Revenue teams are wasting money — bucketloads of it. BCG’s research shows today’s sales and marketing teams are losing $2 trillion a year in excess sales, general, and administrative costs and lost revenue potential.
What are the most pressing areas of waste for revenue teams and solutions you can use to find and fix your revenue leaks? Keep reading to find out.
1. Anonymous Website Visitors
Only 3% of website visitors fill out forms.
Your website is a necessity for sales and marketing, but it can be costly. Whether visitors arrive through ads, content, brand, or your outbound engine, you’re paying to acquire them. If you can’t see who they are, it’s difficult to get a return on that investment.
Most companies can’t identify their website visitors, and rely on website form-fills to uncover interest. However, only 3% of visitors actually fill out forms. That means that the other 97% of traffic goes to waste — leaving organizations blind to buyers who don’t want to hand over their contact information.
What’s the Solution?
Revenue AI uncovers anonymous website traffic and links it back to the accounts or buying teams visiting your site. This enables you to uncover the anonymous accounts that are in-market for your solution, understand their interests, and dramatically increase ROI from your current website traffic.
2. Wasting Resources on the Wrong Accounts
Sales teams only spend 36% of their time on activities that generate revenue.
Instead of selling, almost two-thirds of your sales teams’ time is spent:
- Prospecting the wrong accounts
- Attempting to prioritize time
- Trying to craft persuasive outreach
- Performing administrative tasks
Meanwhile, marketing dollars are wasted on spray-and-pray campaigns directed at accounts that aren’t interested in your solution. This imprecision across your revenue team wastes time and money — and negatively impacts your pipeline.
What’s the Solution?
Accurately predict which prospects are likely to convert, and when, by uncovering your In-Market Ideal Customer Profile (IICP) and understanding where they are in their buying journey. Sales teams can prioritize their time on the most profitable, likely-to-close accounts (here’s how our AEs do it), and marketing teams can create targeted, personalized campaigns at scale.
3. Lackluster Website Experiences
B2B websites have an average bounce rate of 75%.
By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will take place in digital channels. You’ve already spent money driving traffic to your website. Now it’s time to give your prospects a compelling reason to stay there.
But the majority of B2B websites offer static, one-size-fits-all user experiences. This inevitably leads to high bounce rates and dollars down the drain.
What’s the Solution?
Increase engagement by delivering appropriate messaging and content for your prospect’s buying stage, industry, or role. Use captured intent data and account insights to provide a personalized digital experience, offering useful resources to build trust and help answer your prospects’ pressing questions.
4. Inefficient Ad Targeting
60% of digital marketing spend is wasted and 15% of advertising spend can’t be traced.
Belt tightening and ad budget cuts mean that you’ll have to be more efficient to hit your goals. One of the biggest challenges is making sure your audience is tightly defined so that every dollar spent represents a sales opportunity.
What’s the Solution?
Hyper-targeted digital advertising starts with targeting audiences with real intent to buy. Just as your sales team shouldn’t waste time on accounts that don’t have the budget for your solution, your digital team should avoid accounts with no interest. By narrowing your targeting to in-market accounts — those that have shown interest in your company, products and services, or your competitors — you can boost lead quality and ROI.
5. Slow Response Rates
78% of B2B customers purchase from the vendor that responds first.
Your best prospects have already conducted a ton of research and narrowed down their options before they start reaching out to vendors.
If your competitors beat you to the punch, the data says they’re nearly 4x more likely to win the deal. It’s bad enough to miss out on deals, but mistiming your outreach breeds more problems for your business, including:
- Not shaping the narrative
- Reliance on discounting to win deals
- Making unrealistic promises
- Closing fewer renewals
What’s the Solution?
An AI-powered email assistant slashes the time it takes to respond to prospects and buyers. Automatic personalized responses keep warm prospects on the hook, while letting your sales team focus on prospects that are closer to closing.
6. Inaccurate Pipeline Forecasting
85% of B2B organizations regularly miss their monthly forecast by more than 5%.
Despite revenue being the prime metric for most businesses, managing the mechanism that drives it — pipeline — has remained an art rather than a science. Pipeline forecasting is still largely completed in spreadsheets or homegrown tools, and based on gut feelings instead of cold, hard data.
This inaccurate process creates a number of pipeline management problems and leaves revenue teams operating from plans built on guesswork, leading to more miscalculations and waste.
What’s the Solution?
Pipeline intelligence empowers you to predict revenue by looking at the prospects in your pipeline and comparing their characteristics and behaviors to past deals — which helps you understand who is likely to close a deal, how soon, and for how much. By using AI to examine your pipeline data and provide insights, you can create accurate forecasts and make predictable revenue a reality.
6sense Revenue AI™ removes waste across the buying journey to drive efficient growth for revenue teams. Want to see how we can deliver a 454% ROI? Check out Forrester’s 2022 TEI Study.
