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Trends and Forces in B2B Sales A 2016 Sales Technology Guide

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Trends and Forces in B2B SalesA 2016 Sales Technology Guide

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More data is not necessarily a good thing.

The key is having the right data about

the right buyers.

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Forward

1 Introduction

2 2016 Sales Technology Watchlist 5 Lead Generation 8 Data Cleansing & Validation 13 Sales Intelligence 16 Email Outreach 19 Content & Presentations 21 Sales Management 24 Business Intelligence, Analytics & Insights

27 The Changing Face of Sales 28 A New Type of Buyer 29 A New Way to Look At Your Audience 32 A New Sales Rep

34 Trends Driving B2B Revenue 35 Increased Marketing and Sales Collaboration 37 Account Based Marketing 39 B2C Tactics to B2B Models 41 Highly-Targeted Outbound Prospecting 43 Data Integration

44 Conclusion 46 Industry Prediction

Contents

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Four years ago I attended a sales conference in downtown San Francisco. As the recent co-founder of a data-driven outbound sales startup, I wanted to learn as much as I could about the technology my buyers were using.

I asked everyone I met the same question: “What’s the one piece of technology you can’t live without?”

In 2011, the answers were unanimous: “CRM,” they’d say.

I’ve asked the same question to sales leaders every year since, but there is no longer a consensus. “CRM” rarely comes up in conversation. Why? Because Customer Relationship Management software has become ubiquitous. It’s essential. It’s a given.

Instead, the tools sales leaders report making the greatest impact on their sales process are those that feed data into their now-taken-for-granted CRM. Some say the one tool they can’t function without is email automation, for others it’s a lead generation solution. For others still, it’s not even a sales solution that is making the biggest impact on their processes, but a marketing technology.

Every year the sales stack expands, and the number of technologies arriving in the open market grows. Even for experts in the space it has become nearly impossible to keep up. So, how is the sales landscape changing in 2016?

To build a roadmap for your sales process, you need to know what’s over the next hill…

– Prayag Narula, CEO, LeadGenius

Forward

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Many B2B organizations struggle to make sense of all the sales technology tools at their disposal. We believe sales organizations should approach technology as an integrated stack with a strategic adoption plan.

Each tool added to your sales stack should improve the volume and quality of customer data at your team’s disposal.

Without quality customer data, adoption of new technology and new processes will not yield fruit.

For Whom Is This Book Written?

If you’re a sales leader, we’re helping you look ahead to better understand which B2B sales technologies will impact your organization most in the coming year.

If you’re just starting your sales career, this guide will help you understand why specific sales tools exist, and how they impact certain trends.

What’s Covered In This Book?

This book has three parts. In the first section, we cover technology that is driving change for B2B sales teams in 2016. We then describe who is directly affected by these changes: individual buyers, the buying audience, and sales representatives. We conclude with an overview of how sales teams can adapt to the technological changes taking place in their industry.

Introduction

1

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| Sales Watchlist 2 |

The 2016 Sales Technology Watchlist

Lead Generation

Data Cleansing

Sales Intelligence

Content & Presentations

Sales Management

Business Intelligence

Email Outreach

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| Sales Watchlist 3 |

By nature, most sales tools are standalone products that support one specific task. Oftentimes a minor gain in one area can create a major complication in another.

Our technology watchlist is intended to be simple and straightforward. LeadGenius’ 2016 Sales Technology Guide is a look at the types of solutions that gained the most momentum in the past year, and will continue to do so throughout 2016 and onwards.

78% of companies report that they experienced email deliverability

issues in the last 12 months.1 83% of companies struggle to link

customer information across internal channels.2

The 2016 Sales Technology Watchlist

The driving force behind the proliferation of sales technology is the growing importance of data quality.

Lead GenerationData

Cleansing & Validation

Sales Intelligence Email Outreach

Content & Presentations Sales Management

Business Intelligence, Analytics & Insights

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| Sales Watchlist 4 |

We have 8-11 stages from capturing data to re-engaging a lead on the phone or via email.

At each stage technology makes my team’s life easier and means we can scale much quicker than manual management. We really use sales technology to enhance the personal relationships we make with people.

