Table of Contents
Introduction
People buy from people. If you’re in sales, you’ve no doubt heard this saying before. For all our years of iterating and innovating on products and services, the fact remains that salespeople are the line from an opportunity to a win — be it jagged, dotted, or straight.
B2B selling is an art, one that’s rooted in the human experience, stemming from your ability as a salesperson to understand pain points, educate, and connect with customers on a person-to-person level. The uniqueness of your pitch, the way you tie a customer’s problems to your business’s solutions, and the way your talk track can adapt at different moments in the sales process are all examples of your art.
But there’s a science to it as well. Great technology serves to complement, not replace, all that’s uniquely you as a salesperson.
CRM, analytics, and AI… Consider all the tools we use to support the sales process from start to finish. For every phone call, email, in-person meeting you make, there should be a layer of technology tethering these interactions together, enabling you to more easily create and measure the success of different efforts (e.g., establishing cadences, personalizing messaging, identifying target accounts, and so on).
We live in an on-demand society. Customer expectations are constantly evolving with the times, and so must the technologies we use to inform and support all aspects of the sales process.
Quantifying, qualifying, and ultimately delivering on the new buyer journey
For the better part of ten years, we’ve been in the Age of the Customer. It’s just as it sounds: customers are at the center of our intentions, or they should be.
It’s not what you’re selling, how you distribute it, or even whether you hold the reins on information flow that determine your success today. Now that customers have greater access to information than ever before, their expectations of the customer experience — and specific aspects of the sales process — have changed. Your success depends on how well you empower and engage your customers. Fortunately, the methods for doing so have evolved. We can quantify and qualify the buyer experience like never before. We can interrogate our successes and failures for key information to teach us, help us try new paths forward, and get better results.
It’s art + science, not art vs. science
Marketing and sales teams both serve the greater goal of closing deals and creating wins for the business, but there tends to be uncertainty — or outright clashes — around how best to achieve that goal. While we’re talking about the art of selling and the science that helps power it, it’s equally important to consider the alignment of the teams responsible for revenue growth. You probably wouldn’t paint without a brush, and you probably wouldn’t close a deal without any relevant content, collateral, or data to support your efforts.
Align sales and marketing for the greater good
Perhaps you’re already account driven in your sales efforts. Great! That means you’re not solely focused on generating leads; you know who your target accounts are and are all set to engage them. But what about your marketing counterparts? Is their eye on the same prize?
Half of all sales and marketing leaders only somewhat agree (or don’t agree at all) on their target account list. In a research report we produced with Heinz Marketing, we found that even 42% of organizations that are successful lack consensus. All too often, marketing and sales teams rely on different datasets, work in different platforms, and track different success metrics. So how can you come together to identify target accounts and coordinate personalized engagement?
Align on the fundamental measurable goals
Sit down with the marketers and talk specifics around metrics, KPIs, and goals that you both need to work toward, as well as who’s responsible for accomplishing what, when, and how.
Align on personas, target accounts, and other buyer-based criteria
By aligning on your ideal customer, who the target accounts are, and what trigger actions and criteria qualify a lead to be handed off to sales. Use your data; let it do the talking, and avoid falling into old assumptions.
Ultimately, you’re all working toward turning prospects into customers and customers into a steady stream of revenue. Remember that common goal and let it lead you toward prioritizing the data, tools, and metrics you and the marketing team need to achieve it together.
It’s like trying to fish in the ocean with a net. What you want is a kiddie pool and a spear. That’s where intent data comes in.
Quit guessing, start knowing: trade MQLs for intent data
Who would settle for a crystal ball when they could have the facts? If you’re relying on MQLs, what you’re really doing is shaking that ball and hoping for a yes.
Historically, and especially in times of economic uncertainty, it can feel like the familiar MQL is a surefire way to generate revenue. In our report, we found that despite over half of account-driven organizations focusing their strategies on metrics like MQLs, 80% of companies failed to exceed revenue goals in 2019 — and 38% of companies didn’t even get 90% to goal.
The thing is, MQLs are often more convenient than they are accurate. They rely on outdated ways of getting data (e.g., form fills, spam, and cold calls). It’s like trying to fish in the ocean with a net. What you want is a kiddie pool and a spear. That’s where intent data comes in.
Real-time intent data
Intent data gives you total visibility into buyer activity within the Dark Funnel™, which is where signals like anonymous web visits, third-party research, and false form fills go unseen by your marketing automation platform. Intent data helps you understand what your accounts care about right now and where they are in the buyer journey. And unlike MQLs, which can become stale, intent data updates in real time… just like your customers’ buying behaviors and desires.
