fbpx
Categories
Buying Intent Data Champions Cold Calling Customer Churn Customer Success Demand Generation Lead Generation Relationship Signals Sales Leadership Sales Pipeline Sales Process Sales Technology Signal Intelligence Total Addressable Market

ZoomInfo: A Must-Have Tool for Sales & Demand Gen Teams

ZoomInfo is the perfect solution for sales and marketing teams, offering extensive contact and company data with accuracy, automation tools for improved efficiency, and an AI-powered platform to increase lead conversions.

 

If you’re serious about growing your business, ZoomInfo is a must-have tool in your arsenal. With access to over 150 million business contacts and insights into decision-makers, executives, and influencers, ZoomInfo helps you identify new prospects and sales leads.

 

Create targeted campaigns for increased conversions and develop better relationships with your customers.

 

What is ZoomInfo?

 

ZoomInfo (formerly Discover Org) is a sales intelligence platform that helps businesses generate more revenue by quickly identifying sales leads and decision-makers. It helps to identify potential target accounts, access detailed contact information, build an understanding of companies and contacts, create targeted marketing campaigns, and more.

 

ZoomInfo stands out due to its exclusive database of 129 million verified email addresses and 50 million phone numbers. Not only this, but you can also sort through potential leads based on over 300 criteria, including former job positions and company size.

 

Furthermore, ZoomInfo’s AI-powered engine can help you quickly identify leads and prioritize them based on their engagement with your content and the likelihood of conversion. It also provides real-time data insights into the performance.

 

With detailed insights into customers’ behaviors and preferences, the platform enables you to deliver relevant content at the right time.

 

An overwhelming majority of companies consider ZoomInfo their go-to source when searching for business leads due to its immense capabilities, such as accessing employee emails and contact numbers, including both work and personal phone lines. 

 

It is crucial for Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) responsible for sales prospecting to have access to mobile numbers to contact workers who may be located remotely.

 

Who Is ZoomInfo For?

 

ZoomInfo is the perfect choice for sales and marketing teams that conduct outbound sales. Boasting high-quality contact data, ZoomInfo will ensure your team can close deals more efficiently and effectively. 

 

However, your deal size must be substantial to ensure it’s worth the cost of a subscription. In addition to having a steady stream of prospects, you can confidently turn them into paying customers. 

 

As such, small startups should first have an understanding of their target customer base and confidence in closing cold calls before exploring this option.

 

How Does ZoomInfo Get My Information?

 

How Does ZoomInfo Get My Information

 

ZoomInfo creates comprehensive “Public Profiles” of businesses and individuals by consolidating business data from various sources. These Public Profiles are then made public to users, customers, and other concerned parties through a directory.

 

There are several ways ZoomInfo collects the data for its Public Profiles, such as:

 

Extensive Network of Contributors

 

ZoomInfo draws on an extensive network of contributors to authenticate existing and recent data and add contacts. The community members utilize proprietary machine learning technology to trace the signature lines of emails sent and received from their inboxes. 

 

According to ZoomInfo, its contributors verify 20 million emails monthly and collect data on four million people and one million companies daily.

 

Human Research and Verification

 

In addition to machine learning, ZoomInfo relies on a dedicated team of human professionals to optimize its database. ZoomInfo’s data training lab is staffed with 300 human researchers, consistently gathering an impressive 100 million contact records daily and keeping tabs on 45 million web domains. 

 

This group continuously verifies the results from the company’s algorithms, collects contact information, and discovers internal information about businesses like funding events – which can be valuable for sales teams when prospecting.

 

Third-Party Partners

 

ZoomInfo collects data from trusted, third-party sources to enrich the profiles of individuals and businesses. These sources may include public companies, government data sources, social media feeds, and more.

 

ZoomInfo Product Categories

 

ZoomInfo’s solutions are broken down into four distinct categories:

 

Sales OS – The primary focus of this product lies in aiding sales teams with a convenient contact search that can be used for cold emails and calls. 

 

Marketing OS – This product is ideal for marketing teams due to its Company and Contact Search feature. This provides marketing teams with valuable lists that equip SDRs to execute their Account Based Marketing strategies effectively. 

 

Operations OS – Next, we have Operations OS, targeted at sales operations teams. Data enrichment is essential for an efficient CRM system containing accurate contact and company information. 

 

Talent OS – Without fresh talent, companies cannot meet targets, grow and remain competitive. ZoomInfo’s Talent OS helps HR and recruiting teams with hiring by providing valuable insights into potential candidates.

 

Is ZoomInfo better than LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

 

Is ZoomInfo better than LinkedIn Sales Navigator

 

ZoomInfo has much to offer compared to LinkedIn Sales Navigator; however, it is essential to understand your team’s needs before investing in either solution.

 

At its most basic level, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an ideal tool for targeting clients you want or specific clients. At the same time, ZoomInfo excels at discovering key decision-makers who may not be in your sights already.

