Cosby kicked his presentation off by level-setting his classification of ABM, which he defines as a revenue strategy that aligns revenue teams around a set of shared accounts. Revenue teams, for their part, are defined as tightly aligned sales, marketing and customer success departments. However, alignment remains a key issue, as it’s the No. 1 reason ABM fails, Cosby explained. He continued that the other two reasons for failure include:

• A tech stack and KPIs not set up for ABM; and
• A lack of dedicated resources.

“You can’t just go to your sales team and tell them that you’re building an ABM program, because they’ll just Google the term and get a bunch of information that sounds really complicated,” said Cosby. “Instead, tell them you’re going to build a playbook that will help surface meetings for them.”

{loadposition GIAA}With that in mind, he explained that the ABM playbook must be built around sales activation plays, which are “the repeatable processes for sales or customer success teams when they become involved in specific customer conversations.” The benefits of these activation plays, he continued, consist of:

• A natural alignment of sales and marketing;
• Starting the transition of KPIs and the martech stack; and
• Simplifies the process of getting started.

In other words? Sales activation plays directly address the top three reasons for failure. With that in mind, he shared the “Four D” framework of building activation plays, which include:

• Data, a summary of the target, messaging, positioning, personas, product and any input that impacts the content and targeting of the activation play;
• Distribution, which are defined strategies, tactics and channels for how the data is then distributed to the target audience;
• Destination, which consists of the “what” and “where” that data and distribution push prospects to, whether it’s pages, content, conversion points or desired outcomes; and
• Direction, which are the conversion points or paths that are established to better track target direction and outcomes for the activation play, such as forms, CTAs and demos.

Once there’s a successful playbook in place and sales’ calendars are filling up with meetings, Cosby shared that marketers can then focus on refining the playbooks and more directly tailoring them to specific accounts.

“If you’re starting scrappy, focus on one playbook and choose the one that aligns with your largest or most reliable data source,” said Cosby. “This ensures repeatability and allows for a smoother transition into more advanced ABM programs later on. The goal is to balance volume with control and data specificity. Don’t jump into a 1:1 approach right away — instead, build a foundation with a targeted playbook.”

The post #B2BMX24 Campfire Session: How To Build A Sales Activation Playbook For ABM Strategies appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The TruVoice platform was created to help capture and present customer insights and coaching intervention analytics in role-based dashboards to help managers monitor, measure and modify strategies and interventions on specific accounts. Specifically, the solution was designed to:

• Pinpoint areas of weakness or opportunity in customer relationships;
• Trigger an alert to the account team that outlines an account’s areas of concern and/or interest; and
• Serve up relevant coaching content.

“With this automated customer feedback and customer success coaching system, each individual account team member will be shown areas for improvement based on what their customers are saying,” said Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate Visions, in a statement. “It’s like a fitness tracker for customer success: Just like a fitness tracker monitors your physical activities, helps you identify areas for improvement and provides personalized recommendations, this system tracks customer experience, uncovers gaps based on customer feedback and offers tailored training to optimize results.”

The post Corporate Visions Releases New Customer Feedback Tool, TruVoice appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Lowdown

Conga Revenue Lifecycle Cloud takes typically separate and disjointed business processes — such as quotes, contracts, revenue collection, obligation management and opportunity renewal — and brings them together within one complete revenue lifecycle. This reportedly empowers organizations to provide intelligent end-to-end selling experiences and targeted omnichannel customer interactions.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

According to the company, Conga Revenue Lifecycle Cloud is a first-of-its-kind cloud platform that supports the complexities of revenue management for businesses to drive, configure, price, quote, contract, negotiate, manage, collect and renew revenue. Conga Revenue Lifecycle Cloud connects and standardizes processes across all teams to create one unified system. This single system-of-record:

• Drives intelligence throughout revenue processes for businesses with a platform that is open; and
• Gives customers the flexibility to use Conga’s solutions on the interface of their choosing, which includes a web application, a Salesforce connector and APIs that can be embedded directly into a website, portal or application.

Who It’s For

Conga Revenue Lifecycle Cloud benefits many roles within an organization and across industries, including financial services, health and life sciences, manufacturing and more. While finance teams perform many revenue lifecycle management tasks, the outcomes impact several departments across organizations, from sales and marketing to procurement, legal, IT and business operations.

