The Problem

Revenue professionals understand the significance of selling to existing customers rather than acquiring new ones: It cuts down on acquisition costs, enhances overall efficiency, fosters enduring customer relationships and maximizes the value of each customer. With that in mind, Avalara wanted to uncover new ways to deliver greater value to its customers and optimize revenue opportunities based on their existing contracts.

“Avalara’s customer account teams handle a high volume of interactions, driving roughly 3,000 deals to close each month,” said Sean Flynn, SVP of Global Sales at Avalara. “We put great emphasis on providing best-in-class customer service to make compliance less taxing for our customers.”

The Solution

In 2021, Avalara’s customer account management (CAM) team adopted revenue intelligence platform Gong to capture customer interactions — such as calls, emails, video conferences and more — to surface insights that would help teams boost engagement and increase efficiencies to drive more revenue. Leveraging Gong Insights, the CAM team was able to identify the behaviors that contributed to growth and those that hindered opportunities.

“For customers like Avalara that have a large and diverse customer base, automated insights that uncover opportunities for account growth can make a big difference,” said Ben Brownlee, Gong’s Chief Customer Officer.

These insights allowed CAM leaders to provide personalized coaching that would improve customer interaction quality. They could also communicate the value of their solutions more effectively and assist their sales teams in achieving better results.

The Results

After seeing the widespread adoption of the platform throughout the CAM team, Avalara decided to extend the use of Gong to other departments, including customer success, customer development, product marketing, sales development, new business sales and support. Gong rapidly became integral to these teams’ most critical workflows, enabling Avalara teams to:

• Achieve a better understanding of their customers, which enabled them to build robust sales pipeline and identify potential opportunities;
• Close new business deals more effectively through data-driven insights into customer needs and preferences;
• Provide a more personalized and value-driven customer service experience; and
• Analyze customer interactions and behaviors to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities to maximize revenue from Avalara’s existing customer base.

“With Gong, we have accurate, market-driven insights on how to deliver the best possible experience for customers on every transaction, which has been instrumental in helping us develop a culture of value in every customer interaction,” concluded Flynn.

The post How Avalara Drives Lifetime Value For Customers With AI-Enabled Insights From Gong appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

Brand Tracker enables companies to continuously measure brand performance in market by tracking behavior trends and consumer habits across multiple channels, allowing users to assess their campaigns’ effectiveness. The solution leverages AI-powered insights to identify trends, monitor key metrics and provide up-to-the-minute insights on how a brand evolves over time.

Users can also conduct competitive analysis on competing brands within the same market, which helps users identify what tactics and campaigns are working for their competitors to inform and improve their own brand strategies.

Who It’s For

Brand Tracker is designed for marketing and insights professionals who want to measure key brand metrics while tracking competitors.

What Makes It Special

SurveyMonkey Brand Tracker uses AI-powered technology to surface valuable brand performance insights to help users stay on top of their brand health instantly, over time and without needing deep analytical expertise from third-party data sources.

Contact

SurveyMonkey

The post SurveyMonkey Brand Tracker Measures In Market Brand Performance For Brand Development Strategies appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

Spekit is designed to help users build effective training and communication programs from their existing processes. The platform enables users to embed knowledge programs alongside defined terms, fields and picklist values in their databases to consolidate knowledge, policies and processes from an organization and simplify employee and team training and productivity.

Additional features of the solution include:

• Content cards, or “Speks,” that break down difficult-to-consume PDFs and PowerPoints into easily digestible bites of information;
• In-app alerts that push information and new resources and keep teams aligned;
• The ability to integrate with data platforms such as Salesforce for simplified data workflows and communication; and
• A Google Chrome extension that helps teams surface training across any application to create a consistent, seamless and easily accessible learning experience across an employee’s entire workflow.

Who It’s For

Spekit is for organizations looking to increase their team productivity while reducing the time it takes to onboard, train and communicate changes across an organization. 

What Makes It Special

Spekit combines the power of a learning management system (LMS), a digital adoption solution and a change management tool to enable continuous employee learning and productivity and reduce the time needed to onboard teammates on new processes and systems.