Your ideal customers may not even be visiting your website. They’re likely doing their research anonymously. By capturing intent data, you can spend time focusing on the accounts that are researching your products and services — or your competitors’ — and are ready to engage with you.
Fill in the gaps
When you use intent data to move prospects through the funnel, you’ll naturally find gaps in your pipeline which indicate that deals could fall through. 6sense Chief Market Officer Latané Conant refers to these gaps as “the red.”
Finding the red is a process. What leaks can you identify within your entire funnel? How will you plug them? By adjusting your processes.
Then, by tracking conversion rates at every step, you can see what adjustments work and where prospect retention is improving so you can set revenue goals based on your new and improved pipeline.
Narrowing down your target accounts with predictive analytics
So maybe we can’t exactly see the future… but we can make predictions with incredible accuracy where our accounts are concerned. This certainly wasn’t always the case, even for the most tech-savvy salespeople and marketers. Today, using predictive analytics allows your revenue teams to eliminate guesswork and prioritize marketing and sales efforts on accounts with an ideal customer profile (ICP) and a strong intent to buy. When it comes to predictive analytics, there are three data sources to focus on: intent data, historical data, and firmographic/technographic data (i.e., ICP).
Why does the combination matter? It’s not enough to have an ideal customer on paper. They need to also show intent to buy in order to be a valuable lead worth pursuing.
Intent data
There are two types of intent data that are collected and analyzed: first party and third party. Third-party intent data is the anonymous kind (i.e., browsing sites for comparison and research purposes and performing generic keyword searches). You may know what people are looking for on the whole, but you don’t know who they are without the tools to figure it out. First-party intent data, on the other hand, is fueled by known activities — activities you can see from the start — such as visits to your website (e.g., watching a video, engaging with a blog post).
Historical data
Historical data is a repository of information that machine learning and AI can analyze to recognize behavioral patterns and, in turn, predict future behavior.
Ideal customer profile
ICP refers to all the information that makes a company your ideal customer: industry, location, size, etc.
When you layer intent data on top of historical data and filter that through your ICP, you have all the fuel you need to power predictive analytics. You can identify a target account list that is the perfect cross-section of showing intent to buy and fit your ICP.
Adding rich account insights to your CRM with sales intelligence technology
AI and predictive analytics are all well and good, but what if they don’t improve or even speak to your CRM? It’s where you live and where your accounts live every day. 6sense Sales Intelligence collects all the data you care about most (i.e., where accounts are in the buying journey, how and when they’ve engaged with your business, which contacts are part of the buying center, what they’re interested in, and the next actions you should take to move the deal forward) and makes it accessible right in your CRM.
But how specifically does Sales Intelligence support sales reps? There are six ways that you can turn insights into actions.
1. Align with marketing on accounts
Remember, you and marketing share a common goal — the common goal: to turn prospects into customers and to turn customers into a steady stream of revenue. Sales Intelligence gives AEs and BDRs/SDRs access to the same data and insights your marketing team relies on, which makes it easy to align on the most important accounts.
2. Engage at the right time
Sales Intelligence provides deep insights into account and contact engagement history, including a visual trendline of engagement activity, so you know exactly when to reach out and what message is most likely to resonate with a specific customer.
3. Prioritize the best accounts
With in-market and ICP-fit predictions available within your CRM, you can prioritize the best accounts to work; not the ones that only seem like a good fit in theory or that expressed interest last month, but those that have displayed real-time, measurable intent to buy and also fit your ICP.
4. Make every conversation relevant and personal
Sales Intelligence highlights the keywords that known and anonymous contacts are searching, as well as the individual website pages they’re visiting, which locations are most active, and the campaigns they’re engaging with. With this information, you can create highly relevant messages instead of wastingcycles on a one-size-fits-all approach.
5. Identify the buying team
Knowing your account’s buying team is critical to closing the deal. With AI Sales Intelligence, you can quickly identify key contacts, see how engaged they are with your business, and uncover white space where additional contacts should be acquired.
6. Know your next steps
Don’t miss a beat. The Next Best Action feature uses AI to give reps a prioritized list of recommended actions to help you engage the buying team within a target account — including which contacts to engage next, key talking points to use, and new contacts to acquire.
Give yourself an advantage every step of the way
If people buy from people, what are customers buying from you? Your successful artistry as a salesperson depends on how well you understand your customer’s challenges and the value of solving them. Technology can’t do that work. But you only have so much time in a day to devote to different accounts and the multiple people on their buying teams. The right technology can enhance your ability to personalize the customer experience without sacrificing operational efficiency.
