Business to Business or B2B enterprises who leverage email marketing and selling solutions to engage and nurture deals with customers are often missing the most relevant information they need to Sell Smarter at Scale™. This blog will investigate a breakthrough approach to radically change the rules and economics of selling; by providing an unfair advantage over alternative approaches being employed by your competition. Selgine is that breakthrough approach.
Traditionally, B2B enterprises leverage email automation solutions to help accelerate and scale sales activities. Email templates are crafted by marketing and sales enablement professionals for products, services, or solutions and loaded into a CRM solution like Salesforce. From here, these templates are accessed by sales professionals based on their custom or ad-hoc sales endeavor at their account and launched to the contacts at their customer account.
Although effective in providing sales signal insights into the banter between the sales representative and the customer, they often fall short of providing the insights needed to course correct an account, quantify or qualify a sales opportunity, or incrementally improve your sales play process and account-based marketing (ABM) email outreach.
Additionally, there is always a disconnect between email inbox and sent folders that are managed by Salesforce and the Sales Representative’s Google Workplace or Microsoft 365 email folders. A major point of pain for sales representatives that causes frustration and disconnects when communicating with account contacts.
As the graph below depicts, modern outreach solutions that deliver a breakthrough customer experience have four distinct dimensions:
The Discover Dimension – assures the integrated email sales execution platform for Surveying Internal Audiences (sales representatives and channel partners) as well as External Audiences (customer contacts and influential partners representing the customer account). A comprehensive Discovery Platform must enable correlation of Survey Insights from both the Internal Sales Representative and the External Customer contact. “Does the sales representative feel they can sell the solutions this quarter?” and conversely, “Does the customer have the need, budget, and authority to assess and consume this solution this quarter?” Perhaps a very blunt example, but one can see how polling both sellers and customers on the same topics from their unique perspective can be of immense value to all audiences. At Selgine we focus on delivering a full range of Survey capabilities including:
Net Promoter Score (NPS):
Is the sales representative open to promoting the merits of the sales play?
Is the customer open to promoting the solution to be solicited to them?
Multiple Choice Selection:
Specific items we wish to learn from sales representatives and their customer contacts.
Open Ended Question and Answer:
Other “word cloud” and statement insights we can glean from write-in answers from our sales representatives and their customer contacts.
The Engage Dimension – provides an email platform that helps drive a personalized and curated sales motion email to internal sales representatives for them to relay a personalized and curated sales play email to their external account contacts. The Engage dimension, for external contacts is where most CRM email systems gather their sales signals from. As one can see, from a Selgine point of view, this constitutes less than 25% of desired sales signals. So, what’s missing? What’s so unique about Selgine’s approach? Several items:
Internal Engagement
The internal sales motion solicitation provides insights into whether that sales representative has been trained on the sales plays subject matter
The internal also provides insights to sales representative’s engagement with other sales professionals and subject matter experts
Internal insights also include what and how often marketing content and collateral are being employed by sales professionals.
Further internal activity provides sales representatives the option to opt-out with a reason, that can help refine and develop future sales motions and plays.
External Engagement
The external sales play solicitation provides insights into whether the customer has sought training on the sales plays subject matter
The external also provides account planning insights to customers engagement with other customer contacts not originally party to the solicitation
It also provides access to account team subject matter experts, and whether they requested a meeting with the SMEs.
Other external insights also include what and how often marketing content and collateral are being employed by sales professionals.
Of course the standard metrics of mail opened, mail forwards, replies etc are always provided, but its these deeper insights that really make Selgine standout. Particularly since this data can be correlated – so sales representative engagement and account contact engagement can be correlated side by side to help quantify and qualify the quality and state of the sales play pursuit.
The Internal Dimension – are sales representatives and channel partners, a very key difference than CRM and alternative email based B2B campaign management systems. For the first time, if you are managing marketing development funds for your channel partners, you can insist that they use Selgine so they and you can glean insights into their sales motions and sales plays with your products and services being solicited to your partner customers. Think about it, shared visibility between your company and your channel partner company in joint pursuits at your channel partner customers.
The External Dimension – is how and when account contacts, customers, and influential partners representing the customer are engaged. This is the typical audience and dimension professionals think of when they think of email marketing.
How does Selgine Bring All These Dimensions Together?
Let’s explore a straightforwarduse case. Mary, is a B2B marketing guru, responsible for field sales, bizdev, product, and partner marketing. Robert, is a B2B customer account sales executive who’s struggling to hit his number. Tanya, is a customer executive at Robert’s account.
Mary needs to stimulate targeted demand for scores of solutions, products, and services on a very limited budget. Upsell, cross-sell, renewals, new product introductions, as well as sales and customer surveys are all on Mary’s desk to deliver.
Robert needs to expand his influence with his customers by continuously introducing new and better approaches to solve their problems or grow their business. Robert makes money when he convinces his customer he can help them make or save money.
Tanya’s business has demanding wants and needs that need to be addressed on-time and on-budget, and she’s smart enough to know what she doesn’t know. She needs help from a trusted innovator.
Selgine empowers Mary to build, target and launch customer sales motions by working with and through her salesforce, including Robert. Her first carefully and professionally curated email with embedded links creates awareness with Robert and provides him with targeted training and content on how to approach his customer.
Robert initiates his product upgrade sales play by Relaying Mary’s second email in her double-trigger sales motion directly to his account contacts, including Tanya. Since the email came directly from Robert, Tanya acts on the email and engages with Robert as she knows him, it’s not from a corporate or third-party account.
This back and forth of Selgine communications between Mary and Robert; and Robert and Tanya produce a torrent of sales signals and customer sentiment data.
Selgine’s AI Analytics and Reporting platform collects, correlates, and transforms this torrent of sales signals and customer sentiment data into meaningful insights that reveal the state and progress of the Mary’s sales play, under Selgine management, based on Robert and Tanya’s interactions.
Robert leverages Selgine to better understand the interactive interest level of Tanya and her peers, many who were not on the initial email from Robert. Robert now has the confidence to forecast this sales play as an opportunity in Salesforce. Selgine Analytics capabilities go beyond operational sales support, it provides transformational value to all levels of the business, including Robert, Mary, their executive leadership and the C-suite.
In Conclusion
Current email sales automation is lacking 75% of the email and sentiment analysis functionality you need, and it's killing deals. Only Selgine provides the four dimensions you need to Discover, Engage, Internal, and External audiences with confidence and correlated insights so you can Sell Smarter at Scale™.
Selgine delivers a breakthrough that radically changes the rules and economics of selling; providing an unfair advantage over alternative approaches being employed by your competition.
The goal? Get high-qualified deals into CRM and progress them through a sales funnel to closure. Hopefully, “Win” status before the end of the quarter.