 

Sales Navigator is the go-to platform for acquiring precise contact information, including names, cities, and job titles. Meanwhile, ZoomInfo offers you more current data in larger categories such as company size, industry type, etc.

 

In addition, ZoomInfo also makes exporting contact lists for use with CRM and marketing automation platforms incredibly simple. ZoomInfo is also a great tool for sales professionals as it offers Contact and company data and Buyer intent data, which are key factors in the success of any sales team.

 

Furthermore, it has specialized features like sales automation (Engage), revenue intelligence (Chorus), and conversational sales (Chat) that are not available on Sales Navigator.

 

Final Words

 

ZoomInfo stands out among its competitors with its extensive contact and company data, the quality and accuracy of that data, the integration of various sales tools into a single platform, and its commitment to innovation in the field of sales intelligence. The data and automation capabilities provided by this tool will result in your team generating more leads, boosting conversion rates, and driving better results for the company.

Categories
Buying Intent Data Customer Churn Sales Pipeline Sales Process Sales Technology

Understanding Data Mining and How It Can Enhance Your Business

There is real treasure in your database. You know this. You’ve seen the vast sales boosts from upselling, remarketing, and other valuable data-driven campaigns. What about the data or Data Mining?

The problem is, they don’t know what to do with it. They’re not sure if they should use it for marketing or sales; they don’t know if they should use it to improve their product or service offerings, and they certainly don’t know how to take that data and apply it to improve their bottom line.

But here’s the thing: You have this data because customers are willing—even eager—to share it with you! And that means you can use it to grow your business in ways you never imagined possible.

What is Data Mining?

What is Data Mining?

Data mining is a process that allows companies to uncover patterns and make predictions about future behavior based on past actions. In other words, data mining will enable you to use your existing data to make better decisions about future activities.

The most common use case for data mining is predictive analytics, which uses past events to predict future outcomes. For example, we can use this information to recommend product B as an add-on option during checkout.

In addition to helping businesses increase revenue through more targeted marketing campaigns and sales offers, data mining also helps companies save money by reducing waste and avoiding unnecessary expenses on product returns or customer service calls.

How Does Data Mining Benefit Businesses?

How Does Data Mining Benefit Businesses?

Data mining helps businesses understand their customers better so they can improve their products and services accordingly. For example, suppose you’re a retailer who sells clothing online. In that case, you may use data mining to discover that most women between 18-30 prefer dresses with pockets over dresses without pockets. You can then use this information to adjust your product offerings accordingly.

How Has Data Mining Impacted Marketing?

How Has Data Mining Impacted Marketing?

Data mining has significantly impacted marketing because it allows marketers to make more accurate predictions about consumers’ behavior and preferences than ever before. This means that marketers can create more targeted messages that speak directly to their target audience’s needs and desires—and ultimately get them more excited about buying whatever product or service they’re selling!

The Role of Data Mining in Reducing Customer Churn

The Role of Data Mining in Reducing Customer Churn

Have you ever been shopping for a product and seen a competitor with a lower price? Then, even if you don’t buy the product, it’s likely that you will remember that lower price.

That’s why it’s so important to keep your customers happy. You need to ensure they’re getting the best value possible from your products and services, which is where data mining comes in. Data mining can help you identify patterns in customer behavior, allowing you to predict when customers are most likely to switch to another provider.

Marketing teams can use this information to convince customers that they’re getting a better deal than their competitors. You could also use this information to send targeted coupons and offers based on your knowledge of each customer’s purchasing history.

When mining your data, it can be easy to get caught up in the numbers—Lifetime Customer Value, retention rate, churn rate. But there’s more to data than just numbers.

By digging into your data and pulling some surveys and questionnaires, you can build a case on why customers are bailing. This will give you more insight into what changes need to happen for them to stick around longer.

You can do this by mining data and identifying where customers are falling off. Then you can use these findings as the basis for surveys or questionnaires that help you determine why they left in the first place.

The Role of Data Mining in Product Development

The Role of Data Mining in Product Development

There’s no doubt that data mining is a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, but it’s essential to understand what it is and how it works before you start using it. Data mining is analyzing large amounts of data to find patterns and trends that can be used to make predictions about future behavior and events.

There’s no shortage of ideas and opportunities to consider when using data mining to create new products. But it’s important to remember that the best use of data mining is not just about creating a product that people want, but rather one that they didn’t even know they needed until they saw it!

Think about it: if you could predict exactly what someone wanted, they would already have it. So you might as well just give them that thing instead of creating something new and innovative!

Here’s a breakdown of how this works:

  1. Identify the features that make your product unique and different from other offerings in the space.
  2. Find out what customers want (or don’t want) in your industry by surveying them or talking one-on-one about their preferences and needs.
  3. Use this information to develop an idea for a new product, then build it!

Data mining allows you to see the most popular trends and tailor your product line accordingly. For example, if many people are not using a particular feature, you can remove it from future product versions or even stop offering it altogether. This ensures that only those who need that feature get it, while those who don’t will be happy with their less cluttered experience.