- Kris Tait, VP of Business Development, Croud

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11Lead Generation

Leaders in the space: Data.com, Zoominfo, Radius, Hoovers

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| Sales Watchlist 6 |

Quality trumps quantity

The oldest and most familiar lead generation solutions in the market are list brokers. List brokers grew out of the yellow pages and offer an endless stream of leads for cold calling and email blasting. Higher volume, lower-quality.

Most list brokers cobble together customer data from a variety of sources and sell it like fruit at the grocery store. A pound of bananas costs $0.55. There is no price variation for bright green bananas, even-hued yellows, or the spotted browns.

However, the difference between buying leads from a list broker and fruit from the grocer is that with leads you must reach into the pile blind. Only after you run the data through your sales funnel do you find out exactly what you bought.

Commoditizing leads creates consistency for the list broker, but not for the buyer. Like fruit, leads have a shelf life and vary widely in quality.

The next generation of lead providers are not brokers but builders.

New lead generation solutions acquire real-time customer data for a company’s target audiences. New lead generation solutions are flexible, integrated with a sales team’s existing software, and continuously improve the quality of data that feed into a sales team’s CRM.

Leads are no longer a commodity. They are a constantly shifting reflection of a real buyer—a business’ ideal customer. Static data simply won’t cut it anymore.

What the next year holds— Lead Generation gets predictive

Artificial Intelligence is entering the lead generation space. When it comes to lead generation, self-learning algorithms that automate the process of sourcing and scoring leads will become the norm. New lead generation tools will accurately predict which prospects make the best opportunities, as well as how and where to find similar leads.

Using advanced data analytics and machine learning, sales and marketing software

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| Sales Watchlist 7 |

will expose entirely new business opportunities and predict how much revenue those opportunities hold—as well as the size and scope of the resources needed to tap into them.

What this means for your team— Less prospecting, more selling

Sales technology is evolving fast, but lead generation solutions are evolving faster. Sales teams must run to keep up.

As time spent entering and checking data goes down, time spent selling should go up.

In the next year, lead generation solutions will move away from

the standard, towards fresher data, accessible in real time. The

average B2B sales and marketing database decays at over 3%

per month—across all industries.3

This time can be used to get more out of existing leads or working a larger number of leads.

Efficiency is only gained if your team’s time surplus is redirected to the right activities.

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22Data Cleansing

& ValidationLeaders in the space:

Experian, Kickbox.io, Brightverify, Ringlead

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| Sales Watchlist 9 |

How the space is evolving— From validation to enrichment

Nearly all companies have a central repository for storing customer data and keeping track of sales interactions—typically a CRM. However, most companies struggle to keep that database up-to-date.

The ability to quantify and report on the entire customer journey is critical but the sheer quantity of interactions and potential customers in a market segment makes this increasingly difficult. Naturally, the bigger the database, the bigger the problem. Data cleaning technology emerged as a solution to this problem.

The 2015 Experian Data Quality Benchmark Report

revealed that on average, U.S. businesses believe

32% of their data is inaccurate—up from 25% in

2014.4 Furthermore, a study of 61 million customer

records by NetProspex reveals that 84% of marketing

databases are barely functional. 88% of those same

customer records lack basic data such as industry,

revenue and employee fields.17

What the next year holds—Activity, Attribution, and Synchronization

Data quality not only sits at the center of today’s most important B2B sales and marketing solutions, it flows through it. For every tool in the stack, no matter how expensive, the most important thing to consider is how the tool impacts the overall health of a CRM.

Prospect data is the lifeblood of the sales organization, and keeping it clean is a huge priority.

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FREE DATABASE DECAY CALCULATOR

High bounce rates? Not sure? Find out the status of your B2B data for free.

Learn More

? ??

EMAIL BOUNCE

!

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| Sales Watchlist 11 |

Data quality is particularly relevant as more and more organizations move their sales teams towards outbound lead development.

In 2015, 78% of companies reported email deliverability issues.4

Rigorous data validation ensures that the right people get the right message at the right time.

From poor email deliverability rates to IPs being blacklisted, bad data can wreak havoc on your sales process.

What this means for your team— More data, more problems

Think of data as the mortar that holds your stack in place. Maintaining the health of your data is not a one time event. It needs to happen at regular intervals.