What It Solves

Conga Revenue Lifecycle Cloud enables cross-team collaboration to help accelerate revenue velocity, eliminate errors and gain more insight into customer behaviors and expectations. Conga’s open platform and unified model eliminates silos, delivering efficiency and certainty across business functions that drive revenue.

What Makes It Special

By delivering a platform that ties to existing and future systems, Conga Revenue Lifecycle Cloud seeks to provide customers with choice, flexibility and scale while offering a 360-degree view of all opportunities, obligations and risks across the revenue lifecycle.

Contact

Conga

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Growth is not solely about acquiring new customers — it’s also about expanding relationships and keeping your customers happy for the long haul. A net revenue retention (NRR) strategy can help you do all this while scaling revenue and accelerating growth beyond what new customer acquisitions can do for you. 

What Is Net Revenue Retention?

NRR is a way to view customer growth through expansion and retention. Suppose you started the year with 10 new customers each paying you $1,000, summing up to $10,000 on Jan. 1. By the end of the year, you would assess the value of those same 10 customers. If three customers, amounting to $3,000 in revenue, churned, your gross revenue retention (GRR) would be 70%. However, if the remaining seven customers expanded their contracts by an additional $13,000, your portfolio would amount to $20,000, resulting in a 200% NRR.

Why NRR Matters For Marketers

Marketing to existing customers is closely connected to NRR, as a high NRR indicates that marketing efforts are successfully retaining and expanding revenue from the existing customer base. Effective marketing strategies promote upsell and cross-sell opportunities for the existing customer base. Moreover, marketing to existing customers fosters loyalty and advocacy, encouraging customers to stay with the brand and refer it to others.

The Bowtie Model: A Holistic GTM Approach

NRR has not typically been fully leveraged as a pillar of growth because a typical go-to-market (GTM) funnel is optimized toward new, local customer acquisition. If this is your model, you may be asking questions such as:

●      How many leads are we getting?

●      What is our conversion rate?

●      How many new customers are we signing?

But what if you shifted your model framework to a process what Winning by Design Research & Development describes as a bowtie? The left side is the customer acquisition side, and then the right side is the customer lifecycle side.

A bowtie model illustration, created by Influ2.

The Power Of The Bowtie Model

The Bowtie Model helps visualize the best ways to reach your targets. You don’t need to just scale one piece of the bowtie to grow your revenue, and if you execute better in every piece of the bowtie puzzle, you can grow quite a bit faster without herculean feats of valor on the customer acquisition side.

The Bowtie Model offers marketers a big-picture view of the customer before and after the initial sale. Building a deep understanding of B2B decision-makers empowers marketing teams to efficiently engage with customers, improve the overall customer experience and build trust in the brand. It also encourages marketers to deeply understand customers throughout the business relationship, enabling them to create more informed and compelling campaigns.

5 Steps To Improve Your NRR

1. Shift your revenue paradigm from customer acquisition alone to LTV of a customer.

Activate your marketing efforts across the entire bowtie rather than focusing primarily on new logos. Quantify the effect you will have at every stage of the “bowtie” from acquisition throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer and look for ways to accelerate your impact.

2. Make revenue processes that you can replicate with an eye toward growing the long-term value of your customers

Remember, often companies rely on increases to boost revenue, but sometimes that can be detrimental. It’s possible to oversell customers with a higher ASP when, if you sold them at a lower amount, you might actually get a longer lifetime value out of them because they’ll be successful with the smaller amount. And then they’ll expand. And they’ll grow. And you’ll retain them.

3. Optimize revenue at each phase of the customer journey through great experiences that deliver impact

Create great experiences at each stage and touchpoint of the relationship rather than leaving off at solely optimizing everything around new local acquisition.

4. Align the goals, incentives and KPIs across the commercial team

If account executives get compensated solely on the initial deal size for a new logo, they’re going to try to extract every dollar possible on that initial deal versus what’s good for LTV of the customer. So, it’s critical for everyone on the commercial team to align with the appropriate incentives that match the goals.

5. Organize your teams for growth

Having a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) with full-funnel revenue oversight is ideal to champion the effort. If there’s no CRO and there are multiple chiefs from various organizations, the CEO can create alignment between the groups, having the same definition of what it means to win and corresponding ways to measure success.