Categories
Account Monitoring Customer Churn Customer Success Sales Process Total Addressable Market

Trust Gap Within Vertical Markets: Why Your Business Should Care

Most B2B trust studies focus on technology and solutions provided by the selling organization, but this doesn’t reveal what you need to know. Audiences don’t care what your product does. They care whether it will solve their problem effectively. The real B2B trust gap is between perceptions of your business and what you do.

How You Can Close the Trust Gap

More Transparency, Better Buyer Tools, Shorter Buying Timeline - Trust Gap

#1: More Transparency, Better Buyer Tools, Shorter Buying Timeline

Many companies are going all-in on B2B tools.

But the problem is that these tools are often too complicated to use and difficult to explain, which puts off potential buyers.

The bottom line is that buyers want transparency.

So how do you do that? An easy way is simply by being honest about your product. Show the buyer what it can do, how it works, and what it costs. Tell them why they need your product and how it will benefit them in the long run. If they want more details or information, they’ll ask for it — but don’t be afraid to give them everything they need up front to make an informed decision right away.

Another way to simplify things is by creating a demo video that shows exactly how your product works in real-life scenarios — and then put it online so that anyone can see it!

When you’re selling a B2B product, it can be difficult to get prospects to understand the value of what you do.  

Take time before every call to understand who you’re talking with, where they are in their buying process and what they want from your solution. Then tailor your message accordingly — if you’re talking with an executive trying to find ways to increase efficiency in his department, show how your product can help him achieve that goal. If you’re talking with an analyst who wants more information about how your product could improve his department’s processes before deciding, give him details on why your product is suitable for the job.

When potential customers ask questions about how your B2B tool works or what it can do for them, provide specific examples that demonstrate its value based on their unique needs or concerns

Make Customer Proof Work For You - Trust Gap

#2: Make Customer Proof Work For You

It’s no secret that customers are the lifeblood of any business. But when you’re looking to make a sale, it can be tricky to convince a prospect that you’re the one for the job. So many companies have turned to customer evidence: real-world examples of how their products have helped other customers.

Customer evidence gives buyers a sense of what they can expect from you and your product. It also helps them understand how your product or service has worked for others in similar situations—helping them feel more confident about investing with you.

The idea of customer proof is simple: Leverage the power of your customers’ stories to help drive your sales. But what does it mean for your business? And how can you make customer proof work for you?

Here are some tips:

  • Get started with testimonials on your website.
  • Add social proof into buyer journeys with live chat and live chat apps.
  • Make it easy for customers to share their experiences on social media by making buttons available on your site (and encouraging them!).
Practice a Customer-Centric Strategy - Trust Gap

#3: Practice a Customer-Centric Strategy

Customer satisfaction is a core part of your sales strategy.

It’s easy to think of customer service as a separate thing from sales, but the truth is that they’re just two sides of the same coin. And if you want to be successful, you need to make sure that both sides of that coin are always working together in harmony.

When it comes to customer satisfaction, two things matter most: closing the feedback loop and measuring results. When you close the feedback loop for your customers by talking to them about what they need and want, then measuring their happiness with your products and services based on those conversations, you can achieve true customer-centricity.

Treat Them As Advocates, Not Just Customers - Trust Gap

#4: Treat Them As Advocates, Not Just Customers

The sales process can be a little intimidating. It’s not always easy to find the right words, especially when trying to convince someone else that they need what you have.

Fortunately, there are some great resources to help you make the best case for your product.

For example, let’s say you’re selling a new product. What could be better than having customers talk about how much they love the effects after using this product? You could even ask them about their experience if they’ve used other products in the past. This way, you get an idea of how well this product compares with others on the market—and how much it stands out from its competitors!

It’s easy to get caught up in the thought that your customers are great, loyal people who would be happy to recommend you to their friends and family. But the reality is that most of them aren’t ready to do that on their own—they need a little nudge.

As you reshape your sales strategy in the face of the trust gap, look at ways you can actively encourage current customers to become advocates for your company. One way is by asking for testimonials from satisfied customers. In addition to making others aware of your product or service, these testimonials can also help reassure potential customers who are still on the fence about making a purchase decision.

You might also enjoy:

Categories
Account Monitoring Compelling Event Signals Customer Churn Sales Process Signal Intelligence Time & Maturity Signals

How to Identify Signals That Are Most Likely to Convert

We have built something called the Signals Quadrant at Pipeline Signals. The goal is to gather knowledge from our clients about the convertibility and urgency of all the different signals and other things that we’re currently tracking. They are constantly changing.

However, we propose concentrating on time-based signals when it comes to urgency because you’re not the only game in town.

Whether someone joins a company, someone departs a company or a department increases in size or declines in size. You, your rivals, and everyone else is vying for the same buyer’s mindshare and wallet share.

What are time-based signals, and how do they work?

Time signals are occurrences that indicate a seller’s chance to contact a prospect. Time Signals enable you to forecast when a company will want your service or product, allowing you to focus on the clients that can be converted easily into potential clients right now.

