Best Sales Technology for Insights Into Your Buyer’s Journey
Guest Author
By Ryan Johns, Principal, RK Johns Consulting
You cannot influence what you fail to understand.
This is a fairly ambiguous statement, right?
Let me add some context. In sales, the most critical ability of any sales org and their people is the ability to influence buyer behavior. I use the word influence because that’s pretty much all that we can do. We cannot control another individual or entity that has the power of free will and the power of choice.
And at the end of the day, we are not the only game in town. No matter how unique we believe that our offerings are, it’s the customer’s perception that really matters. Our goal must then become to influence and shape the perception of our target audience. The best and brightest companies study their customers, listen to their customers, and eventually develop the ability to anticipate customer demand. That’s why it’s crucial to integrate your sales technologies to obtain insights into your buyer journey.
Why Sales Technology is Important to Your Business
Companies that either neglect this practice or over-index on assumption will struggle. Therefore, the need to acquire technologies that allow companies to garner a level of customer behavioral insight at scale is paramount.
This is the understanding component that I was referring to earlier.
We must move beyond arbitrary assumptions based on “our gut” or by using legacy data and analytics. The key is to leverage technologies that provide up-to-date and accurate customer insights, and then allow you to engage at the speed of customer interest and not a moment later. The longer you take to deliver value, the wider the window becomes for your prospective buyer to find what they want elsewhere. Forrester Research conducted a recent study that revealed that buyers choose the vendor that delivers value first, 74% of the time.
Best Sales Technology to Obtain Customer Insights
DiscoverOrg
DiscoverOrg is the most accurate business contact data and B2B intelligence platform that provides fresh and verified data allowing businesses to specifically target their ICPs. Their platform provides direct-dial phone numbers, verified email addresses, and department level org charts. After the recent acquisitions of NeverBounce, ZoomInfo, and RainKing – the company has secured its position as the leading B2B sales and marketing data provider and cleaner.
Notable Feature: They also have customer insights on what technology companies are already using and insight into their current initiatives allowing you to see if your product is a good fit.
Intercom
Intercom is a chatbot and live chat service that makes it easy to personally communicate with people using your products or website through targeted content, behavior-driven email, in-app, and web messages.
Notable Feature: Intercom gives you a totally customizable messaging suite to drive growth at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Intercom has tailored solutions for Sales Teams, Product Teams, Marketing Teams, Support Teams, and Customer Success Teams.
Dooly.ai
Dooly is more than a real-time, cloud-based playbook for closers. It seamlessly syncs information to Salesforce and automatically updating opportunities; can feed Sales relevant talking points during a call based on the flow of the conversation; and aligns Sales and Marketing by allowing Sales to access the content they need in real-time from Marketing and give live feedback to help Marketing understand what is and isn’t moving the needle.
Notable Feature: Dooly’s sales enablement platform has a Chrome extension that connects your notes directly to Salesforce records, Google Calendar, and Outreach workflows.
Outreach.io
Outreach is the World’s #1 Sales Engagement Platform (SEP). It is a complete system of email, voice, social, and text-based communication to reach prospects on their terms and get on their calendars. It enables Sales to close more deals by personalizing, prioritizing, and analyzing sales activities.
Notable Feature: Outreach integrates with all your most important system (Salesforce, marketing automation, email provider, productivity tools, and more), so you can utilize your sales stack in one place and spend more time connecting with prospects.