The world of B2B buying and selling has changed. That’s not something new, it’s a reality marketers and sellers have been learning to adapt to for years.
Where companies used to be the main source of truth for how their product or service works, the digital world has shifted that dynamic
According to a Forrester report, 62% of B2B buyers say they can now develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list based solely on content that exists on the internet. Not necessarily the content you choose to create but the content that the entire market is creating.
That’s where 6sense comes into the picture. 6sense’s platform helps marketers and sellers uncover what their target audience is doing across the internet, like anonymous web visits and third party research, shining a light on the dark funnel that informs how businesses sell to customers today.
So how can insight into buyer intent from a tool like 6sense help power marketing and sales activities to make sure you’re able to market and sell as efficiently as possible? We thought you’d never ask.
We’ll break down how to leverage this data to help power marketing and sales activities throughout the buyer’s journey – and most importantly how to leverage the intent data provided by 6sense to help power gifting campaigns with Alyce.
But before we dive into how to use these two superpowers together, let’s first give a short overview as to why both Alyce and 6sense are impactful for your bottom line.
How Can Alyce and 6sense Help With Marketing And Sales Success
When you invest in a tool like 6sense, you’re helping with focus and insights.
Rather than having your sales team try to cast the widest net possible, which we all know doesn’t work, 6sense can help your team prioritize the accounts that are at the exact right moment in their buyer’s journey to have a conversation, give insights into what that account has been searching for to have relevant conversations, and ultimately save more of your sales team’s time by giving them more at bats with accounts who are ready to have a conversation.
When you power that with Alyce’s personal gifting capabilities you’ll be able to have your outreach standout at those moments, leverage the 9-to-5 data 6sense provides and the #5to9 data Alyce captures to have personal conversations that create deeper relationships, and inevitably drive action from those accounts quickly to create and close pipeline for your business.
So now that we’ve evaluated why using 6sense and Alyce together can be impactful for your revenue teams, let’s dive into how to get the most out of each platform when they work together.
Building Pipeline With 6sense And Alyce
When In The Customer Journey Should You Send A Gift
When you think about the customer journey and when it would be appropriate to send a gift, you want to make sure your prospect knows about you in some capacity.
There has been some marketing or sales activity so you’re not sending a gift to a company that has no context into who you are, the problem your company solves, and how they can leverage your product or service.
Generally these accounts are aware of the problem that they need to solve and are starting to understand who the players in the space are.
During this phase of the customer journey, being proactive, personal, and pertinent (I couldn’t help myself with that alliteration) will keep your company top of mind and displayed in a positive light for your prospective customers.
So once you’ve identified the accounts that you want to reach out to, understanding who you should send a gift to comes next.
Identifying The Right Contacts To Send A Gift To
Whether your team has been sending outbound emails to multiple people at the account and you have a good understanding of who opens and interacts with the emails and who doesn’t, or people who have come in through other channels and interacted with marketing campaigns without yet requesting a demo, gifting is best used to help facilitate conversations that take accounts from the consideration stage to the decision stage.
There should be contacts in your existing marketable database or contacts in existing sales sequences who are interacting with the content in your emails and showing more intent than others. 6sense allows you to see which personas are most engaged with you, and which need to be warmed up – it also allows you to orchestrate contact purchase orders for key personas to build out a more robust buying team to send gifts to.
Having that insight into contact behavior can help you determine who from your accounts in the Consideration and Decision stages of your funnel should be on the receiving end of your gift.
What Gift Should I Send To A Prospect
Once you’ve identified who you want to reach out to, and from which accounts, now is the fun part. It’s time to send your prospect a gift. Now, with other direct mail vendors you may have to stress over what gift to send that will resonate with your prospect, but Alyce works a little differently.
Once you’ve decided who to send a gift to, you can upload them into Alyce and our AI model will research their social presence to find three gifts in our marketplace of 35,000 vendors that suit their interests. Of course, you’ll have a say in which of the three gifts, or another gift you find in the marketplace should be sent to your prospect.