Most of these indications, though, aren’t as straightforward as a tweet or a LinkedIn post. You’ll need to monitor the proper channels to see the minor adjustments that might freshen up a cold outreach.

So, how do these compelling event signals appear, and where do they occur?

Here are several time signals to help you create fresh sales leads and improve your B2B sales strategy.

time signals

Changes in an organizational structure 

Changes in the company’s organizational positions or structure and its hiring velocity fall within this category. For one thing, a newly hired high-level manager has considerable authority and is eager to mess things up. Because they don’t have set conventions in their new business and seek to earn their keep right away, they’re more receptive to fresh ideas than other corporate executives. It’s the right time for you to propose your proposal.

However, you should pay attention to changes in top management and new duties that might imply new plans. Remember that people who have never had a predecessor are free to start their divides in whatever way they want. Make the most of your chance to get in on the main level.

Whether the organization is employing new people or laying off many people, any substantial movement in hiring might be a good trigger event.

A satisfied client shifting employment or transferring to a different organization, on the other hand, might indicate Time Signals. To see if they’d want to take your product or service with them, give them a call. If your offer made them look suitable in their former employment, they’d be ready to spread the news in their new one.

Expansion of the company

New problems occur when a lead enters a new industry or introduces a new product or service in an unexplored area. This means that there will be new challenges to cope with. This is the ideal environment to seize the chance. Uncharted territory demands new kinds of help, as well as maybe new suppliers.

If your target has lately been awarded a significant account, they will get a large sum of money. At this point, you can pitch your product or service.

A new office site necessitates many new solutions, products, and services, which your prospective client will require. Depending on your solution, this might be a significant upsell or an introduction opportunity.

Strategies for business

Draw conclusions about your prospect’s new business strategies or initiatives from a social post or a shift in social media behavior. Find out which projects are being funded and which are being delayed or canceled entirely. Suppose you can derive these observations (from a social post or a shift in social media activity) and position your offer effectively. In that case, buyers will be impressed with your ostensibly clairvoyant powers.

You should also pay attention to any events that a potential account is hosting. Is there a conference or other sort of event planned?

Furthermore, every sector has news and changes that generate a lot of attention inside the field but are scarcely noticed outside of it. Make that you keep note of these occurrences, whatever they may be.

Performance of the Business

Is the business making a lot of money? Then they’ll be more accepting of projects that can assist them in maintaining or hastening their progress. What if the company is rapidly losing money? Do you have a service or product that might go against the grain?

Keep track of any honors that your prospects acquire. It’s satisfying to be acknowledged inside a company’s industry or expertise. While they’re on a high, reach out and tell them how you might help them stay ahead of competitors.

Keep a watch on how the business is being covered in the news. A newspaper feature, whether favorable or harmful, will cast a particular light on a company. Assist them in maintaining a good image or correcting a bad one by being present.

If a prospect mentions that their existing spouse isn’t working out, seize the opportunity. Remember that this might show up in more than just a simple Facebook or LinkedIn post; look for articles or keep an eye on legal activities that signal worsening relations.

If a company gets punished for non-compliance, it will look for a product or service to protect it from getting into difficulty again. The individual who can swoop in and help amid a disaster will almost certainly become their hero.

Reacting to time-based trigger signals

When it comes to time-based signals, you must act quickly. They’re probably looking at your products or services, as well as those of your rivals. You may be their first choice, but quickly enough, you risk losing the transaction if you don’t reply to their compelling event signals. Give them no opportunity to have buyer’s regret. Act quickly and address all of their worries and inquiries to make them feel more comfortable with the deal.

Here are a few tips on how to engage these signals.

how to leverage time signals

Concentrate on your most important prospects.

Using the predictive data, you may build up your lead-scoring algorithm to favor the organizations that exhibit genuine interest and purchase intent. Maybe they’re looking for a specific item. They come back to your product page several times and download the whitepaper.

Your sales team may follow the prospect’s behavior, obtain a visual of the score, and make a timely and fruitful contact by using the intent data.

Reactivate possibilities that have lain dormant for a long time.

Remember that promising lead that you didn’t follow up on? What trigger signals are they sending out to help you rekindle your relationship and clinch the sale? A prospect, for example, accepts your free trial. However, they do not take advantage of it. Your sales representative follows up with the lead to find out why they didn’t use the products.

The agent knows how to influence the conversation and drive the sale ahead with intent-data knowledge, such as the other websites the lead is examining.

Keep existing clients happy.

Clients who you’ve worked hard to get will make more purchases. See what they’re looking at in real-time so you can generate upsell chances and keep them interested in your product.

A lead’s purchase intent data can also assist you in spotting any problems that would prompt them to cancel a subscription or membership renewal and look for another option. This involves getting information from postings and reviews on social media.

If your sellers know what consumers are saying about their positive and negative experiences with your brand, follow-up is more focused, resulting in satisfied clients.

