[Webinar Recap] Find Your “Perfect Pitch”: Using Data as the Maestro of Your Sales Orchestration

The fireside chat style webinar, Find Your “Perfect Pitch”: Using Data as the Maestro of Your Sales Orchestration covered a lot of top-of-mind questions organizations are asking around data strategy and what a data-driven sales orchestration looks like. We’ve pulled out a few key points from the chat but you can also watch the full webinar recording here. 

The webinar was hosted by Sales Hacker’s Scott Baker with guest experts Matt Lopez, Skaled, and Mark Bedard, ZoomInfo.

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn.

Poll Questions

Question 1: How many of you have confidence in your sales processes going into 2020?

58% Not Very Confident

42% Confident

Maybe your 2019 strategy and process didn’t reap the results you anticipated; maybe your team grew exponentially and you don’t have the right infrastructure in place. Whatever the reason, 58% of companies who attended the webinar have a lack of confidence in their sales processes going into 2020. Our advice? Make it about your buyer.

Question 2: What part of your sales process needs the most work? 

7% Territory Management

7% Account Selection

36% Prospecting Research

14% Tech Stack Synergy

21% Measurement

15% Other

[12:25]

People are struggling with basic prospect research according to this second poll. We thought it would be a combination of Measurement and Tech Stack Synergy with the explosion of new tech every year making it difficult to stay ahead. The two pieces of advice that came out of this revelation were being more targeted and specific when it comes to ICPs and buyer personas and focusing on relevancy over personalization in outreach.

Narrow Your ICP

At Skaled, we’ve seen a lot of companies cast the net too wide. How this plays out on the AE level according to Matt, is the ICP and buyer personas they’re asked to target are so vast that they don’t really know where to start and where to research. A lot of VPs of Sales and CROs are starting to make research a part of cadences today, which is a great step in the right direction, but there is a spectrum to research. For instance, for this specific ICP these are the five data points that you should understand about your buyer before going to start a conversation and how does that change in an enterprise plan, etc. If reps aren’t getting this guidance beforehand, it can be very distracting and frustrating when trying to bring in the right deals.

Put the data to work for you

Secondly, everyone is talking about personalization and getting away from bulk email campaigns. Great, that’s another step in the right direction. But then what information should I, as a rep, be looking for? A lot of Sales leaders don’t really give that level of guidance. They may say, “well, make it relevant” and you’ll convert more. There are a lot of ways where this can go wrong. Just because a prospect is in Chicago and you open your message with Go Bears! – that doesn’t make your message relevant to them, although this intro may have worked a few years ago when marketing automation came onto the field.

On the other side of this, Mark made a great point when trying to be personalized or relevant but at scale. This is where data orchestration comes in. It’s not so much about getting the information or having it accessible to an individual contributor or rep, but how can the rep leverage it in a meaningful way that can really make the data work for them more than just noting a prospect’s location.

Defining Data-Driven Sales Orchestration [22:00]

ZoomInfo’s Mark Bedard gave a great answer for defining data-driven sales orchestration by breaking it down into levels of “maturity” versus just giving a single blanket definition. Maybe the better question is, how mature is your sales orchestration right now in terms of leveraging a data strategy?

Rudimentary data orchestration – using a prospecting tool like ZoomInfo or DiscoverOrg so reps aren’t manually sourcing information. This is a very rudimentary version of a data-driven approach as it’s still very manual.

Mature data orchestration – integrating information into your workflows, CRM, or Marketing Automation tool and automatically putting the data and information reps need into where they need it.

Full data orchestration – is where you automate everything and leverage changes in information and changes in data (e.g. intent data, IP tracking, new funding alerts). Leveraging changes is using triggered events to prompt a response and start the process that is going to work that information in an automated fashion. These trigger events can roll out a sequence of events starting with that one change that shows intent or a need – that’s true data orchestration.

A Use Case for Implementing Intent Data [34:20]

As Sales and Marketing professionals, we’re always thinking and re-thinking about how much do we reveal to a prospect that we know about them? During the webinar, Matt gave a really practical example of how to use intent data without being creepy. 

Skaled was working with a company that was trying to disrupt the single-family home real estate space by completely digitizing the homebuying process versus going through a realtor or real estate agent. Basically, homebuyers would go to the company’s website and the whole process was online up until a certain point in the process when a homebuyer would be assigned a virtual real estate agent on the backend who was essentially a salesperson.

What the team had to figure out was how do they prioritize the 100s to 1000s of people going through the process of visiting the website, looking at homes, liking homes, and then touring a home with only about 20 salespeople who did not possibly have the bandwidth to reach out to every person at the top of the funnel.