Contact

Spekit

The post Spekit’s Digital Enablement Platform Aims To Improve Team Training appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

Alida CXM aims to help brands uncover critical insights through customer feedback to craft personalized messaging. The platform also automates workflows to reinforce positive buyer engagement and provides insights to improve upon negative or neutral engagement.

Specific features of the platform include:

• Feedback Collection, which collects broad feedback at scale and deep insights from smaller engaged customers to improve marketing strategies;
• A Configurable Rule Engine with custom rules that trigger actions (email distribution or case creation) for automated workflows; and
• A Salesforce Case Creation integration, which automatically alerts CX reps when further action is required and provides customer and prospect touchpoints.

Who It’s For

The platform is designed for brands looking to leverage customer feedback insights across their business, specifically their product, marketing, customer experience, customer success and support teams.

What Makes It Special

Alida CXM combines CXM capabilities and customer insights expertise to collect broad customer feedback, which aims to empower brands to turn customer preferences into marketable action.

Contact

Alida
365 Bloor St E, 5th Floor
Toronto, ON
M4W 3L4 Canada

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Sightline is designed to collect marketing and sales data from multiple marketing platforms and demand generation channels, generating customer insights that help marketers accurately measure their revenue and impact across B2B lead lifecycles.

“We developed Sightline to address one of the biggest hurdles our clients face,” said Rhoan Morgan, Co-Founder and CEO of DemandLab. “The B2B buyer journey can be long and complex, making it challenging to measure the revenue impact of full-funnel marketing activities. Sightline connects the dots and delivers the accurate, credible attribution data that marketers need to confidently prove marketing’s impact.”

The post DemandLab Launches Sightline Solution For Full-Funnel Marketing Measurement appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Slated to launch early next year, the update aims to provide B2B brands with the customer experience insights to create and manage their workflows and data, allowing marketers to connect Adobe’s data to enrich and update account profiles. B2B brands can also combine multiple account records under a unified profile, providing them with all the critical information about any given account.

Adobe believes that B2B marketers can use this data to inform their account-based efforts, improving account engagement and faster sales cycles by meeting customer expectations.

“Having access to unified account profiles is a game-changer for B2B brands and is a capability that customers have been asking for,” said Brian Glover, Director of Product Marketing at Marketo Engage, Adobe, in a blog post. “The expanded B2B capabilities will enable brands to combine multiple account records into a single account profile that updates in real-time and provides all the critical account-level information needed to provide the best account-based experience possible. Customers will be able to view unified account details, attributes, people, opportunities and more.”

The post Adobe Unveils Expanded CDP Platform For B2B Companies appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

AgilOne

The Hub is designed to help marketers create a single customer profile, apply predictive intelligence to customer data and arrange omnichannel personalization delivered through Oracle Responsys, an email marketing and cross-channel orchestration solution from Oracle Marketing Cloud.

AgilOne’s single customer profile enables Oracle Marketing Cloud customers to integrate data from both online and offline sources. The application’s predictive analytics and insights also are designed to enhance marketers’ abilities to gain deep customer insight, as well as apply machine learning to these insights to understand customer segments and identify revenue opportunities.

The post AgilOne Launches New Customer Insights Application On Oracle Cloud Marketplace appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Tapad

The integration is designed to provide marketers with comprehensive customer insights by combining Tapad’s cross-screen data and ability to identify related devices with Conversion Logic’s machine learning algorithms.

Linking the technologies will enable marketers to optimize channel spend at a more granular level, the companies’ stated in a release.

“Combining highly accurate data from Tapad with our own user ID technology and understanding how devices may be related at an individual level provides additional visibility into the path to conversion,” said Alison Lohse, COO and Co-Founder of Conversion Logic. “The more we know about the customer journey, the more effective, efficient and customized marketers can be with marketing efforts. With Tapad, we have achieved a unified customer view that helps us piece together the purchase journey while preserving proven accuracy.”

The post Tapad Partners With Conversion Logic To Provide Cross-Device Attribution appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

While currently fewer than half (44%) of B2B marketers use personas, that number is expected to increase to 73% in the next 12 months, according to ITSMA’s survey, Increasing Relevance with Buyer Personas and B2I [Business2Individual] Marketing. B2B marketers typically use personas as springboards to develop specific messaging to engage prospects and tap into new markets.