Conclusion

You’ll be able to focus essential accounts at the right moment if you organize your sales efforts around time-based signals, allowing you to use more efficient and effective B2B sales strategies.

Time signals help you not only choose the most outstanding prospects to pursue right now, but they also help you have more meaningful conversations with them. Based on these signals, you may alter your pitch to their present circumstances. The prospect will feel that you know what you’re talking about, which is critical for establishing trust, credibility, and confidence.

Categories
Account Monitoring Customer Churn Customer Success Signal Intelligence

Buyer Sentiment: What is It and How Can You Take Advantage?

The phrases ‘buying behavior’ and ‘buying signals’ relate to customers’ buyer sentiment activities when making a purchase. These actions are frequently used to propel any B2B buying process ahead, in particular, to infer how your sales team should sell. Specific activities, like clicks, opens, and response rates, reveal the how, what, and when of customers’ desire to buy.

However, merely knowing when potential customers respond is ineffective. As your sales staff excitedly anticipate the future, best practice suggests taking a step back and realigning on buying behavior, particularly buyer sentiment—the missing element in many B2B data providers’ engagement strategy.

How do you determine true buyer sentiment?

Buyer sentiment refers to a customer’s emotional response to a sales interaction: good, negative, objection, recommendation, unfollow, unsubscribe. The possibility of the sales process continuing ahead, or even the next best move for your sellers, may be determined by buyer sentiment.

Whether by email or phone, a favorable response to an outreach suggests that the prospective client is eager to learn more about the product or service.

If the prospect responds adversely to outreach, your sellers will need to decide whether another means of contact is the best option. These indicators might also aid sales reps in determining whether or not to collaborate with marketing to develop a nurturing path or if they should wait until later. Buyer sentiment can assist your sales staff in paying attention to what the prospect is saying.

Your sales schedule should also be influenced by buyer sentiment. According to a recent study, the window of opportunity shrinks with each passing day without communicating with the prospective account. As a result, a basic sales rule is to follow up with purchasers as quickly as possible.

While a favorable reaction necessitates quick outreach, continued outreach following a poor response might create more harm than good in the long run, so it’s better to give yourself some time to calm off. In developing sales strategy and pipeline creation, time is essential, so tuning in to emotional cues and reacting quickly and correctly is crucial.

It’s no longer enough just to know whether or not purchasers respond to messages; it’s also essential to understand how effectively they respond. To fully understand a prospect, sales teams must focus on buyer sentiment rather than typical indications of purchasing behavior.

You may learn more about what clients want and anticipate based on these factors. The way you position your company and advertise your product is directly affected by buyer sentiment. You can analyze your customers’ comments and use them to make decisions by digging into your review data. In a nutshell, that is buyer sentiment analysis.

Why is buyer sentiment analysis so important?

You’re probably already keeping track of several metrics. Even yet, for the following reasons, a more profound buyer sentiment research should still be on your consumer analysis shortlist.

importance of buyer sentiment analysis

Making better business decisions

This is the most important one. B2B companies tell clients what products and services they need right now, so they don’t have to speculate. Your client base, after all, understands your solutions better than anybody else. Buyer sentiment analysis responses reveal precisely what your consumers desire, rather than relying on gut reactions and assumptions.

Improving your products and services regularly

Your business should change in lockstep with your consumers’ habits and expectations. Collecting feedback, monitoring compelling event signals, and performing buyer sentiment analysis may assist you in identifying new products, ideas, and features that people want to see. Encouragement of ratings and reviews establishes a direct line of communication between your customers and your business.

Listening to your clients and enhancing your products have a beneficial influence on your bottom line. The more data you can glean from consumer feedback, the simpler it will be to improve your product.

Managing your reputation with ease

You’ve definitely heard the statistic that almost 90% of consumers trust internet recommendations just as much as personal recommendations. These suggestions may be found all over the internet. While many companies seek out the most cutting-edge influencer marketing strategies, you most likely already have your group of micro-influencers talking about you. The key is to locate this community and equip them with a more effective means of having their opinions heard.

Buyer sentiment analysis helps you catch such moments rather than letting them slide through your fingers when you build conversations around your product. As a consequence, you’ll get a more holistic picture of your online reputation, preventing your company from being trapped in a bubble.

How do you analyze buyer sentiment?

Now that you’ve learned the fundamentals of buyer sentiment, the next step is to figure out how to get started with it all.

Because various organizations prioritize different avenues of consumer input, there is no “right” method for buyer sentiment analysis. That’s why we’ve put together a list of ideas for you to select from based on your industry.

buyer sentiment analysis

Use intelligence tools to your advantage.

Because there’s so much to go through, buyer sentiment analysis is challenging to conduct “by hand.” Emotions, on the other hand, might be impossible to quantify at a glance. To overcome these obstacles and speed your buyer sentiment research, we propose utilizing technologies that will handle the job of buyer sentiment analysis by gathering vast amounts of data from your company’s reviews and the industry as a whole.

An intelligence tool is a must-have for companies to find great product insights and fully grasp buyer sentiment without all the digging.