Using tools to clean your data is one solution, but your sales teams must also take responsibility for data quality as potential buyers move through your funnel.

To start, set data entry rules for everyone with access to the CRM system. Setting mandatory validation fields in your CRM ensures that all new data will follow a standard format.

Investing only in data from trustworthy vendors with built-in data validation can also mitigate the risk of poor quality data. High-performance sales teams have a dedicated sales operations position in charge of keeping their technology, tools, and data fine-tuned.

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| Sales Watchlist 12 |

Sales technology has profoundly changed the way we look at acquiring prospects, managing the pipeline and closing sales. Today we are far away from the “GlenGarry GlenRoss” type of sales process management.

- VP of Marketing, Sales, & Communication, Zubie

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33Sales Intelligence

Leaders in the space: InsideView, Datanyze, Salesloft, Infer

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| Sales Watchlist 14 |

How the space is evolving— Automation of manual tasks

Sales teams want to automate. Buyers demand a personal touch. Automation is easy, but maintaining the human touch at scale is hard.

A the top of the funnel, sales reps and SDRs need more firmographic data for initial qualification. In the middle of the funnel, more demographic data allows reps to establish rapport and address a potential customer’s specific pain points. At the bottom, company information help reps close deals. Sales intelligence emerged in response to the need for a higher volume of accurate data.

With sales intelligence, reps have access to an abundance of new data sources, such as social media activity and digital behavior analysis, that help predict purchase intent—even before a first touch.

In the same way that lead generation is embracing dynamic insights, sales intelligence is incorporating elements of predictive marketing and programmatic algorithms to deliver insights to sales reps throughout the buying cycle.

What the next year holds—Supercharged DIY

Sales intelligence tools make teams more effective, but they don’t necessarily make for less work. Sales teams must be skilled at knowing how and when to use a specific sales intelligence solution.

What this means for your team—Process comes first

More data is not necessarily a good thing. The key is having the right data about the right buyers. Sales intelligence makes it easier to access buyer insights, but it doesn’t necessarily help identify which insights move the needle when it comes to increasing sales velocity—in other words, how efficiently qualified buyers are moving through your pipeline and converting into revenue.

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| Sales Watchlist 15 |

Sales teams need to ask themselves what data is actually usable. Many sales intelligence tools are only useful in specific situations. These tools will not work without a process in place that allows for actionable evaluation.

To identify which buying signals make an impact on your sales cycle, start with your highest performing accounts, and identify what they have in common.

This approach can help pinpoint the types of data your team should invest in. Having clearly defined, data-driven buyer personas is the key ingredient to making sales intelligence solutions work in your favor.

[Sales Velocity = Number of Leads x Win Rate (%) x Average Deal Size / Average Sales Cycle]

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44Email Outreach

Leaders in the space: ToutApp, Yesware, Outreach.io, Quickmail

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| Sales Watchlist 17 |

How the space is evolving—Email still reigns

Despite the fact that buyers can be reached through a multitude of channels, email still remains the preferred method of communication for B2B sales. Due to its incredibly low cost (fractions of a penny per send) and ease of use, nearly every high-growth sales team has made email the go-to first touch activity in a sales cycle.

With today’s email tools, sales reps are more empowered to reach out to their prospects, understand the net result of their actions, and prioritize their day-to-day workflow.

Email tools allow sales reps and SDRs to play an active role in segmentation. Once under the sole ownership of marketing, email has evolved into a highly dynamic and personal sales channel. Sales reps can customize and send entire sequences directly to highly-targeted audience segments. And every open, click, and reply is automatically logged into your CRM.

What the next year holds—Personalization at scale

Forrester Research uncovered that the most anticipated email marketing innovations include microsegment targeting, open time personalization, in-email transactions, and email-enabled video [5]. Most new inbox innovations are designed to fill technical gaps, but data quality is taking email a step further.

Timeliness and customized data will keep email as the most powerful selling tool on the market. To remain relevant, email technology must not only track and analyze data but also help sales reps use data to make better decisions.

What this means for your team—Lead activity is more important than ever

On the one hand, prospects indicate that they want to hear from sales reps over email, yet they want fewer unsolicited emails and more personalized messages.

