Top brands like Apple, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Costco (just to name a few) hyper-focus on customer experience. 

Shouldn’t you?

How do you get this competitive advantage?

It’s time to change your perspective. Put customer satisfaction first. Examine your products/services from the customer’s viewpoint. Take a few steps on your own customer journey.

Don’t just learn to address customer needs. Learn what it feels like to have those needs met by your company. Show you truly “get it” and exceed customer expectations. Satisfied customers mean more referrals, a better brand reputation, and repeat sales.

5-steps for a customer-focused strategy

1. Collect and unify your customer feedback

Most companies have plenty of customer information. However, problems can arise if your customer data is siloed across multiple teams and systems. Before you can create a customer-focused organization, you need to get your entire frontline staff on the same page (e.g. the same CRM).

For smooth customer journeys, choose a unified CRM that eliminates departmental data silos. For example, would your sales team benefit from the customer data and feedback stored on your marketing team’s email campaign platform? Would integrating all your customer information help these salespeople personalize their efforts and manage common objections?

Most of all, you need to spend time with your customer feedback. such as the ratio of positive to negative terms in reviews and comments. Be sure to read customer feedback in context. Purchases are emotional decisions. Learn how it feels to go on your company’s customer journey, and share these perspectives with your teams.

2. Study and streamline your touch points

Spend time to scrutinize customer feedback at each step of the customer journey. Use a single-customer-view approach and watch how customers develop individual relationships with your brand. Identify your most popular and productive routes to brand trust. Invest in those proven paths to decrease conversion costs and increase sales.

When compiling a comprehensive list of touch points, organize them in phases. Many touch points occur before the prospect is identified. You probably generate traffic with SEO blogs, social media ads, and search engine ads. Your company may also run print and outdoor ad campaigns. And don’t forget other touch points like events, gift cards, and customer referrals. 

During the sales process, customers consume reviews of your product/service in various forums. Point-of-sale blurbs/brochures can also count as touch points. Of course, your sales process, whether in person or online, must be frictionless and frustration-free.

After the sale, your touch points probably include satisfaction surveys, email lists, reviews, and comments. Of course, many people will continue to touch base with your brand via your social media communities. And remember, billing and shipping touch points matter to customers, as well.

Develop a business model that nurtures customer loyalty after the sale. Asking for feedback builds engagement and allows you to compute important metrics like stickiness, CSAT, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and more. Reduce churn and increase customer retention by showing you care about customer success, even after you’ve scored a sale.

3. Analyze and visualize your customer journey

Study your touchpoint data to anticipate customer needs and eliminate frustrations.

In this popular case study, a Norwegian research team analyzed customer journey touch points. They identified four common problems:

• Timing Errors – Your customer journey needs to make logical sense. This could look like a sales page link that happens too early in an email campaign, making people think you’re going to the hard sell rather than a micro-yes (e.g. download an eBook, check out a blog post). Worse yet, it could be a gaff like asking customers to log into a product before providing a code or registering their credentials.
• Ad Hoc Touch Points – Sometimes, unexpected and unplanned customer interactions happen. For example, when timing errors occur, customers (we hope!) will contact your support team. This can be an opportunity to build trust or further weaken customer relationships. Ad hoc touch points also include customer interactions with your accounting and logistics teams while untangling paperwork snafus.
• Failed Touch Points – Broken links, of course, diminish brand trust and increase bounce rates. Failed integrations between your ad platform, your website, and your point-of-sale software do the same. However, humans make mistakes, too. Late follow-ups, redundant/spammy sales calls, and other gaffs also lead to walk-aways.
• Missing Touch Points – A missing touch point could be as simple as a missing link or an incomplete email series. However, customers may be even more offended by missed meetings and ignored deadlines. These mistakes might be rare, but they can destroy brand trust. Demonstrate professionalism and due diligence to “walk the walk” of your customer-focused strategy across your entire organization.

Unify your data onto a platform with a comprehensive analysis suite. Visualizations matter, especially when sharing customer interaction and behavior insights with stakeholders. Use custom dashboards, graphs, and charts to tell customer stories and extract more value from your data. For example, you could track customer-focused KPIs like satisfaction scores to set team targets.

With the right CRM, it’s easier than ever to watch your customer relationships grow and mature.

4. Foster a customer-focused culture

Provide and track high-quality customer experiences across your entire organization.

To get started, define your vision of customer focus and share it with all stakeholders. It can help to follow Gulati and Oldroid’s four stages of the customer focus journey:

1. Create a centralized customer data repository, such as a unified CRM. Standardize this touchpoint information and organize it by customer, not by product/service, sale, account, location, etc.
2. Select a leader to own this project. This person will oversee the handoff of information from analysts to managers to marketers, to salespeople, etc. (A unified CRM makes this task simpler and easier than ever.)
3. Experiment with interventions. Use your unified data system to analyze and predict behaviors. Test possible improvements to your customer journey with customers (and against a control group).
4. Coordinate your efforts. With a good user experience system in place, let your teams care for your customers. For example, when a logistics team lead might notice a late shipment, she could identify the salesperson with the best relationship with this customer. Who else could best smooth over this mistake on your company’s behalf?

5. Resolve issues quickly

Customer focus means quick issue resolution. 

The logistic team leader from the previous example could use a unified CRM to update delivery schedules. She could reach out to your billing department for a revised quote. Her sales colleague could access this real-time customer relationship data and send out relevant customer service messages.

Of course, a solid software platform will help you catch your mistakes. Employ automated messaging and issue escalation features to alert stakeholders when teams take too long to resolve cases.

Align your teams with Insightly 

Insightly’s unified CRM gives you the tools you need to adopt a customer-focused approach.

It unites Marketing, Sales and Service teams into one tool. Then, you can easily integrate your other apps in your business with Insightly via AppConnect. You can quickly streamline your processes without writing a single line of code.  

Let Insightly’s unified approach give you the insights you need to improve customer focus and build stronger relationships.

 Get your free Insightly trial today.

The post 5 Ways To Improve Customer Focus appeared first on Insightly.

Engagement is a predictor of whether or not that customer will stay with you, and possibly even refer you, so it can be a leading metric for future revenue and growth.

So here’s how to use your CRM to track customer engagement and the appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business size.

What is customer engagement?

Though a sale or a subscription is a landmark in a customer’s relationship with your company, it’s just the beginning. Engaged customers create emotional bonds with your brand, and can create a valuable feedback loop for product improvements. 

You can elect to add engaged customers to customer or member councils who can get early access to new products or services and provide candid feedback in both one-on-one and focus-group style programs. If you’re in software, your engaged customers can be the ultimate beta testing group. 

In the positive cases, engaged customers become brand champions who are willing to provide referrals, testimonials, and enthusiastic reviews. In the best cases, they become brand evangelists who regularly engage in a positive manner with your brand on social media, and may even speak on your behalf at events, effectively functioning as an extension of your marketing team. 

Why measure customer engagement?

While engagement is a major revenue predictor in recurring revenue businesses, all businesses can benefit from surfacing these metrics. No one will argue that engaged customers create lasting value for your company. Knowing you can count on positive references and referrals from clients will help you compete for more and bigger deals. While some of this will likely be qualitative in nature, there are tools and metrics available today that can quantify engagement and track it over time, giving you insights into past, present, and future performance.