Sell smarter, not harder: prospecting with efficiency and personalization
BDRs/SDRs and AEs can only be so productive; we’re all only human, with a growing to-do list and finite hours in which to complete it. While there’s no silver bullet that will get you to 100 more outreaches in a day, you can make your outreaches higher quality. All this to say: You can see an uptick in ROI without cloning yourself or losing sleep. The key, as we’ve discussed, is augmenting your deeply human sales talent with data science.
Your approach is unique to you, just as every customer and every conversation needs to be approached with a fresh perspective. Getting people to respond to your cadence or sequence is more challenging than ever. In 2016, it took an average of 13 touches to get a response; today, it can take between 17-22 touches. Combined with the need to reach out to accounts with multiple individual buyers, it’s easy to see how prospecting gets tougher as you scale. It takes a data-driven strategy and the right platforms to build effective prospecting cadences and see results in real time.
At 6sense, our prospecting cadences use 22 steps and incorporate social media, email, phone calls, and direct mail. Our sales reps have moved prospective companies from demonstrating intent to buy to opportunities in just 27 days. Here are a few strategies to help you build a similarly effective cadence.
5 ways to move prospects through the pipeline
Add value in every touch
The number of touches required to garner a response has increased, so you have to step up your game in providing value at every one of those touchpoints. A “following up” or “reaching back out to” isn’t going to win you the deal. Persistence is still heavily rewarded, but effective sales reps have to lead with value in order to make a difference.
When you’re creating cadences, each touchpoint (e.g., phone, email, social, etc.) should make your prospect feel like speaking with you will help them perform better, and ultimately provide value to their role. They don’t care about whether you hit your quota, so expressing urgency around simply scheduling a meeting isn’t going to do the trick. Leading with the idea that you’re here to help them do their jobs better (and how) will.
Personalize again and again
No one wants a generic form of outreach at any point in the buyer journey. As a consumer, you know better and you expect better. As a sales expert, you can do better. A good first impression is one that shows you’ve done at least a little bit of homework on the individual you’re attempting to engage, their company, and how you intend to help them succeed.
After you’ve proven value in that respect, tap into your own analytics to see who’s most engaged with your initial outreach (e.g., email opens, clicks, profile views, etc.). When you’ve caught someone’s attention, strike while the iron’s hot with even more personalized efforts.
The point is to always be adaptable and able to analyze what’s working and what’s not, and ultimately create newly winning cadences that provide different value adds.
Refresh your cadences at least once a quarter
Nothing lasts forever, least of all your sales cadence. Even if you’re seeing great results for a period of time across a certain territory or account type, you’ll still need to revisit your messaging and/ or tactic on a regular basis to ensure the content remains relevant to prospects. A good rule of thumb is to compare your company’s success metrics against cadence success rate on a quarterly basis.
Which subject lines, messaging, and content have proven most effective in securing wins? Which cadences are falling flat? Take a look at how many cadences you have in rotation, how they’re performing, and what talking points from personalized efforts have resulted in meetings.
The point is to always be adaptable and able to analyze what’s working and what’s not, and ultimately create newly winning cadences that provide different value adds.
Know when to add an unresponsive prospect to a nurture cadence
Things happen. Sometimes prospects simply choose not to engage with us at a particular time. They may reach out weeks or months later asking to meet now because the timing is right.
When you haven’t been able to lock down a specific prospect, it’s not necssary over. There are tangible, rewarding things you can do to win their business in the future.
Keep an account on your radar by adding them to a nurture cadence. This isn’t to say spam them, but rather that a successful nurture cadence is a low-touch interaction that primarily provides value rather than overtly promotional messaging.
That said, keep a close eye on their intent signals — as well as email opens, clicks, etc. — so that you can determine the best time to revisit the conversation, should the time arise.
Incorporate social touches
One channel doesn’t necessarily work over others. A multichannel
approach remains most likely to drive success, though that doesn’t
mean stick to phone and email. If you do so, you may be missing out on the other places your prospects spend hours each week, like LinkedIn and Twitter. In fact, salespeople who incorporate social touches throughout their cadences — soft ones such as profile views, “likes,” or comments on posts
— tend to generate more meetings.
Keep leads hot with Next Best Actions
You can keep the conversation going, but do you know what your next tactical steps are at any given point with a prospect? With 6sense as your account engagement platform, you can leverage AI to serve up Next Best Actions: a prioritized list of recommended actions to engage the buying team within a target account. It’s like having a GPS instead of a map.