To scale your email outreach, you need to have a system in place: standardized

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| Sales Watchlist 18 |

templates with merge fields, workflows and sequences that can be cloned, the right reporting, synchronization with your CRM and marketing automation databases.

Today’s sales teams are challenged with sending tens of thousands of emails while maintaining a high standard of customization in each message. The more specific, accurate merge fields available, the greater the capacity for personalization. The more personalized an email, the greater the likelihood of a positive response.

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55Content &

PresentationsLeaders in the space:

Box, Clearslide, Evernote, join.me

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| Sales Watchlist 20 |

How the space is evolving—Marketing and sales alignment

The role of content and presentation software is shifting away from simple storage solutions and joining the industry-wide trend of personalization.

Every piece of content now has an intended audience and a desired action. The goal of each blog post, ebook, case study, deck, and whitepaper is to move prospects further down the funnel, leaving them more informed as they approach the sale.

What the next year holds—The right content at the right time

In 2016, more unique forms of outbound expression will come to the forefront. Tried and true “net” designs aren’t catching as many inbound leads as they used to. Content and its delivery methods will go on the offensive in 2016.

What this means for your team—Real Sales Cycles and Increased Velocity

Relatability to your prospect’s pain points, combined with timeliness of messaging allow your reps to become what the modern market desires from a B2B sales reps: an expert.

For a lot of companies, this means encouraging sales reps to write blog articles, create data sheets, and post on social media, and for others it means hiring a dedicated content marketer to work alongside sales. In either case, sales teams must be fluent in the materials at their disposal.

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66Sales Management

Leaders in the space: Xactly, InsideSales, BaseCRM, Ambition

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| Sales Watchlist 22 |

How the space is evolving—Consistency is key

The right sales management technology is essential for growing sales organizations. Sales management solutions tackle sales needs beyond pipeline management, such as recruiting, training, compensation, contracts, and gamification.

What the next year holds—True predictability

As interactions between buyers and sellers occur through an increasing array of channels and devices, sales management solutions have evolved to keep teams and processes connected.

Now that all activity is centralized, pipeline management and revenue predictability will become the norm. Every input should equate to realized outputs, making the lives of sales reps easier, and allowing VPs to sleep easier at night.

What this means for your team— The data-fluent sales leader

Sales leaders no longer manage a squad of head hunters and closers. High-performance sales leaders must build multi-functional teams capable of not only identifying new prospects but also developing, qualifying, analyzing, both new markets as well as strategic initiatives.

At their core, modern sales reps need to think like marketers, act like enterprise reps, and feel like customer support.

Modern B2B sales leaders need to behave like VCs. Pragmatism and ROI are their bread and butter.

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| Sales Watchlist 23 |

Imagine being able to call someone right as they’re clicking through your portfolio or watching a presentation. It’s the best time for a cold-call. It makes it seem like you have impeccable timing, when, in actuality, you’ve just got impeccable software.

- Juston Smith, Lead Developer, Spectacle Marketing

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77Business Intelligence, Analytics & Insights

Leaders in the space: Domo, Tableau, Looker, Insightsquared

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| Sales Watchlist 25 |

How the space is evolving— Synchronization across platforms

As the size of sales and marketing databases grow, so too does the need for more complex data analysis. IT teams and external consultancies once analyzed a company’s customer data.

With the introduction of business intelligence tools, sales teams now have access to insights that give them a deeper understanding of their activity’s impact.

What the next year holds— Predictability is king

Sales organizations are using business intelligence tools to understand buyer behavior, expand into markets and accounts that are highly likely to convert, reach customers with relevant messages, and build more accurate forecasts.

Data visualization and business intelligence tools help shorten the feedback loop between every stage of the buying cycle.

What this means for your team— Turning insights into actions

Every tool in the sales universe offers reporting of some type. The challenge is to gather those insights in the same place and make sense of them.

This means having a central repository for sales data that not only gives you a snapshot of where you are today, but a panoramic view of your sales efforts over time.

The true goal of business intelligence is to project where you will be this time next year. And, the year after that.

Sales professionals need to be more data-fluent, but they’re never going to be data scientists. Visualization and intelligence tools help the non-tech savvy make large chunks of data understandable, digestible, and actionable. Every report must be tied to an action.