While customer acquisition costs might not decrease soon, marketers can still make a significant impact on revenue by supporting an NRR strategy. By nurturing and expanding existing customer relationships, focusing on their lifetime value, and aligning the entire team’s efforts, marketers can play a crucial role in driving sustained growth and success for their SaaS companies.

Joe McNeill is the CRO of Influ2, a person-based advertising company.

The post Using The Power Of Marketing To Unlock Net Revenue Retention In Your Organization appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Salesloft

Previously, Littleson served as the CMO at Conga and, before Conga, NICE inContact. His appointment builds on Salesloft’s AI focus, which includes an expanded partnership with business software and services review website G2 to tap into Salesloft’s recently released AI-powered revenue engine, Rhythm. The integration is designed to help sales teams expand their playbooks to include custom sales plays that meet prospects where they are. 

“We’re thrilled to have Randy on board to help bring the competitive advantages of the Salesloft platform to new markets and revenue teams around the globe,” said David Obrand, CEO of Salesloft, in a statement. “Randy’s experience working with high-growth, market-leading software companies through maturation — with many of them more than doubling in size during his tenure — uniquely positions him to drive continuous innovation, collaboration and improvement for our industry-leading solution. Under Randy’s leadership, we will increase Salesloft’s visibility in the market, building excitement and engagement with our global community of committed customers.”

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For the season nine premiere of the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast, I was joined by my co-host — #B2BMX’s Content Director Klaudia Tirico — to take a virtual journey back to Boston to listen in on Roderick’s session.

Throughout his presentation, Roderick showed attendees how they can embark on a journey to unlock the true potential of sales enablement and revolutionize their organization’s approach to sales.

Tune in to the podcast now to learn how to:

• Personalize the customer experience by focusing on helping customers rather than just selling;
• Use AI to improve processes like lead scoring, content generation and role playing;
• Measure outcomes and high-value activities rather than just activities;
• Align business functions by bringing them together regularly to ensure everyone is on the same page;
• Continually iterate sales processes, playbooks and strategies based on customer feedback; and
• Speak the language of each business function to partner with them effectively.

Craving more marketing and sales insights? Make sure to subscribe to the podcast today, and register for the upcoming B2B Marketing Exchange event taking place in Scottsdale, Arizona! Super Early Bird pricing is available until Thursday, Nov. 9, so be sure to snag your ticket at the absolute lowest price possible!

The post Podcast Preview: Strategies For Consistency, Collaboration & Success In Sales Enablement appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Lowdown

Automations is designed to streamline and simplify sales workflows. The feature seeks to empower users to easily design, customize and implement automated tasks, ranging from lead management to sales procedures. Recently, Pipedrive introduced two new features to the solution.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

The two new Automations features include:

• Easy automation sharing, which allows salespeople to seamlessly create and share automations with any user on their account; and
• Effortless automation ownership transfer, which allows admin users to easily transfer automations from one user to another with just a few clicks.

Who It’s For

The target users are salespeople. Pipedrive helps salespeople set up automations that adapt sequences based on specific email conditions, such as recipient clicks or replies to messages. The list view simplifies the process of finding workflows by allowing salespeople to filter, search, sort and categorize them with custom labels.

What It Solves

Pipedrive’s Automations is a robust feature designed to streamline and simplify sales workflows. The updates to Automations save time by minimizing manual labor, automating recurring tasks, maintaining consistent follow-ups and facilitating smooth communication within a company’s sales operations.

What Makes It Special

Automation plays a pivotal role in sales by offering a boost in efficiency, consistency and productivity. Sales professionals, armed with intuitive and intelligent automation tools, become catalysts for transformative change within their organizations, elevating productivity, nurturing creativity and accelerating business expansion.

Contact

Pipedrive

The post Pipedrive ‘Automations’ Seeks To Streamline & Simplify Sales Workflows appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

• Designing a sales strategy to deliver predictable revenue and growth;
• Optimizing sales productivity; and
• Future-proofing the sales function through human and technical investments.

The common theme is that CSOs must prioritize and optimize their current environment with an eye on the future. The question then becomes, how can CSOs adjust on-the-fly for the near-term while preparing for the long-term?

