In recent blog posts, we’ve gone over why data rules supreme and why compiling and optimizing segments is so important for revenue teams. With those baselines set, it’s now time to learn how to pull all of your data, predictions, and segments together to deliver meaningful, timely experiences to customers.
Providing those experiences requires the ability to seamlessly engage the right buyers from the right accounts with the right message at the right time — and do so across every channel at scale. And to handle that kind of heavy lift, you’ll need an account engagement platform with robust orchestration capabilities.
Orchestration changes the game for revenue teams. For instance, software company ServiceMax leveraged orchestrations in a recent campaign that generated $2.1 million in pipeline with over 40% account engagement. It improved collaborations between sales and marketing, too. (ServiceMax is a 6sense customer.)
So What is Orchestration?
Orchestrations are a coordinated series of automated actions that are triggered based on logic. These triggers are built around data and segments that indicate changes in states, behaviors, contacts, buying teams, opportunities, and other factors.
By automatically acting on real-time data and predictions about your prospects and customers, orchestration makes it practically effortless to deliver engaging content and campaigns that are personalized to those contacts’ professional roles, what they care about, and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Here are some examples of customer engagement that can be automated with orchestration:
- Automatically serving a dynamic display campaign
- Alerting sales reps via Slack or email when one of their accounts shows increased engagement
- Customizing content hub experiences with company logos and industry-relevant content
- Recommending content based on buying stage or intent keyword
- Automatically acquiring missing buying center data from third-party sources
- Adding accounts to other systems such as a CRM, MAP, or sales engagement platform
- Sending a gift or other direct mail to key personas
Orchestration Use Cases
It’s clear that there are many ways revenue teams can use orchestrations to automate and streamline tasks. Here’s a closer look at a few of them.
Customer Engagement
A common use for orchestrations add audiences to campaigns such as nurturing emails, display ads, direct mail, and personalized online experiences. These orchestrations are determined by segments such as account, job title, geography, and other factors that help your revenue team reach audiences with precision.
Hyper-focusing and targeting customers with this kind of specificity helps you invest your time, budget, and energy only in the accounts that are a good fit for your solution and in-market to buy. Relevant, personalized messaging also tells your customers that they matter, which is a meaningful differentiator that can eventually result in a strong ROI.
Data Enrichment and Optimization
For organizations making the transition from traditional sales and marketing tactics to ABX, orchestration helps bridge the gap between MQLs and accounts qualified by intent data. Enriching data can automatically fill in missing firmographic information for leads.
This hybrid approach helps organizations make the most of the leads they wish to pursue while collecting the data that will — ideally — convince them to switch to a superior account-based approach and define their ICP based on that data.
The Future is Here: AI-Driven Orchestration
The way orchestration currently works is that once the orchestration logic is determined — which accounts and contacts to reach out to, at what timing, based on what criteria, with what content, how often, etc.— the engagement is triggered automatically. But the setup, including the decision-making process behind selecting those triggers, requires manual effort.
But industry-leading account engagement platforms are changing this with big data and AI. These solutions are rolling out AI-driven orchestrations. This capability examines account data and identifies good matches for campaigns, such as driving web engagement and creating opportunities. Future use cases include accelerating opportunities, customer retention and upselling, and much more.
If you’re currently using an account engagement platform with orchestrations, or are evaluating your options, make sure to research what kind of AI-driven orchestrations you can expect to see from the platform in the very near future.
The Stakes and the Benefits
Without orchestrations, your revenue team must make a continual, conscious effort to manually reach out to customers and hand-deliver meaningful, educational, personalized content.
While there’s something to be said about taking a personal approach to sales and marketing, it’s likely more important that your revenue team do it at scale.
Having an ABM or account engagement platform with orchestration capabilities can help by automating many engagement activities. But there are some important things to consider when looking at platforms that can help:
Orchestration Is Easier Said Than Done
Research indicates that orchestration is a challenge for 9 in 10 organizations. It’s critical that the orchestration layer in your tech stack seamlessly connects with other systems — from your CRM, to display advertising and web personalization, to third-party data providers and sales engagement tools.
Look for Platforms That Deliver at Scale
What’s even better is an account engagement platform that captures and optimizes data — including buyer intent data and AI-driven predictive data — at scale, and centralizes it within one platform.
World-Class Platforms Deliver World-Class Results
With the right account engagement platform equipped with orchestration capabilities, your revenue team will benefit from:
- Easy setup of orchestrations with little to no maintenance required
- All of your data in one place, eliminating the need for multiple tech tools
- Engaging customers when they’re ready to buy, and at scale
- Streamlined processes that save time and reduce manual effort
That last benefit is important because it frees up your team to do more creative, productive work, such as coming up with new campaigns and content ideas.
Conclusion
ABM is just good marketing, which means engaging the right accounts with the right message at the right time. This requires having the right data and AI-driven predictions about your buyers, as well as tools that make it easier to reach out to them at scale.
Orchestration is a critical component of this strategy because it centralizes and enriches data, automates and streamlines customer engagement activities, and — when powered by AI — helps your revenue team make more informed decisions about which customers to engage.
Consider inquiring about the next-gen capabilities of your current account engagement platform, or contact 6sense to learn more about AI-driven orchestration and our other industry-leading capabilities.