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| Sales Watchlist 26 |

STEP 1: Find your leads

STEP 2: Make sure their contact information is correct

STEP 3: Fine-tune your messaging

STEP 4: Reach out to your leads via email

STEP 5: Pitch your value

STEP 6: Manage your processes

STEP 7: Measure your performance

Steps to Leveraging Tools

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| Changing Face of Sales 27 |

The Changing Face of Sales

A New B2B Buyer

A New B2B Audience

A New Sales Rep

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| Changing Face of Sales 28 |

The Changing Face of Sales

The evolution of B2B sales technology is a chicken-and-the-egg discussion. The structure of the modern sales organization is shaped by the evolving characteristics of the B2B buying audience, and vice versa. In this section, we focus on the ‘what,’ rather than the ‘why.’

Technology innovation is driving three major shifts in B2B sales:• a new B2B buyer• a new way to look at your B2B audience• a new sales rep

These three shifts are defining a new era of sales. Failure to acknowledge and adapt to these shifts can mean disrupted performance and loss of revenue in your sales organization. Let’s take a look.

A New B2B Buyer

Increased buyer connectivity drives major shifts in sales behavior, but a large gap still separates the B2B buying experience from buyers’ expectations.

In an article published by First Round Review in 2015, data science expert Monica Rogati names this new generation of connected buyers data natives. She conjectures that data native buyers demand greater personalization across all experiences, because they have grown up with rich data insights at their fingertips.

A data native is someone who expects their world to not just

be digital, but to be smart and to adjust immediately to their

taste and habits. For example, a magazine should not only

be digital and interactive—it should be personalized. It should

tell you what you need to know based on your interests,

location, preferences. The expectations have shifted.8

— Monica Rogati, Data Science Advisor

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| Changing Face of Sales 29 |

Using sales technology has given me the ability to be

considered a partner to my customers in an industry

that is fast-paced and easily commoditized. Business

and buyer-specific intelligence gives me the ability to

plan for sales calls that provide considerable value.

–Lauren Russ, Principal, Connect Communications

A 2015 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report, collated by Demandbase and DemandGen Report, found that an overwhelming majority of B2B buyers (86%) are influenced in purchase decisions by vendor-focused content, such as case studies and product data sheets.

Data native buyers want every touch point from both marketing and sales to be designed specifically for them.

Buyers are asking sales teams to deliver sales interactions that meet their immediate, individual needs.

A New Way to Look at Your B2B Audience

The individual B2B buyer is a single point in an increasingly complex audience matrix. To accommodate a new generation of data native buyers, sales organizations must also adjust their approach to target audience building.

The traditional method for building target audiences is fundamentally flawed; it relies on insufficient and inadequate CRM data, faulty assumptions based on intuition–not insight–and a sluggish feedback loop across the funnel. Despite advancements in areas like lead scoring and nurturing, many tools are still largely one-dimensional.

As a result, sales reps aren’t delivering the highly targeted messages that today’s data native buyers demand. Buyers expect personalization such as geo-targeted ads and emails which address them by name. Basic lead data simply cannot stand on its own.

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| Changing Face of Sales 30 |

In the last two years, sales and marketing leaders have more than doubled their visibility into customers, from 18 to 43%. The same study also found that more than half of marketing and sales organizations frequently conduct demographic and behavioral segmentation studies.9

Most B2B sales organization are aware of this trend, but have yet to act. The Teradata 2015 Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey recently uncovered that 92% of marketing and sales leaders list individualized prospecting as a top priority.

This means that sales and marketing leaders know they need to tap into data-driven strategies to build further value and connections with their prospects.

This practice means that the majority of sales leaders use persona based data to develop segmentation strategies. This presents a problem: data only indicates consumption of content, not necessarily a tendency to buy.

In a case study conducted by TOPO, marketing optimization platform LeadMD discovered that lead scores based on purely behavioral data predicted only 2% of the variance in amount purchased, where psychological modeling increased the predictability to 82%.20 LeadMD uses psychological profiling to design a unique customer experience for every audience segment.

When a key decision maker is identified, they should be routed to the sales rep who specializes in that buyer profile.

