Revenue teams are always under huge pressure to quickly…
- Identify potential customers
- Get persuasive, educational messaging in front of prospects at the right time
- Bring in sales to strike when the iron’s hot, and
- Guide customers toward a buying decision before the competition does first
This kind of agility and coordination demands a seamless integration of every component of the revenue team. The brilliance of individual contributors — or even the excellence of a single department — won’t cut it anymore (if it ever did).
Success lies in knocking down longtime internal barriers to optimize transparency and collaboration. We’re talking about siloed operations, in which different teams and departments work in isolation, hindering effective communication — and ultimately, overall productivity.
A good operations team can alleviate this challenge. However, despite their best efforts and years of expertise, ops teams often find that sales, marketing, or customer success departments have wound up in their respective echo chambers where communication has broken down. And it’s up to ops to remedy it.
There are many ways to help your ops team work smarter, but here are some solutions operations can implement to get the departments that make up the revenue team back on the same page.
Enable Data-Driven Decision-Making
Arming sales and marketing teams with a single source of accurate data and a centralized platform to organize and interpret it empowers revenue teams to share valuable insights and work toward the same goals.
A common problem that hurts productivity is that marketing, sales, and customer success teams work in different software systems. Since their data isn’t unified, they struggle to quickly provide practical insights to one another.
By using business Intelligence tools, or purpose-built B2B sales platforms designed to bring revenue team data together, ops teams can create data solutions that enable marketing and sales teams to essentially “speak the same language” and swiftly align strategies.
Furthermore, data-driven decision-making creates a culture of transparency and accountability within the revenue team. This real-time data grants everyone a comprehensive view of the entire customer journey, from initial touchpoints to final conversions.
Identify and Enforce Common KPIs
Another challenge is aligning marketing KPIs with the metrics that matter most to sales — namely bottom line revenue.
Marketing teams often struggle with limited visibility into which of their actions drive real revenue. This is because prospective customers spend most of their buying journeys in what we call the Dark Funnel™, a part of the B2B web that most marketing platforms can’t detect. This invisible part of the sales funnel is made of online trade publications, social networks, message boards, and other popular digital resources.
Since buyer intent signals are effectively anonymized on these websites, marketers are left flying blind and unable to identify accounts that are in-market for their companies’ solutions.
However, groundbreaking revenue technology platforms like 6sense can use…
…to spot potential customers that have begun a research journey, and to understand what those customers care about, like:
- How close they are to making a purchase decision, and
- How much marketing and sales outreach has influenced their buyer journey
These insights enable revenue teams to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of their efforts and track progress more accurately. Equally important, this transparency fosters a sense of shared responsibility among divisions of a revenue team as successes and challenges become visible to both sales and marketing teams. (This reduces the longtime practice of fussy finger-pointing between departments, too.)
Now, marketing, sales, and customer success can engage in collaborative discussions, share best practices, and make informed adjustments to their strategies — resulting in improved collaboration and ultimately driving better business outcomes.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics leverages historical revenue data and applies advanced AI-powered analysis to identify leads that have the highest likelihood of generating revenue. This enables marketing to focus its efforts on generating higher-quality leads that result in more successful sales engagements.
These kinds of insights give teams a common understanding of the characteristics and behaviors that indicate strong conversion potential. This shared knowledge encourages a more unified approach, allowing marketing teams to tailor their strategies and campaigns to target the most promising leads.
Sales teams can then align their efforts on prioritized accounts, focusing resources on engaging and converting these high-intent prospects. This alignment obviously improves the overall effectiveness of marketing and sales initiatives.
Furthermore, predictive lead scoring eliminates guesswork. In the absence of reliable data, teams are forced to rely on individuals’ experience and guesstimates — and professional egos can undermine conversations about results into contentious games of tug-o-war. Using predictive-modeling insights — based on quantifiable data and analytics — reduces these kinds of conflicts.
Leaning on AI-powered predictive tools empowers sales and marketing teams to align their goals, optimize resource allocation, and foster a culture of collaboration and mutual accountability.
Workflows and Orchestrations
When communication breaks down between teams during the sales process, deals can get lost in the cracks. Operations can patch this up with orchestrations.
These can take many forms. Some examples:
Agree On Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Accounts
Your marketing team can then use a tool like 6sense dynamic segmentation to continuously monitor these ICP accounts for signs of activity and automatically add new accounts when they meet specific criteria. The dynamic segment’s audience is enrolled in tailor-made campaigns that are sent to the segment.
Put Target-Account Leads Into Your CRM
Rather than treat a lead as a one-off individual, map them to the account opportunity record instead. This record can then be enriched with contact data for other members of the buying team. You can acquire missing information from third-party sources.
These new buying team members are automatically enrolled in the campaigns described in the previous point, with campaigns tied to each contact’s buyer persona. Once enough people or key personas are engaged, this triggers alerts for your business development team to reach out, using keywords and intent to tailor its messaging.
Outreach also can include inviting members of buying teams to relevant events, webinars, or roundtables based on their role and identified keywords.
Bring It All Together
Ideally, the culmination of these efforts is an account booking a meeting with an Account Executive, paving the way for further sales progression.
With orchestrations and workflows, the hand-off between each part of the revenue team is seamless, with every effort integrated and interwoven into the dynamic buyer journey.
And the best part is that because of these automations, revenue teams can forget about tedious, error-laden manual processes and focus on working together to close deals instead.
Your One-Stop Shop for Ops Teams
One of the best ways ops can align go-to-market actions is to bring marketing and sales together with a single platform that serves the needs of the entire revenue team. 6sense offers such a comprehensive solution.
Our platform:
- Aligns sales and marketing on the best accounts to pursue
- Offers insight into when to reach out to high intent accounts
- Which dramatically increases conversions and win rates
A recent Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting found that organizations using 6sense Revenue AI™ can achieve an ROI of 454% over three years, recouping their investment in less than six months with ROI increasing steadily thereafter.
By identifying and targeting accounts identified by 6sense as strong ICP fits that are in-market, the report said, B2B sellers achieved:
- 2X increases in average contract value
- 4X increases in win rate
- 31% increases in opportunity volume
