Jeffrey Ha, Rev Chief Go-to-Market Officer, explains to sales leaders: Traditional firmographics in sales technology solutions are being pushed aside for exegraphics and Artificial Intelligence
Rev, the AI-powered Sales Development Platform that helps B2B companies find their next best customer, today issued commentary from Jeffrey Ha, Chief Go-to-Market Officer at Rev, speaking to sales leaders about how the traditional sales approach is not enough and how GPS-like technology solution for sales prospecting is a game changer.
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What if There Were Google Maps for Sales Teams?
Just as artificial intelligence (AI) and GPS technology can help a driver navigate through traffic to a destination, what if there was a technology solution that could help sales organizations find the most efficient route possible to new customers and predictable revenue?
What we know is that sales and marketing organizations are wasting time and money looking for qualified leads:
- ~ 40% of research and outbound time is wasted
- ~ 65% of “five star” opportunities are missed
- Up to 66% of leads are low-fit and clog the funnel
Having a GPS-like technology solution would be a game changer for the world of sales prospecting. The secret is that some organizations are already benefiting from it.
If this sounds like an outlandish claim, consider the recent marketing advances in the B2C space. Who among us has not been wowed—unsettled even—by the highly targeted “you might also like” recommendations of Netflix or Amazon? The power of AI, algorithms and psychographics to target consumers in highly granular ways is a universe apart from the relatively blunt instruments (age, gender, income, etc.) of demographics.
Many B2C brands have already benefited from this intelligent targeting. And now B2B is finally catching up. In the sales world, a key advancement is what’s called exegraphics—the characteristics that define how companies do what they do. To truly understand exegraphics, you need a way to review enormous amounts of data. AI is this tool. When you tap the power of AI to create exegraphic roadmaps, magic happens. Exegraphics change everything.
Why the Traditional Sales Approach is Not Enough
The perennial challenge facing sales organizations is how to find their next best customer. Traditionally, sales development reps and marketers generate conversions and revenue by targeting prospects that look like their best customers.
For example, if your best customers are industrial equipment manufacturers, the typical approach is to go find more industrial equipment manufacturers. To do this, sales reps and marketers rely on firmographics—broad-brush filters such as industry, company size and number of employees. But firmographics are to organizations what demographics are to people. At best, they produce only superficial descriptions of potential customers.
Firmographics ignore numerous other characteristics about the target company. For instance, two companies in the same industry or of the same size may differ widely in important ways. Their strategies may have little in common. One may lean into new technologies, while the other may be a late adopter of the latest and greatest tools. They may even be separated by recent developments, such as a new CEO, a funding round or recent layoffs.
The result: As sales teams look for customers that match their ideal customer profile (ICP), firmographics steer them to prospects that are poor matches. This in turn leads to wasted time and a sales funnel clogged with leads that will rarely convert to customers. To make matters worse, once a low-fit lead enters a sales funnel, they tend to be recycled for years without anyone questioning the quality of the lead.
Bottom line: Firmographics are not enough.
Exegraphics, the Game Changer
Exegraphics, on the other hand, go far deeper than firmographics. They go far beyond what prospecting teams can normally see by identifying the deep signals that help you hone in on the best targets for your product or service.
Let’s say a cloud-based software company wants to sell their product to financial institutions. Traditionally, to determine if the financial institution needs their product, the company’s prospecting team would rely on firmographic data—such as the number of employees and look for the presence of an IT department. But if they make this data the primary factor in determining the financial institution’s need for cloud-based software, their sales efforts will likely meet with limited success.
By contrast, exegraphic data is capable of extracting key nuances, such as the financial institution’s track record of adopting newer software, the relative size of their software workforce compared to their peers and whether or not their employees have experience with cloud-based software solutions.
Mining this kind of data would be easy if it resided in convenient repositories online. But the reality is exegraphic and other data is scattered across the Internet like breadcrumbs. The key to synthesizing it is AI, which makes for a customer profile that’s smarter, data driven and dynamically updatable as new data is uncovered. Call it an intelligent customer profile—or even an artificially intelligent customer profile (aiCP). It enables you to uncover the highest-quality targets at scale.
The difference between firmographics and exegraphics is analogous to how you get your vision tested at the optometrist’s. With firmographics, no matter how hard you squint, the universe of potential customers looks blurry, and you’re forced to rely on guesswork. But with AI-powered exegraphics, as the optometrist adds more powerful lenses, the customer landscape comes into crystal clear view.
There’s virtually no limit to the number of exegraphic “lenses” you can use to help uncover company characteristics. Early adoption, growth, tech orientation, interdepartmental breakdowns—you name it, you can add a lens for it. And because an aiCP is dynamically updated with fresh data, it can “learn” over time. This makes an aiCP much more useful than the traditional ICP, which usually consists of bullet points on a PowerPoint deck.
Goodbye, Guesswork
Not very long ago, the idea that your phone could serve as a real-time mapping device seemed like science fiction. Yet, today no one gives this revolutionary technology a second thought.
Customer targeting using AI with exegraphics is no less revolutionary. It’s at least twice as effective—and can be up to 20 times as effective—as firmographic data alone in finding better-fit customers. The time for B2B brands to take advantage of the intelligent targeting power of AI-powered exegraphics is now. The most efficient route to new customers and predictable revenue is yours for the taking. With a Google Maps for your sales teams, you’ll never have to rely on guesswork again.