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| Sales Watchlist 31 |

DATA ANALYSIS FOR YOUR GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY

Get an accurate definition of your target market with LeadGenius.

Learn More

RESEARCH

DEFINE

TARGET

CUSTOM LEADS AT SCALE

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| Changing Face of Sales 32 |

Prospecting Sales Development Reps

Account Executives

Qualification

Demo

Close

A New Sales Rep

Buyers demand customization. Technology enables this customization. To continue momentum, sales teams must deliver on the promise of a customized and personalized sales experience.

The answer for many high-performance teams is to distribute labor. Sales development reps at the top of the funnel for prospecting and qualification, sales reps and account executives at the bottom for closing deals.

Distribution of labor enables specialization, greater efficiency in the sales process itself, and more personal experience for the B2B buyer.

Sales development is quickly becoming a vital role within sales organizations, despite the fact that 75% of sales development reps have less than one year of work experience.10 SDRs specialize in researching buyers, qualifying leads, and making the first touch, while account executives focus on closing qualified prospects.

Many of the leading sales technology trends such as data service innovation, content development, curation, and predictive lead scoring, are closely tied to the responsibilities sales development reps are taking on. It’s no coincidence that sales development and sales technology are growing at a similar pace.

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| Changing Face of Sales 33 |

Prioritizes customer journeys

Specializes in first touch

Rather than hiring inside sales reps to cold call their way through massive lead lists, a growing number of B2B companies are applying a more strategic approach to sales development.

The psychological modeling approach encourages SDRs to design a customer journey for a specific buyer persona.

Today’s sales reps are adaptive; they’re agile and comfortable with risk, they’re focused on the buyer journey. And they’re tech-savvy.

The market now demands sales organizations to prioritize the customer journey over call volume.

The Sales Development Rep

Prospects and qualifies a lead

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| Trends Driving Revenue 34 |

Trends Driving B2B Revenue

Increased Sales & Marketing

Collaboration

Account-Based Marketing

Data Integration

Highly-Targeted Outbound

Prospecting

B2C Tactics to B2B Models

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| Trends Driving Revenue 35 |

1%

Other

TREND #1

Increased Sales & Marketing Collaboration

Where the sales technology space is growing, the marketing technology space is exploding. The lines that separate sales and marketing functions are blurring. According to marketing analyst Scott Brinker, the martech landscape now contains nearly 2,000 vendors.16

As new technology solutions expand sales and marketing capabilities, CMOs and CSOs are being held accountable for a greater portion of the revenue pie. Collaboration is essential to achieve shared goals.

Many new technologies make it easier for sales and marketing to collaborate. However, new technologies also produce new tensions.

Imagine a company that uses inbound lead generation as its primary demand generation method, and has no sales development process in place. The marketing team fulfills the

How Has Digital Marketing’s Growth Changed Your Team’s Responsibilities?

Greater Rev. Growth

Responsibility

53%52%

43%

38% 38%

27%

Greater Need for Data/Analytics Personnel

Greater Ownership

of Customer-Facing Teams/

Channels

Greater Customer

Service Role

Greater Technology

Budget

Greater Ownership of Internal Functions Alignment

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| Trends Driving Revenue 36 |

In the technology era, sales and marketing collaboration has come to mean more than aligning goals; sales and marketing also depend on aligned technology strategies.

B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing

teams around the right processes and technologies

has cost them upwards of 10% or more of revenue

per year, or $100 million for a billion-dollar company,

according to IDC [15].

— Amanda Batista, Senior Manager, Demand Gen Programs, Oracle Marketing Cloud

lead volume quota, but account executives are frustrated by the poor fit of the leads they’re calling.

In this example, the marketing team has invested in digital marketing solutions to create and distribute lead generation content, but the sales team hasn’t evolved their selling process to this strategy. Until the sales team leverages a lead enrichment or email outreach solution, sales will be perpetually frustrated by marketing.

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| Trends Driving Revenue 37 |

TREND #2

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing is a sales tactic in marketers’ clothing.

An account-based marketing strategy is similar to what is traditionally called enterprise sales. The primary difference is that an account-based strategy can be used to target a company of any size.

