It’s another crazy week, you’re trying to figure out which accounts are most worth your sales team’s time, you have 100 tabs open, you can’t seem to find out which accounts have read the latest content or shown the most interest, you have 50 unread emails.
Sound familiar? We get it, sellers need their lives to be simpler. While that sounds obvious and simple, finding the right way to make it happen is a whole other ballgame. We’ve spent years building technology to power marketing teams with the best account-based capabilities to make seller lives easier via influenced opportunities and revenue.
But we knew it shouldn’t just stop there. Powered by data science and detailed engagement insight, we’re excited to release our new product, Sales Insights, to keep sales teams in the know and ready to win.
You asked, we listened
After working closely with marketers and sellers year after year, I already had this intuition of what would and wouldn’t make life easier for them. But, that doesn’t mean we charged ahead and began building something just to build it.
We spent months sitting down with sales leaders, marketers, account execs, and sales development reps to really learn not only what they need, but how to deliver it in a way that’s actually useful. (Yes, some of that feedback was ‘please don’t just give me another tool I don’t need’)
‘We already have too many tools’
Simply put: sellers do not want one more screen to log into. Salesforce and email are where they live and breathe, so we needed to keep our promise to do right by the customer and not clutter their desktop with another UI to login to. Instead, we found a way to bring them the data they were looking for in a streamlined way. it became an early product principle for us that we would not build another new "screen" for sales users to login to, and that we would build the product to be compatible with their existing SFDC workflows.
‘We have to dig too much to find information about engaged accounts and contacts’
That also meant getting to the bottom of what data they felt they were missing and how we could improve their efficiency.
Rather than just hand over any old engagement data for data’s sake, we heard a resounding cry for a smarter way to prioritize outreach and figure out who was best suited for their daily ‘to-do’ list. This led to our decision to add a layer of data science to our engagement activity calculation, allowing us to look at engagement signals differently whether it is a 10 employee account or 10,000 employee account by analyzing these signals compared to account level baselines. This more robust view into account engagement further helps eliminate the guesswork for sales.
‘Account engagement is a nice start, but what about contacts?’
Understanding the engagement activity coming from your target accounts is a good starting point, but what is sales supposed to do when that account has thousands or even hundreds of thousands of employees? It’s great to know that IBM is spiking in engagement, but how can the account owner of IBM actually plan their outreach without knowing (i) who was the contact engaging and (ii) what were their engagement activities? What pages were they viewing or content were they consuming?
Without answering these key questions it’s hard to expect sales teams to act upon account level engagement. To really make a meaningful impact on sales day-to-day, you need contact insights and user-level activity data.
Delivering must-know signals with the power of data science
So, what did we build?
Sales Insights identifies spikes of account-based activity- like website engagement and click signals- and then surfaces alerts directly in Salesforce and via daily email summaries to corresponding sales reps and sales managers. A proprietary data science model identifies increased engagement compared to an account level baseline for each account.
Spiking accounts are routed to appropriate sales reps inside of their Salesforce interface complete with account-based metrics, account fit-score and drill down to specific activity per individual contacts within the account. This includes:
- Account Spike Data: The underlying data that powers the Sales Insights product. The Account data science model analyzes a variety of account engagement signals for all accounts, every day, and flags accounts spiking in engagement directly to sales reps and sales managers in Salesforce.
- Email Account Alerts: Sales Reps and Sales Managers receive daily email notifications summarizing spiking account data for sales assigned and unassigned accounts directly to their inbox.
- Salesforce Reports and Dashboards: The visualization of our Account Spike data in Salesforce via native Salesforce reports and dashboards that can easily be integrated into existing sales team workflows.
- SFDC Account Component: Salesforce Page Layout component that provides key additional insights at the contact-level, including who engaged contacts were that led up to the spike event, and what actions did they take.
A future of more accountable marketing
We know how us touting how important marketing and sales working together sounds, but it’s truly built into the fabric of our product roadmap. We firmly believe that marketing can’t, and shouldn’t, just end with engagement. The marketing and sales tech stack should enable sales to know when and how to act on those signals and power their productivity. Stay tuned as we continue to deliver on that promise, and learn more about Sales Insights.
About the Author
More Content by Sam Kelly, Product Manager