Designing A Sales Strategy To Deliver Predictable Revenue & Growth

CSOs are trying to navigate uncertainty while striving to deliver predictable growth. As B2B buyer behavior changes, so must the go-to-market (GTM) sales strategy.

While CSOs recognize that GTM change is needed, only 19% of CSOs have implemented an end-to-end revenue process. Because of this, CSOs often struggle to:

●      Identify the initial priorities to get started;

●      Select the KPIs to measure progress;

●      Determine the amount of change that the commercial organization can absorb; and

●      Establish the organizational support needed to execute a buyer-centric sales plan.

To address the blind spots of not having a GTM strategy, CSOs must design a strategy with a focus on meeting buyers where they are and how they want to buy. This can be started by building a unified commercial strategy in tandem with the marketing function.

Sales and marketing must work together to orchestrate customer learning across channels and ensure buyers pause to reflect on their own goals as part of the purchase. To ensure this choreographed learning, organizations need to remove silos between sales and marketing and integrate around core activities and goals. Organizations that have coalesced around the main priorities have shown notable commercial outcomes and results, such as increased lead volume, close rates and revenue. This can ultimately be achieved by sharing data, operations, enablement and execution across both functions and throughout the buyer journey.

Optimizing Sales Productivity

CSOs’ current efforts to optimize sales productivity continue to fail. While many companies have invested in new technology over the past couple years, 49% of sellers are overwhelmed by the amount of tech needed to complete their tasks.

This is a major hurdle for the sales organization, as sellers that are overwhelmed are 43% less likely to attain quota compared to non-overwhelmed sellers. Of course, attaining quotas (or not) is felt throughout the organization, meaning the technology optimization (or lack thereof) in the sales team has wide-reaching implications.

CSOs should utilize these three levers to manage pressure felt by tech utilization and optimize sales productivity while decreasing seller burnout:

1. Synchronize sales coverage and sales role design;
2. Evaluate routes to market to meet buyers in their preferred channels; and
3. Leverage technology as a teammate and focus seller time on high-value customer interactions.

Optimizing sales technology goes beyond getting more revenue from existing resources. CSOs must find efficiencies in tools and technologies to automate selected tasks and augment seller effectiveness.

To do this, they can take a data-driven performance approach. The foundation for this approach lies in defining comparative seller performance metrics and comparing individual sellers against peers to objectively identify success factors. From there, CSOs can coach sellers based on a holistic view of performance metrics to improve seller understanding of technology and motivation.

Future-Proofing The Sales Function Through Human & Technical Investments

Seventy-six percent of CSOs and sales leaders expect to increase 2023 budgets for sales technologies, and 71% expect to increase budgets for training and development efforts.

CSOs are concerned with how to future-proof their function for the next stage of growth by making the right investments in people, resources and technology. With driving sustainable growth in mind, CSOs must focus on:

●      Determining the impact of generative AI on the sales organization, operations and engagement of customers in the future;

●      Integrating technology as a teammate into the sales process and sales support; and

●      Balancing investments between technology and seller enablement.

While advances in technology continue to accelerate, CSOs should seek to reduce seller burden and increase effectiveness through process automation and generative AI. These are resources that allow for customization and should be top of mind for CSOs.

However, while the opportunity to tailor a technology to the needs of an individual business may seem initially appealing, it comes at a cost that most organizations are not prepared to pay. Whether through professional services or dedicated headcount, significant customizations will increase the overall cost of ownership by adding time for professional services firms and/or dedicated headcount to complete their work. CSOs must evaluate which features are available out-of-the-box for new tooling and determine the pieces that are worth customizing at additional cost.

CSOs challenges are often grounded in the present, with an eye towards tomorrow. As they address these challenges, they will build up core pillars to future-proofing their organization while addressing key obstacles today.

Stephanie Curry is a Sr. Director, Analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice. She advises clients on strategy, sales leadership, sales execution and sales compensation

The post Addressing Sales Challenges Today To Prepare For Tomorrow appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Introducing new technologies and platforms can cause friction between the sales and RevOps teams. To sales teams, RevOps and their new tools can resemble the new kid on the block with their shiny, new bike. On the flip side, RevOps teams may view sales teams as traditional and hesitant to change. However, there are steps organizations can take when implementing new tools to prevent and mitigate this tension.

Here’s what to keep in mind when implementing intelligent forecasting tools.

