3 ways to use behavioral data to drive better inside sales

B2B companies are constantly evolving, and your sales process needs to do the same.

According to new marketing and sales research, not only do 54% of salespeople think it’s harder to sell than ever before, but only 24.3% of people in sales are exceeding their previous year quotas.

Salespeople are struggling to prioritize and personalize their outreaches at scale, persisting with tactics that are outdated and ineffective. Volume-based KPIs that focus on singular contacts, mass-produced call scripts, and boring email templates are causing sales teams to miss out on potential sales.

In order to succeed with these new B2B buyers, your sales team needs to learn how to leverage inside sources of information such as behavioral data and turn this specialized data into sales success.

Gathering better data

Your sales and marketing team are begging for better, more actionable data.

According to an Ascend2 study, 35% of sales and marketing teams say that quality data is the biggest barrier to their success.

Marketing teams need to embrace more data sets from third parties in order to gather a more complete overview of the entire buyer journey. By tracking anonymous data across multiple digital tracking points, marketers can gather more comprehensive data that gives more vivid details of their B2B buyers and their decision-making process through the sales funnel.

Effectively integrating the data that you are collecting is the key to your improved sales and marketing strategy.

To integrate this data, try:

– Prioritizing accounts that align with your marketing and sales efforts (don’t waste time on outlier accounts.)

– Focusing on contacts within specified accounts that have an active interest in your topics.

– Giving your sales team smarter insights into their consumer behavior. This will enable them to more successfully address these accounts.

With higher-quality data, you will be able to fuel your ABM tactics in a more efficient manner, allowing your sales and marketing team to segment audiences based on set criteria, such as company size, buying trends and industry. By utilizing their specific buying and consumer activity, your team will be able to differentiate key accounts based on their sales funnel stage.

This leads to more effective nurturing campaigns.

Step up your nurturing campaigns with buyer personas

Gone are the days in which a salesperson made a one-on-one sale with a B2B buyer. Now, buyer groups are taking over the market, with increasing numbers of stakeholders giving input into the buying decisions.

Nurturing strategies have not kept up with the more complex buyer persona. An effective nurturing campaign needs to target specific people with specific, personalized content in a more intelligent way.

Using your user behavioral data, marketing and sales teams need to target users who have more recent activity on the topics that lead to sales for you, whether on a third-party website or your own.

From there, your buyer persona needs to be detailed enough that you can target each segment of your potential customer base with the right kind of content – high-quality content that is relevant enough to make the B2B buyer want to invest their time.

Finally, your marketing and sales strategy needs to utilize your data in more intelligent ways. Leverage purchase intent insight to understand your prospects’ interests and intent signals to place your various accounts into appropriate nurturing campaigns.

Close more leads with data

Want to close more leads? Use better data.

Someone who downloaded your infographic will need to be placed in a different nurturing stage than someone who has reached out for information, interacted with your website in some way, and downloaded multiple pieces of information.

Segment your current and incoming leads into appropriate audiences using your behavioral data.

Advanced customer acquisition for complex sales can be difficult to understand or implement. DemandWorks has it down to a science. Contact us today to learn more.