Sales, B2B in particular, is complicated. The market usually is niche, sales cycles are long, and every client is different. That means there is no formula for guaranteed success. As many sales people would agree, a campaign that does great in one quarter may well fail in the next. But as dynamic as the process is, there are some consistent challenges that sales reps have to constantly face and overcome.
If reps don’t get a handle on these challenges they risk compromising the entire sales process. Not only do they take a toll on productivity and ROI, but they can make outreach ineffective and emails winding up in spam.
Listed below are 5 challenges along with how SalesIntel tackles them:
1. High Bounce Rates
High bounce rates on email campaigns is one of the most common pain points for sales and marketing teams that often threatens the entire sales funnel. High bounce rates are obviously linked to inaccurate emails which can occur due to one of two reasons. Either they were wrong to begin with (many list providers simply guess the emails and sell them as legit), or they became outdated (think people leaving an organization).
SalesIntel solves this problem through its rigorous data verification process where each of the emails is hand-verified by human researchers before they make their way to our database. This enables us to consistently deliver over 95% accuracy.
2. Data Decay
The problem with data accuracy is that it is not eternal. Data decays at around 30% every year and that means even if by some miracle you find a contact list provider offering 90% accuracy, you’ll still end up with a 25% bounce rate within just six months and around 40% in a year.
SalesIntel solves this problem through a two-pronged approach. First, we offer a data enrichment solution that identifies and replaces old records in your database or simply weeds them out of the system.
Secondly, we follow a 90-day re-verification cycle where every record is reverified and updated. So we just don’t provide accurate data, we maintain it as well.
3. Incomplete Data
While it may vary depending on what you sell, how niche your market is, the average ticket size, and other factors, only around 7-15% of B2B leads convert into an opportunity. This represents a significant lost revenue opportunity with for every 100 people showing interest in your product, you can sell to only around 7-15 of them.
And while there are numerous reasons for such failings, one of the key factors is under-prepared SDRs owing to the incomplete data they work with.
Consider this: One SDR gets only the name and a personal email address of a prospect while another gets their direct dial, the complete details of their organization including the technologies they use, rounds of funding raised, annual revenue, headcount, etc. Which one of the two do you think is more likely to close the deal?
The problem of incomplete data is faced on two fronts:
Incomplete Data from Webforms
Traditional wisdom dictates that people don’t like filling long forms and thus anything beyond 5-7 fields is generally avoided. But while shorter forms generate more leads, the information they provide is often inadequate for effective selling (as evident from the earlier example).
With SalesIntel, salespeople can get all the requisite data on their prospects to have a better understanding of their problems and by extension, offer better tailored solutions to convert more leads into opportunities.
By automatically enriching your inbound leads it’s easier to balance the goal of generating as many leads as possible while still capturing the data points your sales team needs.
Incomplete Data for a Particular Prospect
There are instances where people provide their personal email in a webform leaving sales reps clueless about which organization they belong to, which kind of solution they might need and by extension, fail to attach a value to that account.
SalesIntel solves this problem by mapping personal email addresses to their professional email address, and thus enables sales reps to acquire all the information they need for effective prospecting.
For instance, if you only have the name and personal email of a prospect, SalesIntel can identify where they work, the company’s technographic, firmographic, intent data, and much more.
4. Data Expansion
Data is the new currency in sales; the more you have it, the more opportunities you can generate. There are two particular instances where salespeople have to look beyond their database:
Expanding Data on Buying Center
As per a Harvard Business Review study, a typical B2B buying center consists of 6.8 people. That means even if you have a lead, they can’t decide on their own. As a result, it is imperative that you need more points of contact to influence the entire buying center.
SalesIntel offers exactly that. If you have a lead, you can map and reach out to the entire buying center by leveraging our vast human-verified database. If you want to contact a specific prospect who is not in our database, our research-on-demand service allows you to request specific contacts (or even companies) and have our researchers find it for you.
Researching to backfill incomplete datasets or finding people in a particular buying center eats up a significant amount of time that sales reps could use on revenue-generating tasks.
Expanding Data on New Markets
When expanding to new markets or industries, businesses need to build an entirely new database, which is not only time and resource intensive but also demands significant investment. Whether you are a foreign business expanding to the US or a local business expanding to another state or product category, you need vast amounts of data on your new potential customers.
With SalesIntel, you get the best business database at a fraction of the cost it would take to build it in-house. Consider it data-as-a-service. Much like you use AWS for cloud storage, use SalesIntel for all of your data needs.
5. Compliance
Last but not least, with all the buzz around data privacy and related laws like GDPR and CCPA, sales reps are often nervous about running campaigns without the fear of reprisal.
With SalesIntel, you do not have to worry on that front. First, we are 100% GDPR and CCPA compliant. Secondly, we can identify and filter contacts from restricted categories as well as apply suppression lists to save you from accidentally sending them emails.
Overall, SalesIntel is a product built by salespeople for salespeople. We understand the intricacies of engaging a client over multiple touchpoints spanning weeks or months and the role data plays in the entire process. That’s why we have built a solution to reduce friction and increase efficiency that ultimately reflects in improved ROI. Schedule a demo now to get started.