Five customer engagement metrics and KPIs that matter

There are five top customer engagement metrics that matter to nearly all companies. Each is described below. If you are wondering which matters the most to your company in particular, read on. At the end of each KPI summary, you’ll see a list of which kinds of companies typically prioritize it.

Start-ups defining and implementing their Unique Selling Points (USPs) will track different KPIs than mid-market companies working to scale up, gain traction, and win market share. Massive corporations typically focus on metrics that reflect their dependence on established brand reputations. That said, these metrics surface at the top for nearly all organizations.

1. First-week engagement

Engagement is often at its peak at the start of a contract. Make the most of your customer’s initial enthusiasm with streamlined setups, progress tracking, and solid support.

In a 2021 study, Linköping University’s Gustav Fridell examined SaaS best practices. He found that reducing friction and monitoring progress increased first-week retention.

Consider guiding, tracking, and displaying your new user’s progress through the onboarding process. They are more likely to stick with your solution if they can visualize a successful customer journey, especially during their first crucial steps.

For example, these tips can improve the new customer experience and lower abandonment and unsubscribe rates in the software industry:

• Make your platform or tool intuitive and easy to learn.
• Offer fast page load speeds.
• Prioritize addressing bugs and glitches that emerge during onboarding steps.
• Demonstrate ‘quick wins’ and value early on.

No user experience is perfect. Inevitably, people will have some trouble adopting your products or services. When they reach out, you need to offer reliable customer service to promote customer retention. Invest in robust support and show new customers you care about their success. 

Chatbots can be a great tool when implemented thoughtfully, but nothing is better than interacting with a deeply-knowledgeable support person. Short term churn can be avoided by quickly showing value to your customer in the onboarding phase. You have to get it right.  

Best for: Mid-market companies, especially startups, should hyper-focus on frictionless onboarding, user journey tracking, and responsive, knowledgeable support. At a small scale, individual customer success equals corporate viability.

Large brands with solid reputations enjoy more initial customer enthusiasm than smaller organizations. Their positive legacy marketing efforts mean users are less likely to jump ship when frustrated.

2. User Activity

SaaS companies, mainly social media platforms, eCommerce brands, and game manufacturers, pay close attention to their Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) metrics. However, DAUs and MAUs aren’t just about competing for market share. Together they create an early-warning system. 

Think of MAUs as benchmarks and DAUs as indicators. If you see a significant difference between your daily numbers and your monthly averages, something unfavorable is happening. DAU valleys or spikes could be your first signal of a major problem or win.

Best for: Companies of all sizes should compare DAUs to MAUs to stay ahead of news events and emerging trends. Small and medium-sized companies can track this metric to acknowledge marketing strategy milestones. However, MAUs are crucial for large companies to maximize their market share for bottom-line profitability.

3. Stickiness

You can use DAUs and MAUs to measure “stickiness.” This metric represents how happy people are with your product or service based on how frequently they are returning. It’s an effective way to predict how likely users are to stick with your brand.

Typically, stickiness equals Daily Active Users divided by Monthly Active Users.

Stickiness = DAU / MAU

However, you may want to consider alternative formulas that account for unique users. Unique users represent the number of visitors to your site. An increase in this metric shows your company and website are growing. 

Businesses often look to churn rate as a measure of stickiness, but keep in mind that churn is a lagging indicator that doesn’t allow you to be as proactive as the formula above. 

Best for: Stickiness matters most for startups that need to build momentum and raise brand awareness. 

Mid-market and large businesses also want to limit turnover, but they are typically better positioned to tolerate variations in customer engagement and have more varied marketing campaigns.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

You’ve likely seen NPS in action even if you’ve never heard the term. If you’ve ever been presented with a scale from 1-10 asking how likely you are to recommend a company, you’ve been NPS’d. The idea is that the most satisfied customers (those who rank you as a 9 or 10) will spread the word about your product or service. 

When you survey your customers, some will say they’ll probably promote you to their peers. Some will say they won’t. And some won’t feel inclined to share positive or negative information about you. The scale lists scores of 0-6 as “detractors”, 7-8 as “passives,” and 9-10 as “promoters.”

To calculate your NPS, subtract the percentage of survey respondents who would say negative things from those who would offer positive things about your brand.

NPS = Promoter % – Detractor %

For example, if 70% of people share positives and 20% share negatives, your NPS would equal 50. Many popular brands struggle with their NPS score. Apple, which is considered world-class when it comes to NPS, sits at around 50.

Best for: Large companies with massive ad budgets need to track brand health with the NPS metric carefully. Experts consider this a fundamental KPI for predicting near-term revenues, especially your target audience. Smaller and emerging businesses that rely less on brand recognition and more on networking and feature-driven ad campaigns rely less on this KPI.

5. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

SaaS companies often measure CSAT by asking users for short one-to-five star or emoji ratings. You can use these quick check-ins to measure the customer experience with the features they use. 

This is different from NPS, which provides a more general satisfaction rating of your product, service, or brand. In short, CSAT tracks customer satisfaction, and NPS measures customer loyalty.

Best for: Because they focus almost exclusively on new solutions and USPs, startups must measure CSATs. Small SaaS businesses need to know specific user preferences when offering suites of new tools. Larger companies need CSAT data when adding features but depend more on NPS scores for predictions.

Track user engagement and much more with Insightly Service and unified CRM

There are other metrics out there, but this list represents a good batch to focus on first.  

With Insightly Service, mission-critical customer data is available to all your teams, in real time, empowering them to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success. A dashboard view gives you rolled-up access to the data that’s important across the organization and to measure the KPIs that are vital to your team. 

Break down silos with a robust view of the customer. Empower your support teams to solve tickets quickly, listen with empathy, and create sales opportunities right in the application. See the features that matter to you with a free demo of Insightly today.

The post 5 essential customer engagement metrics and KPIs appeared first on Insightly.

But for us marketers, that’s easier said than done. Marketers rarely ever speak directly to a lead, prospect, or customer. Instead, we rely on customer data collected throughout the company.

How can you better access, understand, and use customer data? Start by working closely with your customer success team.

Why you should align customer success with marketing

We talk quite a bit about marketing and sales team alignment. Marketing efforts should be in-step with the sales cycle. Yet, we rarely talk about what happens after the sale is closed. At this point, the account moves to a dedicated account or customer success manager.

It is in marketers’ best interest to build relationships with customer success managers. Their close customer communication provides unique insights that lead to better marketing.

Some of the valuable insights that customer success can provide include:

Increased visibility into customers

Customer data can show you trends and patterns, but sometimes you need to know more. Customer success managers can answer qualitative questions about customers to enhance your data. Customer success managers have conversations that provide insight into the user’s behavior and changes over time. These details about the customer relationship can help marketers tell a more complete customer story.

Share customer reactions

Robust customer data is great, but it’s only historical. We don’t know what the customer experience is at a particular moment. Customer success managers can tell you how your customers are feeling about a product feature, a pricing change, or even a world event in near real-time.

Create a stronger customer profile

You can enhance your customer profiles with this qualitative and real-time information. Customer success managers can also provide feedback on these profiles to make them more accurate.