After looking at and analyzing the buyer experience, Skaled found that the most ideal time for a salesperson to reach out to a homebuyer was right after the buyer had their first positive experience with a home tour. Therefore, we decided to set up tracking on doors in which as soon as the front door closed, the system would send a text message and/or email to the homebuyer and ask them to rate the home 1-10. If the buyer replied with a 7 or higher, that was the trigger for a salesperson to get involved. The lead would hit them in the CRM and rep’s would see the home rating and all the other information collected.

This is just one situation where companies can really use intent data to accelerate and prioritize buyers and transform the majority of conversations to be positive versus calling every single lead and having the majority of the conversations be people who were just passively looking and didn’t want to be contacted.

“Use intent data to accelerate and prioritize buyers and transform the majority of conversations to be positive.”

Self-Diagnosing Your Data Strategy [38:15]

How can you diagnose your organization’s own data strategy and then rebuild if you need to rebuild? It’s easy to start with questions on data cleanliness when trying to diagnose your data strategy. What data points are you providing? When were leads last refreshed? But this approach can actually get too tactical and it doesn’t end up solving the problem. Here’s what Matt and Mark had to say:

Matt’s Approach

It starts with uncovering your true buyer.

Step 1: Start with uncovering who the buyer is and if there are any patterns in intent signals. A lot of companies go way to wide on this.

Start the processes around thinking about who really is the buyer. Where do they live digitally; where do they go to get answers; how do they buy; when you have seen them buy, what were the intent signals and were there any patterns there? Really the first step is uncovering who the buyer is and the buyer journey. At the end of the day, that’s going to be centric to anything you’re trying to clean or inject into your outbound or sales process.

From there, narrow it down. A lot of companies go too wide by trying to target “anybody hiring” or “any SaaS company generating over X revenue.” Those types of targets aren’t really segments in your addressable market, and there will be way too much data points to sift through, eliminating a rep’s ability to make their product relevant to a buyer’s business.

Step 2: Align the sales process with data internally.

Many organizations forget this next step in a data strategy and that’s distributing the right data points to the right people. There is an internal piece around the different people who will need to be brought into a conversation and what information they’ll need to see in order to help close a deal. Therefore, diagnosing the process transitions from who the buyer is and that buyer-centric journey to how does your organization ensure that the sales process is aligned to the journey so the data is reaching the right people internally and ultimately align the two worlds.

Mark’s Approach

Keep it simple. Any kind of data orchestration or data strategy can get out of hand super quickly.

Step 1: Start with your main outcome

Start with a single business challenge. Solve the problem that is the most pressing and gain the residual benefits from this solution to start. If there are any gaps after the fact, then you can tackle the next challenge and the next outcome you’re looking for.

Step 2: Deal with the data (5 C’s)

Mark wasn’t talking just data cleanliness here. He called out that by just saying your data is garbage is like looking for a magic wand approach. You have to tackle contact data quality by the 5 C’s. Each C requires a different solution depending which is your data issue: current, correct, consistent, complete, coverage.

Step 3: Orchestration

Orchestration is the last and probably the easiest step. However, many organizations get bogged down in trying to figure out how they should operationally solve their data problems. With the amount of technology and number of consultancies available, operationalizing the process is really the easiest part, but if you skip the initial steps it’s extremely difficult to operationalize an outcome you haven’t set or data that is decaying or incomplete.

3 Actionable sales tips to generate more revenue in 2020 [45:45]

#1 Map Out Your Buyer Journey

Being buyer-centric has become a buzzword in the last few years. And a lot of companies believe they are buyer-centric, but when you look at how they are selling, it’s completely one-sided. If you don’t understand who is on the other side of the selling process (i.e. who you’re selling to) and how they want to buy, it basically makes everything else in the process moot. You can have the cleanest data, all of this intent, but if you don’t know which lever to pull on and when you’re still going to be inefficient.

Set up conversations with former and current customers and ask them how their buying journey went. How would they have preferred to buy? Then think about the information you still need to meet them in the middle and accomplish this.

#2 Focus On Outcomes First

Start with business outcomes and then everything else will fall into place.

If you go and try to start with consuming data or operationalizing, and you start building prior to knowing what you’re building, it won’t matter what the process is because you’re going to come out with a random outcome that may be good or may be bad. It’s like throwing darts at a dartboard but not know what numbers you need to hit in order to win. There is a possibility that you’ll hit all the right numbers, but it’s not likely.

#3 Work With People That Have Done It Before

Work with great companies and great people who have built sales processes and data-driven approaches hundreds of times before. Organizations that work extremely closely with clients in order to generate the desired outcomes.

Skaled approaches sales strategy by focusing on creating a better buyer experience and a smooth path to purchase. By aligning people, process, and technology, our team of practitioner-led consultants leverage our proven methodology to deliver world-class solutions that drive results. 

Let’s get started. Contact Skaled.