What is a crystal ball worth? If you truly knew which B2B buyers were ready to purchase and when, wouldn’t that be infinitely valuable?
Instead of your marketing and sales teams spending their days turning over every rock to find perfect prospects (that they’ve yet to identify), they could simply focus on selling to folks who actually want to buy your services.
You can reorient your organization into a leaner, meaner selling machine by specifically targeting prospects signaling their intent to buy. Let’s take a closer look.
The Downsides of Not Knowing Who to Engage
Some consultants recommend devoting 30% to 40% of your week to prospecting new leads. That’s something like three hours a day Googling or trawling LinkedIn for proverbial needles in a haystack.
Think of all the manual time and effort that goes into prospecting:
- Finding the right company that fits your target account profile
- Determining who at that account to contact
- Crafting the perfect message that makes the prospect want to buy
- Listening to that perfect prospect’s voicemail greeting — again — as they continue to dodge your calls
That sounds like a lot of work, and it is. Forty percent of sellers say prospecting is the most difficult part of their job.
All of that effort, though, is surely worth it if your prospect is the right fit. But just as often all that work is for naught — 50% of your prospects aren’t a good fit for what you sell.
The Downsides of Not Knowing When to Engage
So if half the prospects you reach are a bad fit, then the other half is a good fit. That’s great news. They’ll be signing a deal any day now, right?
Probably not. That’s because they’re currently not ready to buy from you (or anyone else, for that matter). They could already have a solution, or not have any budget to buy at the moment.
To conduct effective sales outreach, your teams must thread the needle and connect with the right prospects at the right time. “Sixty percent of buyers say they want to connect with sales during the consideration stage, after they’ve researched the options and come up with a short list,” says HubSpot research.
Here’s how you can know which of your accounts are currently in-market.
How to Identify In-Market Accounts
Account engagement platforms (like 6sense’s solution) use millions of data points, AI, and machine learning to uncover exactly which of your accounts are giving off buying signals.
With so much data at its disposal, a powerful platform can also analyze historical data on previous deals to identify what your typical buyer looks like and the type of signals they transmit when they’re looking to buy.
Here are some the buying signals 6sense can sniff out:
- Technographics: This includes the tech stack an account uses, whether the company uses a competitor or similar solution to yours, and when that solution was purchased (and if it’s approaching the end of a contract).
- Organizational Performance: Is this account profitable and growing? Have they closed new funding? This could mean there’s money in the budget for your solution.
- Market Forces: Uncover changing factors for an industry such as new regulations or compliance requirements that might result in the need for new products or services.
- Active Research: See the keywords your accounts are researching and whether they’re comparison shopping you or your competitors.
Uncovering these buying signals — and comparing them to years of historical deal data — would probably take a human more than three to four hours a day. But AI-powered platforms do this in nanoseconds and are constantly updating to deliver a real-time view into which accounts are in-market.
With this data integrated into your CRM, you can sit down with a cup of coffee in the morning and instantly see which accounts are in the Crucial Consideration stage. You and your team’s day just got a lot easier, a whole lot more productive … and the mocha isn’t even cold yet.
Let’s look at the impact.
Time is Money; Timing is Even More Money
A 6sense Business Impact Framework studied 100 random customers to see how this intent and signaling data impacted their businesses.
Revenue generation, the lifeblood of any business, was 120% more effective when users could identify and pursue accounts that were in-market and ready to buy.
“77% of opportunities created are ones that 6sense identified as being in Decision and Purchase stages. The concept of ‘in-market’ accounts has permeated the entire revenue operations team.”
Casey Carey, CMO at Kazoo
Similarly, users found that their average days to close a deal reduced by 25%. For companies with longer sales cycle, that kind of reduction could equate to months saved.
All of that time saved allows your sellers to focus on new deals. The benefits start to snowball and suddenly the deals are rolling in, fast.
Conclusion
Too many sales processes are limited by the time tied up in prospecting and qualifying leads.
With an AI-powered platform, your teams can instantly become aware of your target accounts that are in-market and ready to buy today — leading to more effective revenue generation and deals that close more quickly.