One such company is marketing consultancy LeadMD, which has seen a 40% increase in pipeline conversion as a result of an extensive data-driven persona development effort earlier this year. The company analyzed 3,500 deals within the past six years, using EverString‘s predictive platform; it also surveyed 180 customers. It then used the findings to hone its personas.

Justin Gray, LeadMD’s CEO, attributes the improved conversion rates to better messaging that is tailored based on persona research. “We really approached it from a data perspective, and we now have a much higher level of confidence in our nurture stream.”

Data-driven persona development also helped LeadMD more accurately target its content, according to Gray. “We don’t just look at titles when building our personas. We have personas based on institutional penetration as well. A VP in a very small company has a different level of influence than someone with the same title at a larger company.”

Other examples of personas impacting marketing initiatives include:

• A construction software company, which revamped its marketing copy and website based on interviews with prospects about their biggest challenges;
• A Fortune 500 company that developed four buyer personas and is in the process of creating content around those roles to help them enter a new market; and
• A large technology firm that used persona research to make the shift from enterprise offerings to cloud-based computing by targeting line-of-business buyers rather than IT professionals.

How Personas Impact Engagement

Even as marketers take a more data-driven approach to persona development, observers note that it can be challenging to accurately track the influence of persona-based content on metrics such as open rates and engagement. While A/B testing is an option, few companies are benchmarking their persona work, according to industry insiders.

“We don’t see a lot of testing going on, as once marketers develop a persona the tendency is to want to use it immediately, not to see how it performs against a campaign that was developed without persona insights,” said Katie Martell, Co-founder and CMO of Cintell, a customer intelligence platform. There is also the concern, she said, of wasting good leads by sending them content that was not a result of persona research.

Personas should be viewed as a catalyst for creating more relevant content and messaging to drive engagement and conversion, Martell noted. “As a result, having the right personas is ultimately going to impact open rates and click through rates. In general, when you compare a persona-based campaign to one that is not persona-based, you’re going to see twice the amount of open rates and five times the amount of click-through rates with the persona-based campaign.”

A clear indication that buyer personas are working is that more content is getting used. Tony Zambito, creator of the buyer persona concept, said “as much as 70% of content goes unused, according to industry figures, and that percentage gets lowered dramatically when content is developed based on goal-directed buyer persona research.”

According to Zambito, buyer personas provide additional benefits, such as:.

• More effective and fruitful conversations between salespeople and prospects;
• A higher level of customer engagement; and
• More successful go-to-market efforts when informed by goal-directed personas.

Isolating Variables A Key Challenge

While some marketers are having success with data-driven personas, there are opportunities for improvement. Only 15% of respondents using personas said that they were very effective, according to the ITSMA survey. Among the challenges cited were inconsistent application and inability to operationalize.

“One of the biggest challenges B2B marketers face in persona development is that you can’t assess a persona,” according to Matthew McKenzie, Chief Content Officer for Content4Demand. “Marketers can only assess elements of a persona that they are able to isolate and link to some aspect of a buyer interaction.”

While metrics can be difficult to obtain, personas can help marketers steer their content marketing budgets to the most effective messages and formats, said Adele Revella, Founder of the Buyer Persona Institute. “Personas should force you to rethink your strategy. Ultimately the idea is to stop wasting time on creating content on topics no one cares about.”

Personas have to be continuously updated and evaluated to be most effective, according to Revella. “To be real contributors to strategy, marketers need to be able to know, with some confidence, how buyers are going to react. Since buyers are always evolving, marketers can’t just put their personas on a shelf and bring them out occasionally.”

It is also crucial for marketers to ensure that content maps back to the personas, according to observers. That may mean making adjustments to existing content and creating new content to fill any gaps, McKenzie said. “A persona should be a living document. You can add new insights, throw out stuff that isn’t working and constantly test various pieces.”

Personas will play an even greater role going forward, as prospects continue to wait longer to interact with sales and marketing during the buyer’s journey. “A recent Gartner study said that buyers are engaged with sales and marketing for just 33% of the buyer’s journey. Marketers have to have a better understanding of their buyers to reverse that trend,” Revella concluded.

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