Instead of messaging only to decision makers within a company, sales and marketing work together to simultaneously target multiple decision makers with different roles and responsibilities.

Account-based marketing has become popular in the last two years, in large part because technology now automates the process of decision maker identification.

With an account-based approach, every buyer should feel that the sales process is customized specifically for them.

Lead enrichment, data validation, and sales intelligence have become crucial technology categories for account-based marketing.

In its simplest form:

Identify the accounts that matter the most

to your business

Market to those accounts

Measure the results by accounts

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| Trends Driving Revenue 38 |

of companies are calling ABM a B2B marketing

must-have (SiriusDecisions)

92% 60% 52%of marketers are planning

to invest in technology for ABM (SiriusDecisions)

of marketers have ABM pilot programs in place

(SiriusDecisions)

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| Trends Driving Revenue 39 |

TREND #3

B2C Tactics to B2B Models

Broader than account-based marketing but with a similar objective is a new type of selling labelled business-to-consumer-to-business (B2C2B). Favored by companies like Expensify and LinkedIn, this approach is a growing trend that takes influencer selling to a new level.

The B2C2B approach works when a company successfully acquires a consumer customer base, then expands upstream to capture the attention of business clients. In some cases, such as Dropbox, consumer companies launch B2B solutions to expand their reach across a broader customer base.

Then the whole company

Then teams

Acquire Individuals

New Customer Acquisition Channels Mobile Apps Open Source Self Sign Up

B2C2B Companies

While the B2C2B model doesn’t work for every business, some of its tenets can serve as a guide for B2B sales reps navigating the confusing digital landscape. The B2C2B approach is effective because its practitioners know exactly which customers are most likely to convert, as well as which behaviors they’re most likely to practice–they already have this data on record.

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| Trends Driving Revenue 40 |

Dabbling in the B2C2B model requires adoption of email outreach and content presentation solutions.

Because customers are already familiar with your brand, you have to reach them with targeted, relevant messaging.

The idea that B2B sales can and should borrow tactics from consumer sales is a new concept for a lot of B2B sales teams. This notion hinges on the idea that business buyers want to be treated as individuals as much as consumers do.

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| Trends Driving Revenue 41 |

TREND #4

Highly-Targeted Outbound Prospecting

When strategically incorporated into the buying process, new buying signals can serve as powerful targeting tools. Informed outbound prospecting differs from traditional prospecting in the discovery process.

Traditional outbound prospecting usually involves nothing more than a lead list with names and phone numbers, and a headset. With informed outbound prospecting, buyer insights enter the conversation—before the discovery call has even happened.

Data validation and sales intelligence tools can augment the process with increased data accuracy and richer insights. Lead generation technology can also enhance the process with automated lead enrichment.

However, data is only the first step in an informed outbound approach; the outreach mechanism is equally important.

To earn a high response rate from an informed outbound campaign, reps have to deliver dynamic messages (i.e. emails that adjust content to fit prospect), or reach prospects through a channel they’re not likely to ignore, such as a social network.

Thanks to innovation in the outreach space, sales reps are able to send batch emails that look and sound like personal messages.

Despite increasing adoption of new sales outreach channels for informed outbound prospecting such as LinkedIn, email is still thriving. With the highest consistent response rate of all the sales communication methods, email is a much better place to focus informed outbound campaigns than newer channels, such as LinkedIn.

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| Trends Driving Revenue 42 |

Perc

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(e.g

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| Trends Driving Revenue 43 |

TREND #5

Data Integration

When building an advanced technology stack, it’s crucial to make sure all the technology vendors in a sales stack play nicely together. Data integration keeps all your sales technology on a first name basis. It also keeps the first names, last names, and other data points of prospects and clients consistent across all tools.

Why is data integration such a big deal? Every technology solution stores data differently. For example, four different technology solutions create four silos of customer data. Making sure all technology integrates well can help sales reps avoid the process of pulling data separately from each silo every time they need information about a key account or contact.

No matter what technology tools a sales team invests in, it’s important to make sure all the tools can speak the same data language.

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How much time did you and your team spend in the past year researching, building, massaging, and maintaining your sales stack? The answer for most B2B sales teams is “a lot.”

What if you had that time back? What if that time was spent selling?

