Using Intelligent Virtual Assistants with your Sales Engagement Tools Can Increase Customer Engagement and Connect Rates on Marketing and Sales Leads
In B2B and Tech, having sales and marketing teams align on core strategies like account-based marketing/sales is a requirement to ensure successful outcomes. When moving through a typical account-based marketing and selling process, these teams work together to shortlist a set of high priority target accounts, define the road ahead in terms of touch points, outreach, campaigns, all with the aim of measuring qualitative results (The impact of a campaign in terms of MQLs/SQLs won and those converted on one set of target accounts, for instance).
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For a more proactive and well-coordinated approach, sales and marketing have to identify a set of valid touch points to maneuver the buying journey of those prospects (based on their persona, buying behavior and customer profile) and ensure they run relevant outreach at the most opportune moments to help drive more results. Marketing has to step in here to help validate the high value leads from the ones that aren’t moving through the funnel, marketing needs to also work closely with sales to ensure that they feed sales with the most up to date information on prospect behavior at the individual and company level.
While this is one part of the process, some of the common challenges B2B sales and marketing teams might face when implementing ABM campaigns could include missed opportunities, taking too long to prioritize outreach to accounts with high buying signals, overlooking personalization tokens. In mid to larger sales teams, when a single sales rep is responsible for hundreds of target accounts, it is more crucial to support their processes with the help of the right tools and technology otherwise the number of instances where important parameters of a campaign are overlooked are bound to impact sales pipelines.
Sales Engagement Tools V/s Intelligent Virtual Assistants
Sales engagement tools like Outreach, Groove, Salesloft enable salespeople to automate territory wise outreach at scale while also helping prioritize accounts based on their engagement activities with the brand. So then why is it still worth it to consider using Intelligent Virtual Assistants in addition to this?
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Here’s why:
To Reduce The Number of Things That ‘’Fall Through The Cracks’’ in Sales, You Need an Autonomous Tool
Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) are built on intelligent platforms with the aim of powering high volume, routine but valuable conversations (with online visitors to your site, for instance) continuously, modern AI-powered intelligent virtual assistants can interpret conversations with humans to help drive relevant replies. Sales engagement tools are perfect for creating, setting up and automating a multi-touch cadence across multiple channels. But a sales engagement platform will not respond on behalf of a sales or account rep!
Intelligent Virtual Assistants Help Create The Ideal ‘’Surround Sound’’ Strategy
Most high value target accounts have multiple (key) buying decision makers, making the job of the sales and marketing team a tad bit more difficult. Not only do sales and marketing teams need to drive relevant campaigns at the account level, they also have to drive personalized campaigns at the individual level for all these multiple buying decision makers, and they have to do it in such a way so as to influence all of them into investing in your product at the same time.
The right number of touch points, right messaging planned at the most sensitive junctions in the buying journey is what sales and marketing teams can do with the automation capabilities at their disposal today. By sharing this part of the prospecting process with intelligent virtual assistants, sales and marketing teams can actually identify the lowest hanging fruit and reduce the number of missed opportunities more effectively.
Intelligent Virtual Assistants Can Be Trained or Programmed to Close Conversations and Schedule Meetings
To optimize use of a sales engagement tool, sales teams have to plan a relevant cadence or flow, then input relevant media (video/audio files/PPTs/One-pagers/Emails) into the system and automate the sending of this cadence at appropriate times. An email cadence takes longer to run through. When it comes to intelligent virtual assistants, workflows can be set into the system to enable the tool to respond more autonomously and instantly (email takes longer), intelligent virtual assistant workflows can also be built to help take a prospect from the lead stage to scheduling a meeting with them, for them to learn about the product through a demo.
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Conclusion – Are You Set to Use Intelligent Virtual Assistants In your Sales?
The key to driving business impact at scale within a shorter time frame today lies in augmenting the capabilities of your team with the right tools and tech, it doesn’t lie in hiring more people! Intelligent virtual assistants can be a cost-effective solution to drive shared sales, marketing and organizational goals.
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