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.

The Lowdown

MetricsMatter 4.0 is a dashboard that summarizes both communications and marketing results to deliver insights for marketing leaders.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

The MetricsMatter 4.0 application is designed to deliver updated results in real-time and allows individuals to isolate specific campaign results by selecting specific date ranges. Now, marketing executives will not have to:

• Wait for manual reports;
• Update static PowerPoint presentations; or
• Log into multiple monitoring applications to get an overview of their marketing programs.

Who It’s For

With MetricsMatter, marketing leaders can better optimize strategies, maximize resources and take action based on real-time data. Designed for maximum visibility, the MetricsMatter application allows clients to import any marketing reports or dashboards with open APIs into the dashboard — giving them access to all critical marketing KPIs in one place.

What It Solves

Communication and public relations firms send monthly reports to clients on their activities, but the reports are often delivered in formats like PowerPoint or Word. To gain insights, the internal marketing team must manually compare data from different tools, which can be time-consuming. MetricsMatter 4.0 offers a solution by allowing executives to view and compare results based on any date range.

What Makes It Special

With MetricsMatter, marketers can:

• Demonstrate real-time progress of communications and marketing initiatives;
• Compare results alongside the corresponding web analytics with the ability to drill down into results that created traffic spikes;
• Evaluate campaigns for impact across multiple channels; and
• Compare key metrics against competitors.

Contact

10Fold
info@10fold.com
1-415-800-5361

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Maher will serve as Hotjar’sfirstCRO and lead the growth, expansion and success of Hotjar’s customer base alongside the sales, customer success and support teams. With more than 16 years of focusing on go-to-market strategy and delivering end-to-end customer experiences, Maher will help Hotjar elevate customer value, bring new and old perspectives into its product maturity and uncover new revenue streams. Prior to Hotjar, Maher worked at Zendesk and New Relic.

As CMO, Santinwill lead Hotjar’s global marketing strategy and vision with a focus on scaling the demand generation engine, continuing to develop a distinctive brand and building long-lasting relationships with existing customers. He will work closely with Hotjar’s product and revenue teams to define the company’s road maps and drive cross-functional projects. Santin has more than 15 years of experience across E-commerce, retail, mobility, travel and healthcare.

With more than 10 years of experience, Abalos will work to foster a diverse and healthy workforce at Hotjar and ensure the company has the resources and tools needed to provide the best employee experience. Previously, Abalos served as VP of People & Talent at Stuart for more than seven years.

“I am extremely pleased to welcome Celine Maher, Mattia Santin and Marta Abalos to the Hotjar team,” said Mohannad Ali, CEO of Hotjar, in a statement. “Their combined expertise and experience in marketing, customer experience and culture will help us drive forward the global growth we want to accomplish for our products and people as we continue to scale. We are thrilled to have these new leaders on board during this key stage of growth.”

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We recently worked with a mature software-as-a-service (SaaS) company to develop a long-term strategy for achieving 20% annual revenue growth. The sales team was primarily focused on nurturing existing relationships with limited energy invested in developing new markets or finding new clients.

Further, the client management software lacked data to identify company, parent and subsidiary relationships, making it challenging to understand which organizations were genuine prospects. And the company’s leadership didn’t have a clear line of sight into their overall market potential.

To create a more sustainable outlook for the business, we sought to map and characterize the total addressable market, then develop a roadmap with sales targets and strategies to define the right sequence of actions. The SaaS company followed these steps, and the result was a straightforward guide that aligned executives and sales and marketing leaders around the organizational goals and how to achieve them.

Here are some key considerations if your organization is working on refining its growth strategy.

1. Start With The Total Addressable Market

Our marching orders were simple when we started this project: “Characterize the market.” However, the data you uncover is much more helpful and actionable if you start with a hypothesis. So, what questions are you asking of the data, and what do you predict you’ll discover?

The executive team had hypothesized that there was significant white space market potential, but the company struggled to access it for two reasons: Lack of visibility into addressable prospects and onerous rules of engagement policies that prevented the team from proactively pursuing large chunks of the market.

The analysis confirmed and strengthened these hypotheses by using firmographic data to identify untapped market segments and measure the revenue opportunity associated with modifying the rules of engagement to improve access to more accounts.

In this case, a data-driven approach would serve well to identify pockets of opportunity and get a clear view of the market. Looking at 150,000 company records during our bottom-up total addressable market analysis afforded the ability to size up the opportunity. By customizing the analysis based on the company’s product portfolio and the firmographic and technographic characteristics that determined high-value target accounts, it was possible to tell:

• Best-fit industries;
• What market segments could drive the most growth; and
• The segments that should be de-emphasized.

With that clear view, it was possible to move forward with developing a roadmap for the sales team to go after specific opportunities and generate the growth senior leaders were looking for.

2. Prioritize & Sequence The Sales Strategy

Most companies have myriad related and competing initiatives that can muddy sales roadmaps. Documenting and cataloguing cross-functional initiatives that impact the organization’s ability to achieve sales goals can help to ensure that plans are realistic, actionable and address significant dependencies.  

