In my last blog, I discussed Forrester’s model of Digital Predators, Digital Transformers, and Digital Dinosaurs. Forrester argues that businesses must quickly become digital with products and services which are either sold or delivered digitally. According to Forrester, about five percent of business revenue is being converted from traditional to digital each year with nearly half of all revenue being digitally mediated by 2020. At that point, ninety percent of digital predator revenue will be digitally mediated, and nearly seventy percent of digital transformer revenue will be digital, but only one-third of digital dinosaur revenue will be digital. Thus, over the next four years, the transformers will quadruple their digital revenue mix while the dinosaurs will merely double it.
That is a rapid rate of change. It is Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction readying to blow away your business model. Process change needs to be implemented across all your business functions including sales and marketing. B2B Sales intelligence (SI) is a key resource for bringing digital into sales and marketing processes. Its goal is to make sales reps more efficient and effective at generating revenue and meeting customer needs. Sales Intelligence vendors assist with
CRM / MAP DaaS Enrichment: SI services reduce the time spent on busywork through Data as a Service (DaaS) enrichment of account, contact, and lead records. DaaS frees up sales rep time for higher value sales activities than keyboarding and is a true source of efficiency gains. Furthermore, data enrichment provides more accurate firmographics and contact information which are then propagated to downstream systems helping enable a single view of the customer via standardized data containing company ids and corporate linkages. Not only are there efficiency gains, but ongoing maintenance of account and contact information is managed automatically by a third party with “golden records,” ensuring that CRM and Marketing Automation data is more accurate, complete, and timely.
Prospecting: SI services offer advanced sales and marketing prospecting based upon an understanding of who are your best customers and which companies display similar attributes. The goal is to clone your best customers and focus on this optimal set of accounts and prospects. If you are adopting the Account Based Marketing (ABM) methodology, advanced prospecting and customer cloning are critical elements of your strategy.
Lead Qualification: SI services support rapid lead qualification and prioritization of activities via business signals, ideal profiles scores, and accurate firmographics, technographics, and biographics.
Customer Insights: SI services improve sales rep understanding of customers and prospects. Whether your company is employing ABM, Account Based Sales Development, Social Selling, or other sales techniques, customer-centricity begins with an understanding of the customer at the contact, company, and industry level. Sales Reps are naturally more inclined to be actively selling to customers and prospects than conducting research and assembling account plans. To address this bias, SI makes account research as straightforward as possible with key insights delivered seamlessly via mobile and web browsers, CRMs, and marketing automation platforms.
Change Awareness: One of the newer tools provided by SIs is the delivery of event triggers which provide ongoing alerts concerning changes at customers and prospects. Triggers help improve account messaging, pipeline forecasting, daily sales activity prioritization, and call timing. They also provide a conversational hook which indicates you’ve done your homework and are ready to engage the prospect.
Account Penetration: Using SIs, sales reps can sell deeper into companies through access to biographies, direct contact information, and corporate linkage. Advanced SIs also provide job function, title, and level screening across a firm, helping reps extend an MSA or advance an ABM “land and expand” strategy at target accounts.
So while Sales Intelligence does not address your underlying business model, it addresses one business function which has remained stubbornly inefficient – your sales team. What’s more, many of the sales intelligence vendors are morphing into sales and marketing intelligence vendors with tools that support both functions. These include hosted marketing databases, data hygiene, and analytical tools. The rise of MarTech and now SalesTech are indicators that the sales and marketing functions are being transformed digitally. SI services are a critical tool for modernizing your sales and marketing processes.
When creative destruction blows through your industry, it is far better to be the digital predator or transformer rather than the digital dinosaur.
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