Keep track of what buyers are saying.

Prospective accounts are increasingly using social media to voice their opinions on products and solutions. Social media is a fast-moving platform that provides a rich knowledge of buyer sentiment, whether it’s a shout-out or a customer service issue.

You may use social listening to collect brand mentions (including reviews) and analyze your brand’s social health. These platforms may also be used to monitor trigger signals. In an age where a single contact may derail an entire customer satisfaction effort, buyer sentiment is essential to monitor. There are several strategies to keep track of and listen to social cues.

Listening elements in tools, like Sprout Social, analyze good vs. negative sentiment across social networks and personal remarks. At the same time, businesses and merchants may use review material to listen to similar sentiment.

Collect and organize comments from your email list.

Your buyer sentiment analysis will be more precise if you have more reviews. Given that most purchasers would post reviews if asked, your email list is likely the best way to collect additional reviews.

You poll your current accounts via surveys, questionnaires, and post-purchase messages to find out what they want to see from you in the future.

You can also try setting up post-purchase autoresponder messages to solicit more input as a way to curate reviews passively. When you ask simply and directly, you’d be amazed at how attentive your consumers are.

Anybody who takes the time to respond is clearly involved in your company and hence crucial to your buyer sentiment analysis efforts.

Make sure to evaluate feedback.

It’s essential to keep in mind that not all reviews and comments must be treated equally. There’s a substantial difference between a long-term client leaving a positive review and someone trolling or splitting hairs. As a result, don’t be surprised by outliers in your buyer sentiment analysis; instead, consider the context of your study.

Negative feedback should not be avoided. Thoughtful criticism can help you learn how to enhance your items to get more business in the future. Don’t conceal your buyer sentiment; welcome it and grow from it. Open communication is vital for building trust, so pay attention to your consumers.

Conclusion

Buyer sentiment is just like what we hear from friends and family. When someone gives you advice, you either accept it and try to be better, or you can disagree and choose not to follow it.

The same may be said of buyer sentiment. When you track it, you’ll probably find some things that consumers enjoy and other things that they don’t like about your business. When most people are dissatisfied with something, it’s time to think about if you should adjust what you’re doing. On the other direction, if a considerable proportion of your consumers are satisfied, it’s a strong indication that they don’t want you to change anything.

Regardless of how many clients you have, you should carefully choose which feedback you will use and which you will discard. You can’t please everyone. However, you want your buyer sentiment to be good in general. Keeping track of it, together with compelling event signals and the use of effective B2B marketing strategies, will help you get closer to your pipeline goals.

Categories
Customer Churn Signal Intelligence

10 Ways Sales Teams Can Address the Inevitable Problem of Customer Churn

In the B2B Sales Teams process, churn, also known as client attrition, is the proportion of business clients who stop using your company’s products or services after a certain amount of time has passed. It’s commonly calculated by dividing the number of clientele you lost over the course of a quarter by the total you had at the start.

This could indicate that they have discovered a higher-quality product or service than yours. So now you’ve not only lost business, but one of your competitors has gained a new one as well.

While it’s challenging to keep every single client, you must take advantage of using credible B2B sales intelligence and other methods so you can retain as many as possible. That comes in the shape of a strong customer satisfaction strategy and identifying important trigger signals that may indicate churn.

What can cause skyrocketing churn rates?

Revenue churn rate

Although revenue churn differs from customer churn, it’s still crucial to consider when studying this measure.

The quantity of income lost in a given period is referred to as revenue churn.

This doesn’t always imply that you’re losing business, but rather that you’re not making as much money from them as you formerly did.

Intervention from competitors

Every business has competition, and some clients will inevitably leave you for another. This isn’t ideal, but it happens. It’s more crucial to concentrate on why these clients are switching to your competitors.

Are they a poor fit for your company? Is it possible that something you’re doing is driving them away?

Once you’ve figured out what’s causing the problem, you’ll know which of these clients you should try to maintain and which ones will eventually depart.

Ineffective onboarding of new customers

Attrition is prevalent in various firms, especially towards the start of the B2B customer journey.

This is because many companies rarely provide an orientation program that teaches B2B clients how to utilize their products or services.

That implies that it’s up to the customer to figure out how the product or service works and how it can suit their needs.

Missing desired feature or functionality

Some clients want individualized experiences, so they’ll expect your company to develop new products to meet their wants. If you have a varied B2B consumer base, some of them may be unhappy if you launch a new product or service that doesn’t seem to meet their needs.

While this new product may appeal to the bulk of your target market, there may be a small group of businesses who believe your brand is taking a different path than they planned. This is one sort of client churn that isn’t always a negative experience. Just be sure to keep an eye on your trigger signals and churn rate to make sure it doesn’t get higher than you expected.

Company closure

This is another sort of client churn that isn’t always a negative experience.

If your company is moving towards a new path, it may be at the expense of some client attrition.

Just keep watch on your churn or turnover rate to ensure it doesn’t rise faster than you anticipated.

