Next Gen B2B Sales | Leveraging AI and Account Based Marketing

Alvin Toffler’s 1970 global best seller “Future Shock” described the disruptive impact of new technologies on business and society. His title is even more applicable right now for sales organisations. The combined effect of SaaS apps, big data and AI are having a profound impact on the way products and services are sold, and on sales organisations.

Advances in IT are having a dual impact. With customers, technology has empowered them like never before – arming your clients with unlimited choice and brutal price-performance transparency. Industrial age B2B sales, with reps explaining product features and performance has been made redundant. This information is now automated self-serve, via you tube, social media and blogs.

The impact of recent tech advances are also transforming sales organizations from within and hold the promise of shifting sales productivity by 2-3x. The key question facing sales leaders is how fast can you align your organization to leverage available technologies and increase efficiency and effectiveness?

Achieving break-through sales performance starts with the new role of data, and integrating marketing with sales. Rather than old-school “spray & pray” broadcast communications to create brand awareness, data-driven Account Based Marketing “ABM”, is transforming the economics of sales engines.

Targeted content-driven communications, through social media, marketing automation and AI combine to enable a highly selective, personalized dialogue with thousands of target customers at scale.  And paid outbound social media marketing can create deep brand awareness in ever narrower micro-segments across the globe. Tech-enabled marketing delivers richer, more relevant information content to far more potential customers than a sales force could ever dream of.

Managed properly, tech-enabled ABM transforms the economics of your sales pipeline. Instead of B2B field sales pushing information out to trigger leads, ABM at scale creates an inbound flow of qualified leads with much higher conversion rates. Gravity Global, the most awarded specialist B2B marketing firm globally, uses its ABM services to fuel its own phenomenal growth in the highly competitive sector. Tech-enabled ABM shifts the bottleneck in the pipeline from generating qualified leads to prioritizing and converting them.

Leveraging ABM therefore also demands a new set of skills and competencies from field sales as a second step in the process. Instead of talking benefits, reps must listen to needs. Gone are the days of “sheep-dip” product training and then “just-do-it”. Reps need to connect the dots on solutions that best fulfil a customer’s unique requirements in order to sell value. A deeper understanding of the customer’s business and processes is needed in order to ask the right questions that uncover valuable pain-points on which to construct a winning solution.

Humatica has found the impact of ABM on sales organizations to be transformational. More data analysts and automated marketing specialists are needed. And, at the same time, fewer, but more qualified sales reps. The biggest challenge is orchestrating the required new skills and competencies in management processes to realize the promise of tech-enabled ABM and breakthrough productivity improvements.