Break Down Communication Silos

Identifying and breaking down communication silos is an important first step. This encourages open lines of communication, which keeps teams on the same page from the start and promotes buy-in from the sales organization. Prior to implementing any new tool, RevOps teams must thoughtfully explain the necessity of new technologies and be prepared to support sales leaders with change management.

Often, sales reps see new tools and technology as something that will detract from their time spent on prospecting and closing deals. However, if RevOps explains how intelligent forecasting will benefit them, like the fact that an enterprise software company that implements a forecasting solution can experience a 15% increase in rep productivity, reps will understand the value of the tool and be more likely to invest time in adopting it.

Feedback between the sales team and RevOps is an important aspect of open communication. While sales teams need to be open to change and recommendations from RevOps, the same principle applies to RevOps teams. With barriers broken down, the two teams can establish a genuine partnership and trust that decisions are made with the sales teams’ best interest in mind. 

Paint A Picture With Forecasting Data

Once RevOps and the sales team have established a solid partnership, the next step is ensuring both teams understand the data they’re gaining from forecasting tools. Accurate forecasting software can serve as a single, centralized source of truth for data-backed insights into the business that helps all parts of the organization understand how the market is changing and where they need to pivot their strategy. Using AI-backed forecasting provides reps with greater transparency into their commission, pipeline hygiene, sales performance and quota. However, the tool and data are useless if sales reps don’t know how to leverage them for actionable insights.

RevOps teams need to work with sales teams to unpack and better understand the numbers, which is essential to extracting the full value of the solution. Once this is done, the two teams can work together to create better selling plans and ultimately land more valuable deals. In turn, these new plans, coupled with accurate commission predictions, motivate sellers to chase higher impact deals. This also provides organizational leaders with the information needed to determine if they’ll meet their goals or if a pivot in strategy is required. Adopting a data-driven approach provides reps with more effective and efficient sales messaging, helping to drive predictable revenue and meet forecasting goals with ease.

Coordinate Cross-Departmental Collaboration

The final step in unlocking the full value of an intelligent forecasting solution is encouraging and facilitating cross-departmental collaboration. RevOps teams interact with virtually every part of the business, creating a unique opportunity to bring more siloed teams together so no decisions are made in a vacuum.

Much of the data RevOps interprets goes well beyond sales insights. Using intelligent forecasting, RevOps leaders can gain insight into different departments and adjust their strategy to benefit cross-departmental efforts. For example, if RevOps sees a dip in win rates due to more deals being lost, they can work with lead gen to determine if there is a gap in their qualification process. These interactions drive higher quality pipeline for the sales team, leading to higher conversion rates, win rates and a more predictable and successful business.

As businesses continue to lean into digital transformation, RevOps leaders can be the catalyst for positive change by working with sales to implement AI-backed forecasting tools. Just like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, sales teams are often focused solely on what’s in front of them and move through the sales cycle, unaware of the possibilities that exist with other solutions. They believe their tried-and-true processes are the only way forward.

RevOps can change perspectives and show the benefits of adopting new approaches to forecasting, bringing sales out of the forecasting Stone Age. While it may be a challenge to gain the trust of sales teams, doing so will vastly improve business processes and tap into markets that were previously unavailable due to a lack of data. 

With a better understanding of customer data, breaking down harmful silos and creating a holistic approach to organizational strategy, roadblocks that once stood in the way of collaboration will fall to the wayside and organizations will prosper. 

Bayley Fesler is Xactly’s Director of RevOps, while Annie Jones serves as the company’s RevOps Business Partner. Xactly is a provider of revenue solutions.

The post How To Create Effective Relationships Between Sales & RevOps appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

OtterPilot for Sales automatically transcribes sales calls and extracts sales insights, such as next steps, action items, pain points, objections and more. It then syncs these insights directly into CRM and productivity tools — including Salesforce and HubSpot — for live insights into calls. Additionally, the AI solution can centrally organize all customer calls in one channel.

“We know that a thriving sales team is key to a successful business,” said Sam Liang, Co-founder and CEO of Otter.ai, in a statement. “We’ve listened to sales teams, specifically reps and their coaches, and built OtterPilot for Sales to solve their biggest challenges around time, streamlining communication and capturing actionable insight so they can spend more of their time doing what they do best: Closing deals and increasing revenue.” 

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