The hard part is over and done for you! Now all you have to do is craft a message that is relevant, relatable, and respectful that allows you to create a connection with your prospect and book that meeting.
What Should I Say When I Send A Gift?
When you’re sending a gift through Alyce, the experience is a digital-first experience. Whether you choose to send a physical invitation or a digital invitation, your prospects will visit a gift recipient landing page where they’ll be able to accept, exchange, or donate the dollar value of their gift.
Due to the digital nature and recipient-first experience that Alyce takes, your messaging can reflect that experience before your prospect even views or accepts their gift.
To start, you’ll want to create that personal connection by referencing the gift and the research that Alyce brought back to you with the gift suggestions.
You’ll want to introduce the power of choice and then relate to the information about the company that 6sense informed you of based on their funnel stage, keywords they’ve been searching, and how your solution solves their problem.
At the end, you’ll wrap up your ask with a CTA that drives conversions and sets the right expectations and books that meeting.
Want some help crafting your gift invitation message? Check out our free gifting email templates here!
What Happens After The Gift Is Sent And Not Yet Accepted
Following up with your corporate gifting campaigns is so important.
Sending a gift to a prospect is the first step in ensuring they see it, they like it, and they act on it.
Use that first week after hitting send to reinforce your value prop, remind your prospects about their gift, and encourage next steps through email, social media, and phone call follow up.
And if you do so, you’ll stand out from the crowd. 58% of sales reps give up after a single attempt to connect.
Which means: The reps who go that extra mile to follow up with their prospects are the ones who book more meetings.
There’s data behind why follow-up matters as well, typically it can take 8 days for a prospect to claim their gift, even with the rise of digital gifting.
Leveraging the Alyce gift link and the channels at your fingertips, you can create a follow up cadence that captures attention and drives action so you can see the most out of your gifting campaigns.
When you think about crafting your follow up cadences, communication cross-channel is your superpower.
If your prospect isn’t responding to email, reach out on Linkedin, try calling, reference the gift in your new outreach to switch up your messaging and try to re-attract your prospect in to your offer.
As much as we all wish that we could sit back and relax as prospects come to us, the reality is most customers aren’t proactively reaching out to sales reps. Consumers are far more educated than ever before and are initiating contact with prospective vendors much later in their purchasing cycle.
A well-thought-out follow-up strategy is a key differentiator for high performing sales reps.
What Happens When The Gift Is Accepted
There’s nothing worse than getting ghosted. You put all this work into grabbing the attention of your prospect, it finally works and you book a meeting, and then… you’re alone in the Zoom room for 15 minutes.
We’ve all felt that sense of dread, finally ending the Zoom and making the “no show” note in the activity in your CRM.
Rather than have this happen to you after your gift is accepted, there are a few ways to make sure you have your prospect show up to that meeting so you can lead it with confidence.
First thing’s first, continue your follow up until the meeting occurs. We put together some pre-meeting email reminder templates that can help you maintain interest and continue to drive value for your prospects before they even get on the phone with you.
Now, in order to make sure your account executives show up to those meetings prepared and ready for action, Alyce will send your AE an email an hour before the meeting is held with information on the company, their firmographics, as well as the gift information so they can show up to the call with tactical talking points that facilitate real conversations and build trust.
Power Your Sales Gifting With Intent Data With 6sense And Alyce
The world of prospecting no longer has to be a guessing game. With 6sense’s rich account insights and intent data, sales teams can get a better understanding of who to reach out to so they can spend more time crafting the perfect message that will resonate.
That’s where Alyce comes in. Adding personal gifting to the prospecting cadence your sales team is using can act as an accelerant to creating deeper relationships with prospects, driving more action from your outbound efforts, and inherently creating and closing more pipeline by creating a more delightful buying experience for your prospects.