Measuring marketing programs using customer success data

Typically, we measure marketing against revenue. If marketing programs are successful, they lead to increased monthly or annual recurring revenue, or MRR and ARR, respectively.

Customer success is measured similarly. If customer success is thriving, MRR and ARR increases because of the lack of customer churn.

Consider measuring your marketing programs against which you can drive growth for customer success key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, perhaps customers who come in through a webinar are less likely to churn. By investing in more webinars, you’ll improve customer long-term value.

Using customer success documentation for content marketing

Customer success managers are content marketers. They develop resources for customers to better use your product. Usually these are ‘help’ or ‘support’ articles, but sometimes they are videos, walkthroughs, or webinars. They also have access to great customer profiles and stories.

The problem? Rarely do these pieces live on a company’s main marketing site. At best, they are on a help or support subdomain. At worst, they are PDFs that are shared privately with customers.

Why should these valuable pieces of content be hidden under a bushel basket? They provide a resource to customers and they often have high SEO value.

Consider repurposing this content on the blog or marketing site. If the content doesn’t meet your marketing guidelines, rework and rewrite.

How customer success can improve customer marketing

Most marketing efforts drive toward acquiring customers. Yet, once you achieve team alignment with your customer success and marketing teams, you may shift some focus to customer marketing.

What is customer marketing?

Customer marketing is marketing that’s focused on retention, not acquisition. This means that you create marketing programs for current customers, not future customers. It includes decreasing churn, but also upgrading and upselling.

For successful customer marketing, the marketing, sales, account management, and customer success teams must be in lockstep.

If there’s a dedicated role, i.e. a customer marketing manager, that person will report into both marketing and customer success.

3 ways customer success can amplify customer marketing

They can uncover new ideas

If a customer needs a resource, they’re likely to ask their dedicated success manager. Customers might request a new tutorial, video, or support document. If marketers have a close relationship with customer success, they will have a direct pipeline to useful content ideas.

They can collect qualitative feedback about customer experience

Was your new email campaign helpful or annoying? A customer success manager can get a customer on the phone and ask about the customer experience right away. Marketers don’t have to work in a black box or wait for survey results to understand the impact of their efforts.

They can identify customer advocates

An advocate who goes to bat for you is a strong way to both acquire and retain customers. Customer success can identify and cultivate advocates so marketing can best position them to engage new and old customers.

Should you have a customer marketing team?

How do you know when it’s time to refocus your efforts on customer marketing? Consider this checklist when deciding if you should hire a customer marketing team.

• You have a complete acquisition marketing and customer success team
• You’ve reached your goals for new MRR or ARR
• Customer churn is a major problem
• There’s a lot of potential to upgrade and upsell

How to communicate & collaborate with customer success

When aligning teams, the biggest challenge is aligning communication and collaboration channels.

Marketing teams typically use project management tools focused on task completion. Often, customer success works on a ‘ticket’ system designed to address urgent issues.

To smoothly integrate your teams, consider the following collaboration tools and techniques:

Customer relationship management (CRM) tool

Your CRM should serve both customer success and marketing functions. A unified CRM should have project management functionality, organize and centralize customer data, and provide visibility into how marketing impacts customer metrics.

Slack or internal chat

Especially in remote or hybrid environments, chatting is crucial to developing team rapport. Start a dedicated marketing/CS channel to openly share thoughts and ideas. This will help your team members feel comfortable working with one another.

Integrated meetings

No one wants to add another Zoom to their calendar. Yet, weekly stand-ups or report-outs are how we understand what is happening at the company. Consider assigning an ‘ambassador’ from each team to sit in on the other’s weekly meeting. This will give the teams insight into one another without adding to meeting fatigue.

Conclusion

There is no downside to better collaboration and alignment between teams. As a marketer across industries, my relationships with customer success teams have both enhanced my personal knowledge, and led to better business outcomes. When customer success and marketing work closely together, customer retention and revenue is certain to grow.

Sources:

Want A Better Customer Experience – Align Customer Success And Marketing. Philipp Wolf. Custify.

Why Customer Success Should Own Customer Marketing. Will Robins. Gainsight.

The post Why you should align marketing and customer success teams appeared first on Insightly.

According to a recent survey by Gartner, prospects spend 50% of their time seeking information from third-party sources.* Why not study their moves?

What is buyer intent?

Buyer intent looks at aggregated behavioral signals to identify potential prospects in the buying cycle. There are a variety of data points that can represent buying intention.

Intent data can include the following behaviors:

• Web site visits and the frequency of visits
• What specific articles or pages a user is reading
• Which topics seem to interest users most
• Engagement with sales or marketing emails

Essentially, intent data is any type of information that indicates a lead is in the buying phase of their customer journey. The main sources of intent marketing include web traffic, off-site activity, data from your CRM, social media metrics, search intent, and content consumption data.

How is intent data collected?

There are a few types of resources that help businesses capture buyer intent. This includes both internal and external buyer intent tools.

Internal data

Any data that a company collects on its own is considered “internal data.” Also referred to as “first-party” intent data, it is information that is collected in-house using a variety of systems, such as application logs, a marketing automation platform, or customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Most CRMs will display metrics for what visitors are doing on your site. The benefits of collecting internal data include total control of what you capture and how, accuracy, and security.

Additionally, a business can act immediately on internal data and customize exactly what classifies as purchase intent. There’s no waiting for another party to deliver your data. This provides a good way to get started with buyer intent data.

External data

Another way of collecting intent data is through a third-party data collection company. This is typically sourced through cookies or IP lookups on specific websites. Because collected internal data can be complex, external data provides an easier means to the same end.

External data is distinct from internal business intelligence because it is generated by and purchased from outside agencies. This data is used by the purchaser to filter out potential buyers and is even packaged as marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

However, there are some disadvantages to going this route. The company you choose must always be GDPR-compliant. You’ll also need to set up clear expectations and closely monitor the deliverables for consistent accuracy and value of data you purchase.

Data should be sourced from leading industry sites that consumers are using to educate themselves. Research is usually based on search intent, prior buying patterns, and prior buying patterns.

Key indicators of buyer intent

In order to ensure prospects are exclusively a good fit, do your homework. You need to position the segmenting and targeting work around a buyer persona. Otherwise, you could end up with leads who, on the surface, look good, but may never buy a thing.

The first step is deciding what the company values as important and how to score interactions with key decision-makers. You should also account for who is interacting with your brand. There’s no point in spending time tracking and scoring leads that aren’t a good fit.

Key considerations when compiling intent data include:

Recency

How recently has a prospect engaged with the brand? This is super important data. If you wait weeks to contact someone after visiting the site, they probably already made a buying decision.

People waste no time these days and thus, speed matters in sales. The faster you react, the more deals you close.

Frequency

How often are people coming back? The more they return, the more likely they are to buy. If you see a lead frequently viewing pages for pricing or case studies, you can easily assume they are far into the buying cycle. At this point, the sales team needs to reach out.

Engagement

Most lead scoring systems count user engagement. If an individual is engaging with content on your site via chat, email, or other forms of interaction, it’s a good indication they are ready to talk.

How is buyer intent data used?

So, once all of this information is collected, what do you do with it?

You can use buyer intent data in a number of ways. For starters, it’s a key asset for customer acquisition. It works to greatly improve segmenting and targeting of account-based marketing campaigns. Intent data also helps to better align your messaging to buyers’ needs.