For this company, a strategy to migrate customers from legacy on-premises products to cloud products was highly dependent on the product team’s development roadmap. That’s where laying out two planning documents (product and sales) side-by-side helped ensure sequencing and timing to reflect cross-functional dependencies.   

Similarly, the sequence of sales strategy implementation must reflect the realities of your sales organization. Consider your sales team — do you have the headcount, role descriptions and competencies required to execute all initiatives? If not, how long will it take for you to close those gaps via training or hiring?

Specific sales initiatives may be planned for out-years to enable the sales organization to catch up. For example, a concentrated new logo acquisition effort required the development of “hunter” skillsets and tools that were anticipated to take 12-18 months. The new logo push remained important, but the sales leaders determined it should be deprioritized in the short term in favor of sales initiatives that could be executed with the current team and tools.

3. Get Buy-In From All Levels Of The Organization

Aggressive growth targets and investor pressure cause tension in an organization. In our case, the head of sales wanted everyone to rally around a shared vision and goal — direct reports, other functional executives and ultimately the sellers.

To create the conditions for change, leaders participated in interviews and workshops. As a result, the leaders evaluated investment areas and where the company should reinforce its already substantial capabilities, including channel and partner management, strategic pricing and the deployment model.

Separately, sellers shared their perspectives, experience selling in specific markets, past frustrations, current territories and qualitative feedback on customer buyers for comparison to marketing’s ideal client profile.

The feedback from these change sessions informed the hypothesis to test and improve the final sales strategy document.

When it was time to formally roll out the strategy document, workshops and listening sessions brought in people from all levels and functions of the organization. We avoided the impulse to hold meetings stratified by seniority level — bringing people together from all levels creates richer conversations and understanding. Getting input and buy-in from the executives signing off on decisions and the people who are doing the everyday sales work — and everyone in between — is essential.

4. Unlock Growth

Plans are never perfect. It’s important to exhibit flexibility and adjust some tactics as they relate to the overall strategy to bring everyone on board and get their commitment. In this case, the sales team aligned around a clear business case and understood the specific roles they could each play in achieving the long-term goals.

As of this writing, this SaaS company has seen over 15% growth in its annual revenue for the preceding four quarters, despite current macro-economic headwinds. We’re confident that they will achieve and even surpass their goal by putting a data-driven, strategic plan in place that gets people involved from all levels of the organization.

Tom Hill is a Partner and Charlie Pope is a Principal in the Revenue Growth and Consumer & Retail sector practices of Axiom Consulting Partners, an advisory firm that combines data with behavioral science to help companies grow.

The post 3 Steps For Translating Market Insights Into Growth Strategy appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

B2B Surveys seeks to provide a “one-stop-shop” offering that includes survey design advisory, programming of the survey, custom recruitment of expert respondents and visualization of survey outputs. The service hopes to provide transparency in survey respondent identity and generate high-speed insights to meet M&A deal- and decision-making timetables.

“At a time when the appetite for validated and trusted business insights and market data is soaring worldwide, businesses and investment professionals are looking for innovative ways to access primary research and real-time information to inform business decisions and evaluate billion-dollar investment opportunities,” said Fred Corkett, Managing Director and Co-founder at Dialectica, in a statement. “We’ve architected Dialectica’s B2B Surveys service to ensure research datasets are truly representative of the niche markets of interest to our clients, along with the assurance that survey responses are from vetted B2B experts. Helping our clients make smarter, better and faster decisions is our team’s passion and this new service is built with their needs in mind.”

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Back-Of-The-Box Details

Key features of Casted Insights enable marketers to:

• Reveal which brands are engaging with audio and video content;
• Surface company-level contact information and engagement data about new and existing audiences;
• Identify top-performing podcasts, videos and themes for businesses; and
• Amplify data to create attribution models, inform marketing automation and craft ABM strategies.

Who It’s For

Casted Insights was created to offer users a holistic picture of a brand’s audience and provide the insights needed to best connect with them — putting actionable data into the hands of B2B marketers.

What It Solves

The solution offers companies an in-depth view of the brands engaging with podcasts and videos side-by-side with the themes piquing their interest and seeks to reach, nurture and expand audiences with the right content at the right time.

What Makes It Special

While other audio and video solutions deliver standard vanity metrics, failing to create value for marketing or revenue teams, Casted Insights aims to provide a holistic approach for supporting a company’s content strategy to convert and connect.

Contact

Casted

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Casted Insights was created to offer users a holistic picture of a brand’s audience and provide the insights needed to best connect with them. The solution aims to give companies an in-depth view of the brands engaging with podcasts and videos side-by-side with the themes piquing their interest. Other key features of Casted Insights allow marketers to:

• Reveal which brands are engaging with audio and video content;
• Surface company-level contact information and engagement data about new and existing audiences;
• Identify top-performing podcasts, videos and themes for businesses; and
• Amplify data to create attribution models, inform marketing automation and craft ABM strategies. 