Brand values vs. customer values 

Some clients may not share your company’s values.

If your company prides itself on offering eco-friendly items, for example, you may encounter prospects who are unconcerned about the manufacturing process. Instead of buying “green” products, these B2B clients are more concerned with a reduced price point and a quick delivery process.

Stagnant growth

Your company will develop as it expands. As your account base grows, you recruit more staff and are able to provide more products and services to a broader audience. This type of change is beneficial to your company, but it may result in increased client attrition.

Imagine you gave a free product that you later realized companies and businesses would be ready to pay for if combined with other items. While this modification will increase revenue, you may lose clients who were only interested in the free product.

What can you do to prevent this?

10 ways Sales Teams to prevent customer churn

1. Focus on your most valuable customers

For many businesses, preventing churn requires identifying a subset of B2B clients who are most likely to cancel and focusing efforts on them. This strategy, however, is deficient.

Rather than devoting money and efforts to keeping any customers on the verge of leaving, businesses should concentrate their efforts on the most profitable business partners.

Businesses must examine the possibility that a client would respond to a re-engagement initiative by tracking compelling event signals to fuel the lead generation in their sales process, whether it be a phone call, email, social selling, or larger promotional package, in addition to concentrating their efforts towards the most profitable partners.

2. Communicate proactively

You demonstrate your commitment to helping your clients get the most out of your product or service by reaching out to them before they need it. But not just any outreach will suffice. The message or resource you send them should be directly related to how they use your product or service.

For instance, if a business signs up for your service or product and you find that they aren’t taking advantage of all of the features, you may send them a friendly nudge.

3. Create a roadmap for your new clients

Establishing a new account onboarding strategy to guide fresh clients through your product or service’s capabilities, features, and procedure is valuable. This method makes it easy to manage their expectations while also allowing you to adjust the rate at which new information is presented.

B2B customers who feel empowered to succeed with your company’s support are less likely to leave.

Therefore, you must regularly monitor your onboarding process, looking for snags or roadblocks and addressing them as early as possible.

4. Provide rewards to your customers

Give clients an incentive to stick around by providing a special offer, such as a discount or a loyalty program. This modest gesture can go a long way toward demonstrating how much you respect your existing accounts’ business.

When selecting when to disclose these incentives, rewards, or benefits, there are a few factors to note. Consider the client’s timeline: if they’re nearing the end of the contract period and you’re worried they won’t be renewing, a lower renewal price could be just the thing to persuade them to stay, for example.

5. Request comments frequently

Building a customer feedback mechanism could be as simple as sending an email or creating a survey or feedback form, depending on the business needs. Live chat is another approach to get feedback and insights about your client’s experiences with your product or service.

If your website has a live chat option, you may listen in on those chats to see any trends, FAQs, or typical bottlenecks that are keeping your clients from getting the most out of your product or service.

6. Examine churn as soon as it occurs

Churn is an inevitable component of any business, no matter how much work you put into the measures above. The objective is to leverage your churned clients (and the happy ones) to predict key trigger signals of customer contentment and dissatisfaction so you can engage with them and save the relationship before they leave.

Begin by analyzing the situation using compelling event signals. When are customers most likely to leave? Is it thirty, sixty, or ninety days after the first use of your product or service? Is it considered churn if a customer goes a specific length of time without using a good or service?

7. Determine how and when your typical customer experiences churn

Get some input after that. Are there any particular explanations why clients are abandoning your business? What were their reasons for canceling or stopping purchases? Determine why turnover is so expected.

Then, combine these B2B data to predict churn before it occurs, and reach out to at-risk clients with customized incentives and offers to re-engage them.

8. Maintain your edge

Market conditions are continuously shifting, and as new software and technologies join the market, your clients’ wants and demands will undoubtedly evolve as well.

Businesses that focus on what’s next, such as trends, technology, and product improvements, are better positioned to avoid disruption.

While it’s critical to keep your product or service cutting-edge, it’s vital to keep your client’s success and support activities current. Make a note of your competitors’ customer success initiatives to ensure they aren’t ahead of you.

Using their plan as a guide will help your company better service your accounts and retain their loyalty.

9. Maintain a high level of client service

Of course, providing exceptional customer service is a terrific B2B sales strategy to reduce churn. When attempting to resolve an issue or answer a question, your team should have the authority to solve it for your client. This may necessitate spending money to set things right with an account.

Excellent customer service is a terrific way to differentiate yourself from the competition and reduce client attrition.

10. Create a sense of belonging for your customers

B2B accounts are loyal to companies that have created a community around their products, services, and clients. This implies that your marketing team may focus on community management by connecting with accounts, such as forming a Facebook group or organizing events for loyal clients.

Conclusion

Churn has the potential to harm your business seriously, but only if you allow it. This can be accomplished by identifying compelling signals as part of your B2B sales process to learn about and better understand your customers’ needs. This can also be beneficial in the process of building a sales pipeline for your business.

