Using AI to get more from your Sales & Marketing buck
You already have all the information you need to laser focus your efforts
“Half my advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”
- attributed to John Wanamaker some time in the late 1800s
This quote feels kind of quaint now. But when you think about your sales pipeline and if you’ve attributed weighting to each stage, getting higher and higher as you get close to the ‘Closed Won’ stage, maybe it isn’t as quaint as it seems. A Sales Accepted Lead may have a weighting of 30%, meaning the sales team believes that the likelihood that 3 in 10 of the leads will become a customer.
So in that case we’re saying 70% of our sales efforts are wasted: worse than John Wanamaker’s assessment.
The big difference is you almost certainly do know who the 30% are, or at least, you can get a pretty good idea using lead scoring, especially when it’s combined with AI. Have a think about what that would mean if you had a crystal ball that meant you were only exerting time, effort and money on the leads that were going to convert and basically sacking off the ones that weren’t? Imagine never having to do a pitch again to someone who was never going to choose your company in the first place?
Is that really possible? Let’s have a look…
Data
If you get a reasonable amount of leads and have a reasonable amount of customers, you probably have a sh*t ton of data, too. From product usage and user behaviour, through to your sales and marketing platforms: content that people have interacted with, emails that have prompted a response, channels that have delivered leads. Products like Drift, Intercom, Hubspot, Salesforce, Clearbit, Marketo, Outreach, SalesLoft, Gong… .basically anything where you have some interaction with customers.
Data Model
From here, you use AI to model what the data is telling you about what constitutes the type of behaviour that predict a positive outcome. It also tells us what types of activity on our side has the biggest impact. And that could be quite nuanced. In the old days we might just look at click-through-rates and maybe number of times someone engaged with some content to determine what was working and what wasn’t, but now we can look at an infinite combination of steps that customers take as they make their way through the funnel. AI might learn that the device used, the time spent on a page, the number of clicks also have a bearing on what signals a customer with a higher intent to purchase has.
Recommendations
Not only do we know what behaviour predicts what outcome, we can also understand what activity we need to take to convert the lead. Does this type of customer respond best to email, phone call or retargeting, for example? What kind of messaging? What kind of creative? Are they ready to read a white paper, or do they prefer to attend a webinar?
So who is doing this? (I don’t have an affiliate deal with anyone here). But if this was interesting, these are a few you might consider:
6Sense
Promise to use AI to predict high quality pipeline and predictable revenue. They have termed the phrase ‘Dark Funnel’ to make sense of the anonymised data that can be gathered to understand buyer intent.
MadKudu
A focus on using AI to predict the right revenue-generating actions so you don’t waste time and money chasing the wrong leads.
D&B Rev.Up ABX
Memorable name that trips off the tongue. Dun & Bradstreet bought Lattice Engines and it now forms part of this offering. It feels more of a one-stop-shop that helps you calculate your Total Addressable Market and create lists from their data. It can also integrate with Salesforce and so is probably geared towards larger companies.
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Let me know if you’ve worked with any of these or others. It’s obviously an area that is evolving fast and I’d love to know of any direct experience people have had.
Happy Weekend y’all.