Some ways in which you can put buyer intent data to use today include:

Maximize outreach

Intent data gives your sales team a leg up. Sales teams don’t have to wait for buyers to complete an action to identify interest. With simple buyer intent signals, it’s now possible to prioritize outreach based on specific behaviors.

Reduce churn

After the sales team converts a prospect, a business can continue to monitor clients who research the competition. This data points to customers who may need additional support or attention. This usually indicates your product or customer service is failing in some way.

Set up triggers that request buyer feedback to help identify gaps for future product development. Intent data helps to uncover problems before buyers even utter a peep. This reduces the churn rate and adds to overall customer satisfaction.

Guide for messaging

Buyer intent data works to strategically target in-market prospects and convert them to quality leads. This type of data provides insight into prospect research history, including specific products and brands.

Research by Gartner found that “by the end of 2022, more than 70% of B2B marketers will utilize third-party intent data to target prospects or engage groups of buyers in selected accounts.”*

Buyer intent data can be used to better craft unique and specific messaging that speaks to segmented audiences in different ways. Rather than using generic marketing tactics, you can better align your outreach with specific interest signals that buyers leave, such as cookie crumbs across third-party sites.

Pros & cons of buyer intent data

When it comes to using this type of data to conduct business, there are two sides to the coin. Here are some pros and cons:

Pros

Efficient prospecting

For a sales team, closing deals is the top priority. Buyer intent data simplifies prospecting with a layer of business intelligence. Knowing who is looking at what content means you can tailor messaging with more direct targeting.

It also means sales can engage leads as early as possible while collecting information on how and what prospects are researching. Sales will be able to prospect SQLs in a fraction of the time.

Improve outbound sales

This is about working smarter, not harder. The sales cycle can be long. Giving your team direct access to buyer intent data allows them to reach out to the most qualified leads and spend less time on people who aren’t really interested.

It also increases the ROI of your B2B content syndication efforts. See who’s reaching out and target more efficiently.

Sales prioritization

Practice advanced sales prioritization with buyer intent data that lights the way. Traditional lead scoring relies on adding points when certain actions are taken.

Intent data helps to uncover additional avenues a lead takes during the buying cycle. This can be used in a more precise way to predict purchase intent and prioritize contacts.

Personalization & targeting

Intent data helps both the sales and marketing departments to run more accurate account-based campaigns. Successful outreach, including buyer enablement, is built on personalization.

The most effective way to improve B2B campaigns is to provide a continuous stream of relevant content. It allows you to strategically nurture leads by segmenting lists and adjusting the messages accordingly.

Relevancy

When you closely understand consumer problems, you can create more relevant content. Buyer intent data helps to uncover common obstacles and issues people run into that pertain to the product or service you provide.

These insights can be used to better guide content creation and increase inbound leads. Create content that directly reflects exactly what people are interested in and watch the social return on investment skyrocket.

Cons

Accuracy issues

When it comes to purchasing buyer intent data from a third party, there is no true way to confirm the data is accurate. You are simply relying on good faith that the company is giving you correct information.

Leads can be anywhere

Third-party agencies that provide external buyer data include leads that can be anywhere in the funnel. Rather than focus on one buyer stage, most outside sources will send them to you along the entire journey.

That means, purchasing buyer data with the intent of using it for top-of-the-funnel messaging can be risky. Your business is going in directly for the sale when some buyers may just be getting to know you. It comes off as pushy.

Too specific 

Being too specific in targeting can lead a sales team right back to blind targeting. There is such a thing as over-personalization. Zeroing in on super-specific characteristics of a potential buyer can cut out people that are actually willing to buy.

You risk not reaching a wide enough audience and missing out on sales. You should employ critical thinking to determine the fine line between being too general or too specific in your messaging.

Waiting to reach out  

Having sales and marketing wait to respond to buyers reaching out can cost you. Sometimes outbound cold-calling is the best form of gathering new leads.

Non-compliance 

The worst issue a business can run into when purchasing buyer intent data is that it was captured in a way that’s deemed “non-compliant” with the latest data security standards and regulations. Control and management is necessary to ensure the data is being used properly.

If it’s not used correctly, you can face non-compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which can lead to some hefty fines.

Is buyer intent data worth it?

It all depends on how a business wants to spend its money. Top-of-the-funnel leads require a lot more time and attention. This means fewer leads for your money.

Perhaps a better option is to purchase buyer intent when prospects are part-way down the funnel and use CRM and internal data before that. You can then allocate resources to more profitable endeavors, such as ad spend, customer engagement campaigns, and content creation.

Buyer intent data is most valuable when a business has a well-crafted buyer persona and has the capacity to follow through with leads in a timely manner. A poorly crafted buyer persona or failure to pay attention to details means wasted money on missed opportunities.

Many businesses start targeting before they have fully segmented the audience. Narrow the focus and build out the value prop with relevant content. Then, it will make more sense to purchase buyer intent data. This establishes buyer confidence that your company can solve their biggest problems.

Sources:

*“Emerging Technology Analysis: Leveraging Intent Data for Marketing and Demand Generation.” Alan Antin. Gartner. February 11, 2020.

The post How to make the most out of buyer intent data appeared first on Insightly.

One of these will forever remain…email.

In fact, just as marketers thought this was a dying art, email marketing is doing better than ever. It’s projected by the year 2024, the number of email users will reach 4.48 billion.

And one way to reach them is to start an email drip campaign.

What is a drip campaign?

A drip campaign is a form of digital marketing where relevant information is “dripped” to sales leads over a period of time. These messages typically take the form of email marketing and are based on either a user action or predefined time interval.

For any given action, a marketer can choose the number of emails, type, and rate at which to send them. These emails can also be personalized with data, such as a prospect’s name or specific references to actions they took.

A drip campaign is automation mixed with prewritten messages. Important engagement points are mapped in the marketing automation system and information is generally sent on a preset schedule in response to a specific action or strategic plan.

Drip actions

Some examples of important actions a consumer might take to trigger a drip campaign include:

• Purchasing a product or placing an order
• Shopping cart abandonment
• Not placing an order for a period of time
• Engaging with customer service
• Attending a store event
• Registering for a webinar
• Downloading a report or white paper

Anything you can think of where automation easily gets the message across should be suitable for another drip message.

How are drip campaigns used?

Drip campaigns help you better connect with the right person at the right moment. They are designed for hyper-targeted messaging without the manual labor. They accompany every prospect through the sales pipeline and assist them when any snags or challenges occur.

Important dates

Date-based automations help a brand communicate with an audience on days that matter to them. This goes beyond just a birthday. You can also initiate a drip campaign for things like:

• Subscription renewal
• Reordering prompts
• Anniversary of first purchase
• Major holidays

Anything that can further brand value for the consumer can be added to a timely drip campaign.

User behavior

Drip campaigns can also be triggered by a user’s behavior. This includes actions they do or do not take. Here are some examples:

Welcome email

When a new person joins the audience, use a welcome drip to share your brand highlights or product information and tips for first-time users. Keep new people posted on upcoming events, sales, and other relevant activities.

First order

After someone makes an initial purchase, thank them for their business. Reinforce they made a good decision and suggest complementary products for future purchases.