As part of 6sense Sales Intelligence — which, if you recall, provides rich behavioral and predictive data on account records within CRM — Next Best Actions deliver recommendations including which contacts to engage next, key talking points to use, and new contacts to find.
A day in the life of a 6sense rep: how we use 6sense to prioritize outreach on target accounts
The proof is in the pudding… or in this case, in the platform. At 6sense, our AEs use the 6sense Account Engagement Platform to personalize and prioritize outreach on target accounts within Salesforce. Here’s a high-level look at a day in the life of one of our sales reps:
Review account activity via email alerts from 6sense
They review the daily and weekly email alerts they receive via the 6sense platform, including accounts that are in their patch where they have active opportunities. It discerns who the most engaged prospects are, what content and keywords they’re consuming within the Dark Funnel, and the pages they’re consuming in the traditional (known) funnel and on the 6sense website (anonymously or not).
Prioritize and plan for pipeline generation
They prioritize the day ahead with a dashboard focused on pipeline generation — understanding which accounts are in an active buying cycle that they don’t have any open opportunities against, or alternatively, where their pipeline is coming from. Let’s say most of their pipeline is coming from accounts in the decision or purchase stage. If they can get in the door earlier and educate the prospective buyer, they have a much higher chance of increasing the ACV rather than having to discount at the end of the day.
Examine hot contacts
Next, they navigate to a report that tells them their hot accounts and hot contacts (i.e., the most engaged accounts and the most engaged people at those accounts that we should be talking to). Within the list of hot accounts and hot contacts, they can see not only whether specific individuals are engaged, but also whether there are enough people to go after.
Use 6sense Account Intelligence within Salesforce
Let’s say ABC Company is in the purchase stage and a contact there is somewhat engaged. On every account within Salesforce, we have 6sense Account Intelligence that displays the stage they’re in according to predictive AI — in this case, they’re ripe to purchase — as well as tracking branded keywords (e.g., competitors of ours), generic keywords (related to their pain points), marketing and sales activities directly contributing to the overall engagement of the account, and a visual graph showcasing activity at the account. Every dot along the graph plots a level of intent within the Dark Funnel or within 6sense channels.
Let’s go further and say that there was a spike in activity on April 13, in which ABC Company opened our emails, consumed some content, explored the website, etc. The 6sense sales rep goes into the persona view within Salesforce to see who they should be reaching out to, with identifying levels of strong, moderate, or weak. They see job title, role, how engaged or disengaged they are… and with the help of intelligent insights on the account, they can tell where the activity is coming from geographically, what topics are of interest, and more.
Make moves with Next Best Actions
Within Salesforce, our Next Best Actions help the 6sense sales rep understand who they should reach out to. In this case, it’s a Director of Enterprise Marketing, and the sales rep can pull them directly into a specific cadence (with insight into any existing cadences they’re already in). In addition to that contact, there are more recommendations for other contacts not yet marked in the system. They can automatically be added into Salesforce for immediate outreach.
It’s an intuitive flow that allows the sales rep to not only check in on existing opportunities and take next steps, but get immediate insight into other areas of interest where there may be strong personas ready to add to a cadence and go after.
The ROI on knowing everything
On The Office when Michael Scott is trying to hire hotshot rival paper salesman Danny Cordray so that he’ll stop stealing their business, he says, “You already know Dunder-Mifflin has the best service and the best prices, but you beat us anyway. Can you imagine how well you would do selling our stuff?” And hey, it works. Danny comes to work for Dunder-Mifflin. He has everything he needs to succeed: raw talent, great service, and the best prices — a dreamy trifecta.
You have the talent. You have great products and services. Now imagine how much better you’d do if you also had the ease of a built-in secret weapon of intel. Thanks to analytics, AI, and CRM, we can do more than see inside a custom database; we can see inside each individual sales process and always have a next step to take with our findings.
Know everything, do anything
As the leading account engagement platform, 6sense champions the art of selling by providing the science that makes targeting, engaging, and winning deals easier and more efficient. You’ve had a sneak preview of the solution from the POV of one of our own sales reps, but there’s much more to see. In Forrester’s Total EconomicImpact™ (TEI) study of 6sense, respondents saw:
- MQLs convert to opportunities at a 75% higher rate
- Opportunities convert to closed business at a 40% higher rate
- Contract values 50% higher than historical average
Customer expectations may be changing with the times, but so are our technologies. Once you incorporate science into your sales process, you can focus less on hunting down new leads and moreon sealing the deal — or several.