Categories
Account Monitoring Compelling Event Signals Customer Churn

How Signal Intelligence Can Help You Maintain Accounts

Sales signal intelligence is most commonly associated with upper funnel activities: Finding new prospects, engaging them, and nudging them further along the sales pipeline via relevant content and insight-driven interactions.

But what a lot of sellers don’t realize is that sales intelligence can make a bigger difference when it comes to existing accounts. With most sellers focused on finding opportunities to sell to new clients, they might fail to notice opportunities to sell to their existing customer base. As existing customers are more likely to purchase again and spend more, missing such sales opportunities can drastically affect your bottom line.

“A vast majority of sellers are just not monitoring their accounts,” says Jamie Shanks, Co-founder of PipelineSignals. “But even the sellers that are monitoring their accounts, they aren’t creating a routine around it. they’re not capturing all the intelligence of their key accounts. And then they’re very fickle or very inconsistent as to when they use intelligence and how they use it.”

“And so, you’ll notice a breakdown in the chain of an individual seller not monitoring all those opportunities. And now when you multiply that by your 50, 500, 5,000 sellers, you start to recognize the domino effect caused by hundreds of thousands of accounts that are not being properly monitored. You don’t know who’s joining your accounts, who’s leaving them, how you’re interconnected with other customers, how your competitors are getting involved in those accounts—a cascading waterfall of missed opportunity.”

And that’s where we can help you.

At PipelineSignals, we use the term Compelling Events Signals to refer to digital events and insights that can help your team determine areas of opportunity and risk in your Total Addressable Market, or TAM. Setting up these Signals on LinkedIn search will allow your revenue team to spend more time on activities that have a higher likelihood of resulting in a won deal.

While Signals can create a difference in pipeline generation, it also functions as a way to keep track of what’s going on within your existing customers. Beyond simple intelligence, the insights delivered by Signals allow you to keep an eye on what’s happening within your accounts so you’re always ready to mitigate potential risks or move in on opportunities to upsell/cross-sell. And by using verified data to monitor and protect relationships at scale, your revenue is kept secure and practically insured.

Selling Without Signals: The Opportunities You Could Miss

However, it’s easy to miss these trigger Signals—they don’t exactly come with a label, after all.

That’s why it’s crucial that your revenue team knows what they should be looking for and how they should engage prospects involved in these Signals.

“Remember that people buy from people,” says Shanks. “You’re not selling to a company—you’re selling to a group of people inside a company.”

“When there are people inside those companies that may know you, like you, and have enjoyed your solutions in the past, wouldn’t you want to focus on them first?”

One example would be a person from one of your existing accounts joining a new account. On LinkedIn, it’ll reflect as a run-of-the-mill job transfer announcement. But an astute salesperson would be able to spot an opportunity here.

“If you have a customer that you’ve dealt with, and all of a sudden they’re now in another account, you’ll have a much higher likelihood of generating a relationship there than just randomly calling on other accounts,” says Amar Sheth, Sales for Life’s Partner for Customer Success.

The opportunity becomes greater when a key stakeholder is involved.

“When a decision maker joins an account, the Signal becomes much more powerful because about 70 perecent of a decision maker’s budget is generally decided upon within the first six to nine months of them joining,” explains Amar. Finding out when someone joins becomes critical for pipeline success because all budgets are essentially decided, and you just have to convince them to spend it on your product.

The Modern Seller’s Security System

Sheth thinks of Signals as an alarm system for existing accounts, protecting them from risk.

“I have a security system in my house. If something happens, I’ve got a company that’s going to monitor my house, they’re going to call the police and all that. So there’s a level of security there,” he says.

In the same way, Signals provide a level of security for your customers and your pipeline. It’s like an insurance policy for your ROI because it protects and monitors your existing relationships and the revenue you’re getting (or could stand to get) from them.

You should never forget that your competitors are doing sales moves that are similar to yours, and that they’re also connecting, scaling, changing, and are probably targeting the same accounts you’re eyeing.

“If, all of a sudden, you find out that someone from a rival company is talking to one of your prospects, that should send alarm bells off,” says Sheth. “Even worse, what if someone from your competitor actually joins your prospect account? They’ll probably be partial to their former company since they’re more familiar with it. Now, which solution do you think they’re going to be more likely to choose, yours or theirs?”

Never Miss, Always On

What sets Signals apart from other sales tools is that it goes beyond offering intelligence that only pertains to people searching for a keyword, visiting a certain website, or doing other actions.

“We’re not just providing sales intelligence,” says Sheth. “We’re also monitoring your existing accounts, so you’ll never miss potential opportunities and potential risks. That’s the value of our intelligence.”

With Signals, you’ll be able to find better opportunities, whether it’s within your existing accounts or involving your potential customers. 

You’ll never miss employees joining or leaving your prospect companies, especially during crucial times. You’ll never miss opportunities to engage. And you’ll never miss competitors talking to your accounts and the threats they pose.

You’ll never miss—and that’s powerful.