Talk of “stacks” dominates B2B sales conversations, however, many people seem to miss the point: stacks are an imperfect means to an end. People, data, and technology are piling up because here is no true end-to-end sales solution on the market. This is a problem. More technology is not the answer for most sales organizations.

2016 will be the year sales leaders consolidate and simplify large chunks of their stack. Adding one-off technologies to the sales process is unsustainable.

2016 will be the year high performance sales teams make gains by simplifying their stacks rather than by expanding them.

For sales leaders, reps, and SDRs alike, the goal for 2016 should be to know the B2B technology landscape, set strategy, pick the right tools—tools that will grow with your business—and get back to selling.

Conclusion

44

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There’s one feature of sales technology that I see becoming more and more prevalent across the industry: A.I. I currently use a tool that detects at-risk accounts based on the way an email from a client is worded, then instantly sends an alert to the account executive. Artificial Intelligence is slowly growing into a core component of sales technology, and will continue to do so in the coming years.

— Ivan Ciraj, Sales Representative, Cloud Realty

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Industry Prediction

“Today’s salespeople will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence in the next ten years.” I made this claim as the keynote speaker at a recent sales conference in Silicon Valley. More than a few eyebrows were raised. Some people were angry.

I believe this to be true, but that is not to say I believe salespeople will become jobless. Muchlike robotics have radically transformed the manufacturing industry I believe B2B sales will also quickly transform due to the technological breakthroughs in AI.

When I say Artificial Intelligence will automate sales reps out of a job within the decade, I don’t mean sales reps will turn into automatons or data scientists. AI will answer today’s simplest sales questions, such as, “how do I know whether this lead data is correct?”, so sales reps can focus more on, “how can I help this customer understand the value our solution delivers?” In this way, AI promises to make the sales teams even more human.

The human touch is not going away. It’s going elsewhere. Technology combined with human intelligence will always outperform technology alone.

- Anand Kulkarni, Founder & Chief Scientist, LeadGenius

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Resources1. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/customer-communication-by-channel 2. http://www.demandgen.com/pdf/DemandGenInternational_EBook.pdf 3. http://blog.leadgenius.com/diagnose-sales-and-marketing-data-decay/ 4. https://www.edq.com/contact-data-quality-statistics/ 5. https://www.forrester.com/The+Forrester+Wave+Email+Marketing+Vendors+Q3+2014/fulltext/-/E-res1152226. http://research.insidesales.com/acton/attachment/1207/f-0434/1/-/-/-/-/2014%20Lead%20Response%20

Report.pdf7. http://www.demandgenreport.com/features/industry-insights/dgr-s-2015-b2b-buyer-s-survey-buyers-want-

facts-a-better-mix-of-content8. http://firstround.com/review/this-is-how-you-build-products-for-the-new-generation-of-data-natives/ 9. http://applications.teradata.com/DDM-Survey/ThankYou/2ba714fd-c405-4a40-a568-cb4763e411ce.ashx 10. http://blog.topohq.com/topo-sales-development-council-7-a-recap/ 11. https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-trend-that-is-changing-sales/ 12. http://tomtunguz.com/b2c2b/ 13. https://www.demandbase.com/b2b-marketing-blog/the-rise-of-account-based-marketing-2/ 14. http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/strategy/us-cons-

bridgingthedigitaldivide-040114.pdf15. http://www.demandgenreport.com/topics/demand-generation/sales-enablement-emerging-as-top-

priority-as-reps-struggle-to-sustain-dialogue-with-changing-buyer 16. http://chiefmartec.com/2015/01/marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-2015/ 17. https://www.netprospex.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-NPX-Benchmark-Report.pdf 18. http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/16/200-billion-facebook-ads-say-click-throughs-up-375-roi-at-152-study/ 19. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/07/23/facebook-earnings/13045633/ 20. http://blog.topohq.com/designing-a-buyer-centric-revenue-process-a-topo-case-on-leadmd/

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About the author

William Wickey is the Content Marketing Manager at LeadGenius. William has a masters in New Media and specializes in growth marketing.

About the designer

Lauren Moe is a freelance designer in the San Francisco area. Her primary scope of work is digital and print creative marketing.

Credits

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