As we all continue to get used to the ‘new normal’ in our personal lives, many of us also need to adjust the approach we take in our professional lives. This is especially true in B2B tech sales and especially true for many of the B2B tech sales reps we work with in Asia Pacific who have traditionally relied very heavily on face-to-face interaction at events. These reps have had to move from exchanging business cards at a conference or trade show – which don’t exist in the post-pandemic world — to relying on other ways to identify good prospects and engage them.
I manage the team of TechTarget’s Customer Success professionals across APAC. In a given quarter we speak with dozens of inside sales reps and account managers. I could write pages about the different strategies that the various sales teams we work with employ, but the most successful ones are becoming comfortable leveraging intent data to uncover their best prospects apply insights to engage them. They’re doing this across three key areas:
#1 – Discover net new contacts/accounts
The truth is, your total addressable market isn’t unlimited. At a time when priorities are shifting, nothing is a more reliable indicator of who’s in market for your solutions right now than their engagement with, decision support content relevant to your specific topical area.
We are helping sales teams get the right insights into the behavior of active buying teams to identify the right accounts to engage now and add prospects who are doing this pre-purchase research to their CRM systems. Here’s one example: the BDRs at a business applications vendor are building out ‘intelligence profiles’ on the accounts doing the most research in their space. Leveraging this data, they create dockets on each account with insights they’ve collected and then reach out to the most active prospects to book meetings for their account executives. This is creating a clear path to drive better conversations and more opportunities.
#2 – Progress open and stalled opportunities
For many tech vendors, the average deal cycle runs at least 6 months or longer and a lot can happen in that time – from budgets shifting, organizational needs changing, or even planned projects being cancelled. Intent data is a key ingredient in deal progression. Our clients are using contact-level intent to better penetrate buying teams by identifying new researchers they didn’t already know and are uncovering insights into content consumption patterns that give them additional reasons to engage an account.
Similarly, this intelligence can be used to re-engage stalled opportunities. For example, we work with a large data center vendor in region whose engagement stalled with one of their key accounts several months ago. Using TechTarget’s Priority Engine intent platform, their sales team was able to identify when that account became active on our network, and furthermore, that an IT decision-maker at that organization had recently engaged with hybrid cloud articles and vendor content. They were able to use this insight to re-engage the prospect in a much more personalized way and re-open an opportunity.
#3 – Engage and retain your current customer base
When there is any uncertainty in the market, your current customer base should always be your #1 priority. This helps you maximize revenue in the short term while continuing to nurture your relationships for future growth. As a Customer Success professional, I understand this better than anyone. That is why our team is focused on helping the sales teams we work with get the most out of the intelligence we are providing. They use our intent platform to alert them to new activity within their customer accounts to open the door for more touchpoints and reasons to engage. This does not necessarily mean selling, but it offers an opportunity to deliver helpful, consultative information that may help their customer solve a new business problem. Sellers also are finding new stakeholders and buying centers for expanded cross-sell/upsell opportunities. And, with visibility into changing topical interests as well as competitor content customers are engaging with, sales has advanced insight or early warning to help protect account revenue. This is the reason that many reps are asking us to upload their accounts into Priority Engine so they can proactively uncover this intelligence or automatically be alerted when we detect new contacts, new content engagement, and new dynamics within an account in their territory.
We’re all trying to adjust to a new reality of doing business. If you’d like to see live data in your market, get advice on how to leverage insights to propel sales activity, or understand some of the best practices our customers are applying to drive success in the current environment, please reach out to me.
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