Recommendations

This is a great automated email to boost sales. Recommendation messages can be sent with an order confirmation or shipping details.

Customer service

Emails that follow up after a customer service or sales inquiry are a productive way to keep your audience engaged. This creates an opportunity to further educate and onboard prospects.

Lead nurture

Drip campaigns are particularly well suited for nurturing active interest in prospects. If someone registers for a webinar or downloads a white paper, this is a cue to send a lead nurture drip email that keeps the conversation flowing.

Abandoned shopping cart

Anytime a prospect fills a shopping cart and then moves away from the page, you want to send them a reminder message. You can encourage people to reassess the purchase or send them offers on similar items.

Types of drip campaigns

When it comes to the method and style of drip campaigns, there are several archetypes to choose from. Some of these include:

Top-of-mind

This type of message keeps leads engaged throughout the sales process.

Educational

This includes any relevant data for prospects to help them make a more informed purchasing decision.

Re-engagement

These are designed to win back the interest of cold leads.

Training

Messages for new clients (or internally) to move readers through a training program.

Competitive

Target a competitor’s customers with a better offer or the benefits of switching to your product.

Promotional

Entice prospects with time-sensitive promotions and special pricing offers.

Setting up a drip campaign

Drip campaigns are an automated workhorse that helps a business maintain the marketing, nurturing, and selling that’s essential to success. Setting up drip marketing is not as difficult as one might think. Follow these simple steps:

1. Choose what will trigger the campaign. Is it a specific date or action?
2. Identify your audience. Information must be targeted. Where in the pipeline are they?
3. Tailor your messages. Drip emails don’t need to be long, but they should always be on-brand.
4. Measure your success and adjust based on performance. Choose metrics based on the email you type, audience, and other factors. You may track open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
5. Save all copy. These messages can be repurposed down the road.

Why are drip campaigns important?

A study of 2,000 people on the Transformational Consumer, found that more than half of us are engaged in a never-ending search for content, services, and products to support changing behavior. A drip campaign is just the type of marketing to encourage this quest.

Drip campaigns are important because they support a variety of business pursuits. Benefits from this style of digital marketing include:

• Nurture leads
• Boost sales
• Provide relevant and timely information
• Targeted and custom messaging
• Increase engagement
• Bolster brand trust
• Automate manual actions

Drip campaigns are also one of the easiest forms of digital marketing to track and analyze. All sorts of metrics and user behavior data can be collected to give a brand deeper insight into exactly what people want to see and read.

Best practices for your drip campaign

When creating a drip campaign, there are a few things to remember.

Specific design

Make it easy for prospects to express their preferences regarding things like the frequency of messages, the type of content, and how they would like to receive it. Never push messages on anyone. That negates the point.

Targeted campaigns

Always tailor your message to a specific audience in mind. The more targeted your marketing, the more relevant the email will seem to the very person reading it.

Test everything

Always monitor and analyze every drip campaign you send. This is how you will test the effectiveness and which aspects of the campaign are working, or what needs to be changed. Review key performance indicators (KPIs), campaign goals, and important metrics like open and bounce rates.

Use your tools

Marketing automation tools typically integrate with other platforms that will make your life easier. Consider items that facilitate drip marketing, like social media management, CRMs, and analytics.

What have we learned?

Drip campaigns are a vital part of digital marketing. The most popular medium is email. This type of personalized messaging provides timely and relevant information to people, just when they need it. Not only does it leverage sales, it stimulates brand trust, and brings your customers closer to you.

Looking for a marketing automation tool? Check out Insightly Marketing.

The post A 5-minute guide to drip marketing appeared first on Insightly.

To scale in a way that is supportive of the customer journey, businesses are turning to automated systems that help them strike a better balance between growth and personalization. And marketing automation tools, such as Insightly Marketing, can be especially useful when implemented thoughtfully and strategically.

Let’s take a closer look at some best practices for automating your customer journeys.

Why marketing automation & customer journeys go together

As we discussed in a previous article, your customer journey map is a visual representation of the process that your buyer goes through from awareness to satisfied customer. A well-crafted customer journey map should help team members understand your buyer personas, their internal motivations, and their interactions with your organization.

Journey mapping is also helpful for improving the customer experience and overcoming internal inefficiencies. For example, you may find it easier to identify:

• Content gaps: Articles, eBooks, technical guides, and other resources that might help the customer achieve his or her goal faster.
• Unnecessary friction: Points in the journey that make life difficult for customers, such as confusing calls to action or redundant steps.
• Time-consuming, manual processes: Steps that, if automated, would benefit both the customer and your team, such as appointment confirmations.

Fixing these challenges is not easy when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of contact records. That’s where marketing automation comes in especially handy. Unlike batch-and-blast email tools that offer minimal configuration options, marketing automation tools are built to enable highly customized, rule-based journeys that align with customer and internal objectives.

Marketing automation enables your company to systematize your processes and scale them to keep pace with growth. The net result? Better informed customers, less friction in the buying process, and improved efficiency.

4 marketing automation tips for a better customer journey

So, what’s the best way to align marketing automation with your customer journey? Consider these four tips.

1. Collect raw ideas & develop your automation strategy

Resist the temptation to start “doing.” Instead, invest time into the process and develop a game plan. Go back to your customer journey map and note any content gaps, broken processes, and improvement opportunities, such as:

• Implementing auto-responder emails for form submissions
• Automating the distribution of blog content to subscribers
• Regularly following up with leads who have requested pricing but failed to buy
• Accelerating the onboarding experience for new customers
• Asking customers to post reviews on social media and review sites

Ask key stakeholders in sales, support, marketing, and other departments for feedback. Aim to understand how much time and effort is involved in supporting existing processes and workflows. Quantify the potential business impact that could be realized through automation.

2. Sequence your work

Take all of your automation ideas and organize them into a central location. You can use kanban boards, which are visually intuitive and make it easy to organize projects into a sequential order for implementation. Start with the project that represents the largest value and least effort. Or, if you’re completely new to automation, perhaps it would be best to start with a very small project with minimal impact. This way, you can familiarize yourself with the marketing automation platform and reduce the risk of unexpected delays.

One additional note about sequencing: If everything is in-process, nothing is in-process. Therefore, it’s best to implement one automation project at a time. Focus on using automation to add value to the customer journey—rather than maximizing the amount of work.

3. Gain a clear understanding of your marketing automation technology

There are a variety of marketing automation systems on the market today. Some offer visually intuitive user interfaces, while others are somewhat antiquated and tedious to use. Some are natively integrated with your CRM, while others require a third-party integration. Regardless of the technology that you intend to use, it’s vital to read support documentation and familiarize yourself with the platform, UI, and terminology. (If you haven’t selected a marketing automation system, check out Insightly’s marketing automation checklist.)

Insightly Users: Insightly Marketing users should read What are Journeys? and brush up on important definitions, such as prospects, lists, steps, actions, triggers, and checks.

4. Use data to measure impact, avoid issues, & inform future decisions

As you automate various aspects of the customer journey, be sure to refer back often to your marketing automation system for data and insights. In addition to top-level campaign metrics, drill down into specific steps in the journey. Your system should make it easy to understand:

• Total number of deliveries, opens, and clicks for each email
• Top-performing and under-performing steps in the journey
• Opportunities to continuously improve the journey

One final note: Your business is continuously evolving—and so is the customer journey. Therefore, you must regularly update your automation rules as things change. Set a goal to review all active automations on a regular basis. Monthly or quarterly is probably a good cadence, depending on the amount of automation. Check for any automated workflows that overlap or detract from the customer experience. Look for ways to consolidate and simplify.