“Marketing departments are known for creativity in getting their brand and company’s name out there, but they must also showcase the results of their efforts creatively,” said Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and Co-founder of Casted, in a statement. “While business leaders always want to see the value of their investments, ROI can be hard to measure for marketing teams as not every campaign or initiative provides sales leads. By launching Casted Insights, we empower marketers with the actionable metrics and insights they need to see, communicate and leverage the value of their content marketing. This enhancement is only possible because of our deep understanding of the needs of B2B marketers looking to amplify their podcast and video content — we’ve been there because we, too, are B2B marketers.”

The post Casted Launches Insights Solution For B2B Marketers appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

“If you can align sales, marketing and product, you can move faster than your competitors. In fact, the numbers show that companies that achieved alignment grew 17% faster and were 14% more profitable than unaligned companies.”

-George Colony, CEO, Forrester

“The final component of aligning internal departments is trust. And this is more in terms of building a relationship with sales, because the more actionable and qualified insights we can deliver to them is just going to increase that trust and level of partnership. Having everyone on the same page and striving toward the same goal is really important.”

-Heather Rath, VP of Marketing, ServiceNow

“It’s time for you to unlock your creativity. Think differently, take risks, try new things, break down those silos and connect disparate pieces of data. But most importantly, take action.”

-Cristina De Martini, VP Research Director, Forrester

“A change leader is less worried about the minutia of change initiatives and more focused on setting the tone and end state. They remove barriers that get in our way, and they release resources to help us accomplish our goals.”

-Peter Ostrow, VP, Research Director, Forrester

“A company like Netflix — or any of these channels that you might subscribe to now — they create content, everything goes into their content creation or the deals that they do with content creators. Every subscriber for them is their revenue, and they treat that subscriber like precious gold dust. They think about how this buyer is changing and how they are going to serve them up information. Because if I lose them, I lose a subscription dollar, and that’s hard because I can’t manage my business. Well, we should think like that about every single person that we get to our sites, any sites that you run: Websites, social media sites. When I started to think about every visitor to my website in this way, it really started making me think about the amount of money that I was losing, not just that I was investing in this content, but I was losing if I couldn’t convert them and keep them engaged.”

-Jennifer Smith, CMO, Brightcove

“Every time somebody makes a purchase decision or recommends one of your products and services to be purchased for their business, they are putting their professional reputation at risk. And that creates a very emotionally charged interaction before you even start communicating.” Michelle Yaiser, VP, CX Analytics, Forrester

“As an organization, if you can align on what you’re trying to achieve through customer obsession and focus on it, it puts you in a good situation. Start assessing how much you want to invest in customer obsession.”

-Nick Buck, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

“We learned that it really is possible to scale personalized, relevant email outreach when marketing and sales come together — when marketing is developing the needs-based templates and when sales has been doing the research when somebody comes through and personalizing those emails. We also learned not to cry over form fills because with person-based advertising, we can get actionable signals from prospects by knowing who’s clicking on what even if they’re not completing a form.”

-Martha France, VP of Marketing and Sales, Vya

“Stop thinking about individual roles and start thinking about personalized, modular content that’s usable across many different functions and then create a personalized journey based on the role and somebody’s self-assessment of their skills.”

-John Buten, Principal Analyst, Forrester

“Know your priorities — including what you want to accomplish this week, month or quarter. This is so critical because in our world, you have so many things coming at you and there’s just so much opportunity to get distracted.”

-Steven Leonard, Chief Sales & Customer Engagement Officer, ArcBest

“The content engine of the future will merge human and machine. They will work side by side, each making autonomous decisions that help manage and fuel a unified customer experience.”

-Christine Polewarczyk, VP, Research Director, Forrester

The post Top Quotes From Forrester’s B2B Summit appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Through the integration, 6sense’s AI-driven data insights — such as buyer intent, firmographic and technographic data — can be surfaced directly in the Outreach platform, along with buying stage predictions and recommendations for account engagement. 

“When sellers have data and insights, they make smarter decisions,” said Mark Ebert, SVP of Sales at 6sense, in a statement. “And when they know that a prospect is in-market, researching their company or competitors and what their tech stack looks like, they can deliver a relevant message at just the right time to create or advance opportunities. We’re excited to put rich insights sellers need right at their fingertips. This unique integration will help sales teams uncover more opportunities, accelerate deal cycles and optimize revenue efficiency.”

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Brightcove customers will now have access to Wicket Labs’ content and subscriber insights to help them better understand audience dynamics, sources of new subscribers, the subscriber journey and how to increase subscription revenue through data visualizations and dashboards. The new audience insights include:

• A deep understanding of customer lifetime values;
• Subscriber cohort analysis;
• Engagement analysis and recommendations to assist with cross-promotion of content amongst groups;
• Key trends in viewer behavior and viewed content to understand what drives long-term relationships and value; and
• Opt-in comparative benchmarks.

“We are committed to serving our customers through our intelligent video platform powered by analytics, AI and machine learning to help them grow their businesses by engaging audiences and monetizing their content,” said Namita Dhallan, Chief Product Officer of Brightcove, in a statement. “The acquisition of Wicket Labs helps us to augment our analytics offering with audience insights and increase our resources dedicated to bringing additional value to our customers.”

Wicket Labs’ Co-founders and all of its employees will join the Brightcove product and engineering organization to help reinforce Brightcove’s analytics and video intelligence investment.

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