Conversations
Every sales pro has lost at least one deal because they weren’t armed with enough sales intelligence. It doesn’t take much to derail a deal, and a lack of buyer-intent info has led many a rep to lament, “If only I’d known about that sooner.”
Leading ABX platforms have capabilities to fill those knowledge gaps. Revenue team members can access account-relevant talking points at any time — and at any stage of a buyer’s bespoke buyer journey — to ensure online and offline messages are always aligned.
Reps can build reference material that perfectly fits a buyer’s place in their journey (and within their persona and industry), and draws from powerful, contextual account-based data such as:
- Online intent signals and keywords associated with the account
- Personnel changes to a buying team
- Updates to an account’s technographic, firmographic or geographic information
- Timely news reports
- Implications related to external market dynamics
Equipped with this info, salespeople can jump into conversations with exactly the right topics to efficiently — and persuasively — engage buyers.
Multi-Threading Buyer Committees
Most reps lose deals because they don’t generate meaningful consensus within buying teams. This often happens when they don’t engage enough job functions within the account.
Multi-threading is a B2B selling strategy in which reps address the concerns of multiple personas on the buying committee throughout the sales process. This involves lots of introductions and communications between an (often growing) list of buyer-side team members. The number of seller-side collaborators often grows, too.
These diverse relationships are typically made and maintained through non-automated, direct correspondence … and conversations can stretch every which way.
It’s imperative for disparate revenue team members to leverage the same repository of aligned, ABX data-enriched talking points in their conversations.
Tightening Offers
Proposing actions is crucial in sales correspondences. And they can be tricky, especially if a seller doesn’t fully understand the scope of the buying team’s needs.
Put another way: The last thing any seller wants to hear is, “You had me until you recommended…”
But key account and buyer data can eliminate these disconnects — and dramatically improve the odds that next-step recommendations will be well-received.
With the right data, sellers can pivot their customer experiences to include…
- Offering demos that are better aligned with the buyer’s needs
- Citing highly relevant use cases
- Creating specific, transformational “surprise and delight” moments
Conclusion
Every hour that a salesperson spends in an uncertain conversational dance with a buyer is an hour that could’ve been invested in a more promising opportunity.
With an ABX tool like 6sense, revenue teams can leverage data to ensure they’re maximizing that time — and customizing their messaging — to maximize their impact. This is must-have intelligence for revenue teams.