Automate your customer journeys, one step at a time

Automation can be tremendously beneficial to the customer journey. It can also be a little overwhelming, especially if your company has been slow to adopt new technologies. As you begin to formulate your automation strategy, don’t try to do too many things at once. Remember, any incremental improvement will be a net gain for your customers and team.

Keep it simple, focus on value, and keep iterating.

If you’d like to learn more about Insightly’s unified platform for sales and marketing automation, request a demo and get a free needs assessment.

Request a demo

The post How to automate customer journeys appeared first on Insightly.

Unfortunately, in today’s omnichannel business landscape, creating one map that represents the entire customer journey can seem daunting—if not impossible. After all, some customers are very candid about their motivations and desired outcomes, while others are less willing to open up. Some customers prefer to interact through face-to-face conversations, while others rely on non-verbal forms of communication, such as email, social media, or text message.

With so many personas, goals, motivations, and communication styles to consider, how can you ever develop a single document that represents the customer journey? One way to do it is to start small and develop your customer journey map over time.

Here are three mapping exercises to help you use CRM data in developing different types of customer journeys for your business.

1. Define your ICPs & personas

Customer journey mapping is a waste of time until you have developed a very specific understanding of your ideal customer. Start by clearly defining your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and personas before spending any time on journey mapping. If you do not have an ICP or personas, consider the following questions:

• If you could only sell to one industry, what would it be?
• Within that industry, what is your primary niche?
• Within your ideal industry and niche, what are the firmographic characteristics of your ideal customer ? (i.e., revenue size, line of business, number of employees, etc.)
• Of the companies that you’ve served in the past, which were less than ideal? Why?
• Who are the types of people (job titles, responsibilities) that your company interacts with?
• Which job titles tend to make decisions about your products or services?
• Which gatekeepers and other stakeholders are involved in the buying process?
• Who will be the actual users or consumers of what you provide?

There’s a lot to think about when developing your ICPs and personas. You may not have all of the answers, and that’s normal. Use your CRM data and build reports that help you answer the tough questions. Your sales team is also a reliable source of first-hand knowledge to help you check your assumptions. Collect all of the feedback and begin simplifying it for the next step.

Example: A manufacturing business that makes and sells assembly line equipment could theoretically have numerous ICPs and personas. However, for customer mapping purposes, it may be beneficial to focus on one industry at a time—especially if buying patterns and customer service requirements vary significantly by industry. Instead of trying to force all industries into a single map, the manufacturing company would be better served to develop one map for automotive, one for healthcare, and so on. The first step would be to itemize each industry’s ICP and persona(s) as follows:

2. Analyze CRM data for closed-won deals within each ICP

Once you’ve defined your primary ICP(s), it’s time to use data from your CRM to identify trends that are common to each journey. Drill down using tags or custom fields and quickly identify won deals that fall within your target ICP. Be sure to set a date range that provides enough meaningful data.

Do you notice any similarities? Things to look for may include:

• Similar interactions in the journey from awareness to close
• Content that was frequently downloaded or viewed on your website
• Marketing emails that helped move deals forward
• Lead sources that were responsible for a sizable percentage of closed deals
• Typical customer buying processes and the personas who were involved
• Objections that were noted during the sales cycle
• Average amount of time that was required to close each deal
• Post-close and implementation details

Note: Looking at closed-lost deals can also be instructive, but you may not need to do it if you have enough closed-won data.

Use actual deal data to build a more complete view of the customer profile. Going back to our previous manufacturing example, the company’s automotive ICP may look something like this:

3. Start building your customer journey map

Having enriched your ICPs and personas with reliable data from your CRM, you’re now ready to begin constructing a basic customer journey map. What’s the best format for your business? There’s no one-size-fits-all template that works for every industry and use case, so here are a few tips for designing a simple, yet effective customer journey map:

Grid layout

Most customer journey maps are built using a graph-based design and have horizontal and vertical axes. Above the grid, it’s important to have your ICP and persona clearly defined. If you’ve developed fictitious personas with names and photos, this might be a great place to use them. Remember, each map should be specific to one persona / ICP combination. If you have several customer journeys to map, start with the most important persona. If certain maps are very similar, you can always combine them or eliminate some later.

Horizontal axis

The horizontal axis of your graph will most likely align with specific stages that customers go through from pre-awareness to satisfied customer. Using your internal sales pipeline terminology could work, although it is better to describe the stages from the perspective of your customer. So, instead of “initial discussions,” you might use the phrase “research vendors.”

Vertical axis

Some customer journey maps try to squeeze as many criteria into the vertical axis as possible. This can lead to an overwhelming experience that defeats the original purpose of mapping. Decide on three to four important criteria as a starting point for your y-axis. Customer actions, customer feelings and thoughts, and common objections are good examples. You can always add more later.

Example customer journey map

Based on our previous example, here’s what a simple customer journey map might look like. You could build this in a document or spreadsheet and hand it off to a designer to pretty up later. The main goal is to get your basic facts on paper as quickly as possible:

Persona: VP Process Engineering – Plastics (Automotive ICP)

Notice that the map’s last row provides space to collect notes and ideas for streamlining each stage of the customer journey. In this example, developing “automated onboarding workflows” is listed as one opportunity to help the customer achieve his or her goal during implementation. Using a tool like Insightly Marketing can be an intuitive and effective way to automate various aspects of the customer journey—from initial awareness to repeat buyer.

Build better customer journeys

As the business world evolves at an even faster pace, smart companies are realizing the importance of building accurate and actionable customer journey maps.

Not sure how to get started? Keep it simple. Rely on data that already exists in your CRM. Focus on business impact rather than worrying about design effects. And, once you’ve built your customer journey map, use it!

To learn more about Insightly Marketing and CRM platform, request a demo.

Request a demo

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Unlike multi-channel campaigns, which typically focus on pushing a common message across multiple marketing channels, integrated campaigns have a broader scope and integrate the talents of a wider spectrum of people. Sales, sales development, product, IT, leadership, and, of course, marketing all play an important role.

Here are a few best practices for planning and running an integrated B2B campaign.

Benefits of integrated campaigns

Before we get into the “how” of running integrated campaigns, let’s examine the “why.” After all, your people are already busy enough. The last thing they want is another project without understanding the potential rewards.

Here are three major reasons why integrated campaigns—when done the right way—can help your company and your people become more successful.

1. Maximize your reach

As a marketer, I’m a big proponent of inbound marketing. Creating compelling content helps potential clients solve their immediate challenges and, simultaneously, become familiar with your brand. That being said, content cannot be your only source of new business—especially if you sell to mid-market and enterprise customers.

There are much bigger decisions being made out there that are not influenced by online search, which is why smart companies develop processes for identifying and intercepting those deals through integrated campaigns.

Takeaway: You’re missing out on deals if you’re relying too heavily on inbound. Integrated campaigns help you reach more high-value leads and, ultimately, close more deals.

