The buying journey has changed, and B2B companies must keep pace.
Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report found 53% of buyers feel companies are not adapting to their needs and are too rigid in their approach. Today, B2B buyers are seeking a B2C-like experience. This change in buyers’ expectations has significantly been influenced by the broad online accessibility to product feedback, including customer reviews on social and product reports from analysts at Gartner or Forrester and crowd sourced sites like G2 Crowd.
With these deeper insights, how buyers make purchases has evolved. B2B companies must get in front of them and evolve, too. To progress and thrive in an environment where buyers self-learn and have consumer-grade demands, organizations must elevate their Go-to-Market (GTM) strategies to meet the needs of modern buyers and stay ahead of the competition.
The key to success in this rapidly evolving environment is Revenue Acceleration, which will help you and your organization meet buyers’ needs and build an ideal buying experience. Because every day you wait, catching up to the competition only gets tougher.
What Is Revenue Acceleration?
Revenue Acceleration is a strategic approach that facilitates peak performance by optimizing all prospect engagement functions—from sales reps to inbound lead management teams—to create an ideal buying experience.
The approach includes four fundamental principles:
- Specialization
- Automation
- Experimentation
- Development
When properly embraced, Revenue Acceleration maximizes internal resources and enables targeted, function-specific interaction with customers—at scale.
Build Your Customers’ Ideal Buying Experience
How you implement Revenue Acceleration will vary based on scope, but it always includes following through on four fundamental principles.
Specialize Tasks
Sales reps doing everything at once can cause lost leads.
With a restructured sales funnel that prioritizes inbound lead management and tailored interaction, you can enhance efficiency, fix resource misallocation, and accelerate growth.
Create tailored interactions by evolving sales reps into revenue reps who are responsible for the sales motion and for becoming experts in their function. Instead of engaging all resources in every potential deal, automatically allocate resources based on buyer’s wants and needs. Use automation to gather readily available online lead information or have solutions engineers work closely with sales reps to evaluate prospects and point them to the right function if they qualify.
In an ideal scenario, unique teams manage inbound leads, automate tasks, or customize demos. Ultimately, specialization allows organizations to adapt dynamically to evolving buyer needs. These specially designed functions engage with buyers in different ways, ensuring qualified prospects reach the right function at the right time. Thus, reps avoid working with unqualified prospects, coordinating redundant processes, and missing out on nurturing other opportunities.
Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Kelli Hobbs, VP of Business Development, Valuedynamx
Automate to Add Value
Escalate your growth by automating low-value tasks to allow your team to focus on higher-value work. The High Growth Study 2021, found high-growth firms that have experienced significant expansion are more inclined (26.2% vs. 16.6%) to possess a well-developed marketing and sales automation strategy compared to their counterparts.
Using automation to refine and specialize the sales funnel is one way to add significant value and embrace a Revenue Acceleration mindset. Consider these automation tools to potentially maximize your value:
- Marketing automation
- Demo creation software
- Chatbot engagement workflows
- SMS/text engagement sequences
- Social media engagement
- In-product automation
- Prebuilt micro-demos
My additional tip? While it’s important to automate as much as possible, continue to offer buyers the option to interact with a person directly.
Experiment with Processes
Break free from the rigid approach to sales by regularly trying new approaches.
Test different product-led conversion points, experiment with value messaging, and evaluate the performance to update your processes—continually—to stay updated with the changing landscape.
A McKinsey & Company report reveals winning B2B companies are more inclined to experiment with new sales technologies and analytics capabilities. I’ve found the most opportunistic moments in the sales process for experimentation are:
- Encourage feedback on redundant steps in the sales process
- Eliminate prospects’ pain points
- Propose changes to leadership
- Implement new automated processes
Drive continuous improvement in your sales process by testing until you find your winners. But—and here’s the kicker—don’t do this siloed.
Create a clear feedback loop between the Revenue Acceleration and product team to optimize the product based on what customers demand in the field (Evan Leong, founder of Product Signals, has great insights on implementing a feedback loop in this podcast episode).
Develop Knowledge-Oriented Revenue Reps
Today’s buyers are highly educated on the product and market and want to learn something new with every brand interaction. Ensure your customer-facing team members meet buyers where they want to be met by developing sales reps into knowledge-based revenue reps.
In other words, turn your sales reps into industry experts who bring relevant insights to your buyers and can add value before requesting a signature. If you consider this specialized development a premium, it is—and will make you money. Sixty-six percent of customers are willing to pay a premium for an exceptional experience, as revealed in the Salesforce report.
This new breed of sales reps must be social media savvy and a step ahead of well-researched modern buyers. Some of today’s top sellers offer insights through Instagram and TikTok. Salesforce’s report even notes that more than half of buyers (57%) prefer engaging with companies through digital channels. Can you imagine your rep making a million-dollar sale via text or DMs? It’s entirely possible.
Read More: With AI, Sales is No Longer a Numbers Game
Accelerate With Ease
You don’t have to choose between exponential growth and creating a seamless buying experience. Do both with Revenue Acceleration. By making small—yet precise—changes to how you organize and operate, you can deliver what your prospects need when they need it while helping them understand why.