2. Foster cross-functional alignment

Creating cross-functional alignment has never been more challenging than in today’s prolonged virtual work environment, especially for teams that used to work exclusively in a physical office environment.

Integrated campaigns, by their very nature, foster elevated levels of alignment. For example, let’s assume your goal is to increase customer upgrade revenue by 25% within the next six months. To achieve this goal, marketing must work with customer success (CS) to build segmented lists of customers who are likely to engage. CS and sales must align around a process for flagging and following up with customers who express interest. Sales needs to provide continuous feedback so marketing can track campaign effectiveness and respond to ongoing collateral needs.

Takeaway: If you’re seeking a better way to encourage cross-departmental alignment, look no further than an integrated campaign.

3. Elevate the quality of output

Aligning teams and campaigns around a data-driven view of success leads to meaningful conversations that yield ever-improving results. Sales begins to rely even more on marketing to produce higher impact landing pages, case studies, remarketing ads, emails, and collateral. Marketing becomes accustomed to receiving first-hand feedback as to why customers engage (or fail to engage) with messaging. CS gains new insights to improve the quality of support documentation and agent interactions.

Rather than operating in silos and taking educated guesses, campaign data serves as the foundation for enhanced decision-making across multiple teams—and, in some cases, sparks ideas for new integrated campaigns.

Takeaway: Alignment around a shared campaign can unleash the creative genius of your teams.

Ask these questions to form an effective strategy for your integrated campaign

So, what’s the first step in implementing an integrated campaign?

Before you have your marketing team create a bunch of banner ads and email blasts, ask yourself the following questions to form a comprehensive campaign strategy.

Consider where your business has been and where it is going. Use a central message or narrative to align the right mix of people, processes and channels.

What is your primary revenue objective?

Aiming to simply “increase sales” is too broad of an objective. Does the lowest hanging fruit come from new customer acquisition or a “land and expand” approach? Use your own data to understand which revenue sources have been reliable in the past and where the greatest opportunity lies.

How will this campaign align with your ICP and related personas?

Integrated campaigns should focus on one type of customer—typically your ideal customer profile (ICP). If you’ve never formalized your ICP and personas, now is the right time. Creating high-impact content, ads, and outreach programs requires an in-depth understanding of the targeted customer. Simply blasting a common message to everyone will result in de minimis returns.

How are competitors leveraging integrated campaigns?

Ask your sales team to share any first-hand knowledge they have about successful integrated campaigns run by competitors. What types of emails, ads, or outreach programs did the competitor(s) use to target customers? What can you learn from competitors to make your integrated campaigns more effective?

What is the best method for reaching your targeted audience?

Make a list of all the ways that you could deliver your message to the intended audience. Depending on the target market and industry, your list might include: sales calls, automated emails, LinkedIn ads, online search ads, in-app product banners, and retargeted display ads. Get specific. Then, begin the process of elimination to identify the tactics for each channel and set goals.

Do we have the right mix of tools and data?

Sharing timely campaign data between sales, marketing, CS, and other teams is difficult—if not impossible—when you lack a unified CRM. Likewise, coordinating collateral and content is challenging when each department uses its own project management system. Set the stage for a successful campaign by aligning around a common source of truth.

Stay tuned for tips to launch your integrated campaign

So far, we’ve defined what an integrated campaign is, why it’s beneficial, and how to develop a successful strategy. In my next post, we’ll explore best practices for launching an integrated campaign.

In the meantime, be sure to check out Insightly’s five-part series on how to encourage greater alignment between sales and marketing teams.

Ready to explore a unified CRM? Request a free CRM needs assessment and a demo.

Request a demo

The post What is an integrated campaign? appeared first on Insightly.

Let’s start with the “why.” Recent survey data indicates that 91% of respondents claim accounts won through ABM have a larger average deal size. They also report that a quarter of those deals are at least 50% larger than non-ABM deals.(1)

Moreover, as far back as 2016, companies using ABM were generating 208% more revenue for their marketing efforts.(2) That number is certainly higher today as ABM continues to grow.

What is account-based marketing?

Instead of casting a broad net in hopes of capturing more leads, account-based marketers work with sales to identify and reach out to prospects that are the best possible fit for their product or service and are high-value. Ample research is involved, and we’ll touch on that below.

With ABM, you must treat each individual prospect as though they were a distinct, separate market with unique needs, challenges, and goals. There are no carpet-bombing marketing campaigns involved; all outreach is direct, one-on-one communication.

Account-based marketing is almost exclusively used by B2B businesses. This is due to the complexity of the B2B sales cycle and the number of people involved in the decision-making process.

Key considerations associated with ABM

Because ABM differs so significantly from traditional “bulk” marketing, it’s important to understand some key components of ABM and how it works.

Ideal customer profiles

Developing ideal customer profiles (ICPs) is similar to creating and aligning buyer personas with the buyer journey. But they differ in important ways.

For example, two individuals at the same prospect organization may have competing objectives or conflicting opinions. That should be noted in your overarching ICP. Successful ABM requires you to take granular, detailed notes and understand your prospect in a much deeper, personal way. You must know and anticipate every minute detail that could impact the sales cycle and buying process.

Humanizing the prospect: high-quality vs. high-volume

The point of ABM is to focus on prospect quality rather than generating a high volume of leads. ABM lets marketing and sales contact pre-qualified leads rather than unqualified, cold leads. Lead scoring can help identify the most sales-ready prospects. Ultimately, one highly-qualified prospect with a proven propensity to purchase is worth 100 cold leads who’ve shown no interest.

When you first make contact, your prospect will feel as though they are communicating with an old friend, not a faceless salesperson. In this way, ABM starts to resemble humanized marketing.

Sales & marketing alignment

Sales and marketing alignment is vital in ABM. These two teams’ collaboration must be airtight for ABM to work properly. Once you’ve identified your target prospect accounts, you begin researching them individually. This kicks off a series of steps involved in successful account-based marketing.

Furthermore, sales and marketing will collaborate better with improved business transparency and if the entire ABM process is managed in a unified CRM.

ABM prospect research

Marketing and sales conduct exhaustive research on each individual prospect. They learn who the decision makers are, the company’s needs, pain points, goals, history, and any additional insights they can find.

With a unified CRM, much of that data is readily available for both teams, alleviating miscommunication or misinterpretation of data. The remaining required research will take place on social media, via internet searches, and anywhere else information can be found about the prospect and its decision makers.

When to use ABM

You don’t need to apply an account-based marketing approach to your every prospecting effort. ABM doesn’t replace traditional marketing, it complements it.

If you use ABM on every prospect, the risk/reward ratio drops significantly. You’ll spend loads of time learning about a prospect who ends up signing a small contract. The resulting cost of conducting the research and learning about the prospect is greater than the revenue generated from your account-based marketing tactics.

Instead, you want to reserve your ABM strategy for only the highest-value prospects with the greatest potential to buy. When one of them signs a five-year deal and locks in a few hundred thousand dollars of recurring revenue, your efforts won’t have gone in vain.

Benefits of account-based marketing

By now you’ll have gleaned insight into some of the top benefits involved in running an ABM campaign. First and foremost, the primary benefit of ABM is more revenue generated. Second, you save loads of time by eliminating outreach to dead-end leads and can more easily acquire new, high-value customers that lend stability to the future of your business.

Those overarching benefits stem from:

• Empowering sales to focus their attention and energy on highly-qualified prospects
• Reducing time spent on cold outreach
• Dramatically increasing your closed/won rates
• A better, more personalized customer experience and buyer’s journey for your most valuable prospects and customers
• Increased efficiency and time saved that can be spent on developing deeper customer relationships
• Easier tracking of results to identify what’s working. Your unified CRM can track every interaction your teams have with individual prospect accounts and the contacts in those accounts
• Improved sales and marketing alignment, which naturally leads to faster revenue growth

What to learn more about ABM?

Keep an eye out for our next piece on account-based marketing. In this piece, we covered ABM basics. In our next piece, we’ll dig into ABM best practices and how a unified CRM can guide your success.

Sources:

1. “State of Account Based Marketing,” SiriusDecisions, 2017

2. “Flipping Funnels Weekly: Account-Based Marketing Isn’t The Death of Anything,” Terminus, 2016

The post What is account-based marketing (ABM)? A beginner’s guide appeared first on Insightly.

But, finding these folks doesn’t have to be difficult. With the use of customer relationship management (CRM) data, you can gain extensive insight into who calls the shots and who influences purchase decisions at a given prospect company.

Here is a list of recommendations that can alleviate the burden of finding and engaging with the right stakeholders in your B2B sales outreach.

Start with buyer personas

Buyer personas are hypothetical profiles of your ideal buyers. They outline this person’s role in the prospect organization, including whether they are a user with limited influence over the decision, a middle manager with significant influence, or the actual decision maker.

Buyer personas also include demographic information, challenges, goals, pain points, interests, etc. In the B2B sales, you need multiple buyer personas as there are several people involved in the decision-making process.

More people are involved in the decision than ever before

Research from 2017 indicates that the number of people involved in a B2B purchase decision is growing. In 2016, 5.2 people were involved on average. That rose to 6.8 people in 2017.(1) And, according to Gartner, “Today’s B2B buying involves more stakeholders than ever before. The median B2B buying group involves six to 10 decision makers.(2)

The importance of buyer personas

Buyer personas are critically important to a streamlined sales process. They help sales and marketing identify prospects that appear to be the best fit for your product or service.

Creating accurate buyer personas requires some legwork, but the end result is worth the effort. When you know your target buyers, it’s exponentially easier to identify and qualify them.

Use your CRM data to find the right decision-makers

CRM solutions like Insightly collect and store loads of data that can be referenced to make informed decisions. CRM data includes information and insight into previous won and lost opportunities. Use that data to find opportunities for similar organizations in your CRM solution and inspect the results and notes included for each respective opportunity.

Which contacts were added to that opportunity? How are they connected/related to other contacts in the same organization? How did each contact contribute to the decision-making process? Identify common reservations expressed by those contacts. If many of the contacts associated with a won opportunity align with the roles of your buyer personas, dig deeper into that opportunity to reveal additional insights.

Use your CRM data, and features like relationship linking, to gain a full picture of each opportunity and you’ll start to understand why some were won and others lost. Avoid mistakes made by reps who lost opportunities and focus instead on tactics that led to won opportunities. This will lead you to identify the contact roles that had the greatest influence on the company’s final decision, and ultimately who the key decision-makers were.

Know your target prospect before reaching out

It is important to conduct substantial research into a target prospect’s organization and its industry before you ever reach out. If your organization adheres to a strict data collection process, your CRM can provide important data about your prospect. This data can even indicate who the key decision-makers might be.

Social media research

Use social media to identify those in your prospect organization that fill the roles outlined in your buyer personas. Read up on them to see what makes them tick so you can more easily and quickly form rapport and trust with your initial outreach.

Look for common connections

LinkedIn is the best social platform for prospect research. As you conduct research and identify the contacts you wish to reach out to, look for shared connections. If you spot one, you can reach out to your contact and request an introduction. An introduction from a known contact is highly effective because it comes with a dose of trust by default.

Read customer reviews to augment what you already know

Look for company reviews on social media and sites like Google My Business to see what your prospect’s customers have to say. This can help you discover variables that are holding the company back so that you can address them in your outreach.

Identify primary pain points & explain how you’ll eliminate them

As you conduct your research, you will form a detailed profile of your prospect and its key decision-makers. Focus on what the organization needs but does not have. Identify key challenges and pain points that are stifling the company’s growth. Pinpoint the daily problems each relevant participant in the decision-making process faces on a daily basis. Do the same for the organization as a whole.

Zeroing in on those pain points, challenges, and problems provides a more accurate picture of the prospect’s needs. With this insight, you can tailor your outreach to explain how your product or service will eliminate those headaches. Educate the decision-makers—and those involved in the decision-making process—about a problem they potentially don’t know they have. Then form your outreach in a way that provides a solution to it. This is one of the best ways to capture a prospect’s attention.

Make a list of qualifying questions for your first conversation

Once you convince a contact to speak with you, use that initial conversation to qualify the company’s need for your offering. You can do this by asking pre-defined qualifying questions developed specifically for your prospect and its use case. These questions will vary depending on your industry, product, and the makeup of your target audience.

However, certain questions are relevant and important to ask in virtually every industry. For example:

1. What is the primary business challenge you’re trying to address?
2. What are your overarching goals and what is your ideal timeline for accomplishing them?
3. What are you looking for in a new partner?

PRO TIP: Use specific language when making first contact with a new prospect. Make it clear that you seek to be their partner in success. Personalize the conversation by speaking in terms of “you” and “I” rather than “we.” This makes the conversation more informal and interpersonal, which lets you develop trust and rapport much quicker.

To learn more about sales qualifying questions, take some insights from this article.(3)

Why qualifying questions are key to success

It’s crucial to quality a prospect’s need for your offering as early in your dialogue with them as possible. Qualifying questions help sales validate the purchase intent of each prospect and confirm that the company is a good fit for your product.

If you don’t qualify from the outset, you can waste hours of time courting a prospect that will never convert. Qualifying questions eliminate that risk and allow salespeople to focus their time on the prospects with the highest win probability.

Final point: Don’t forget the decision influencers

The person who gives the final green light for a B2B purchase decision typically holds an executive position. However, digging into all the nitty-gritty details of a particular product or service is often too far in the weeds for them. They typically don’t get involved at such a granular level. Instead, they rely on their team leaders and power users (of a product or service) to conduct evaluations and provide recommendations. B2B decision-making is a multistep process.

While a team manager or director may be a key decision influencer, the person behind the curtain, or the power user, may be driving the entire decision. If you can start your outreach with decision influencers and form a strong rapport, you can turn them into advocates for your product or service.

Read more like this:

• How to use buyer enablement to win more customers
• The new B2B purchase process
• How to use lead scoring to make faster sales
• Aligning personas with the buyer journey
• How to use a CRM for business development
• Why failing to follow up sends the wrong message to prospects

Sources:

1. “The New Sales Imperative,” Harvard Business Review, 2017

2. Gartner for Marketers “Marketing-Fueled Buyer Enablement**,” 2019

3. “25 Sales Questions to Qualify Your Leads Faster,” Neil Patel, 2020

The post How to find the right decision-makers for B2B sales outreach appeared first on Insightly.