Last year, Clari processed nearly 300 million emails and 40 million meetings. Through our analysis, we found that on average 50-70% of the people your sales reps have email communication with or are meeting with do not exist as contacts in CRM.
Yup, you heard that right.
When reps don’t log contacts to CRM, you miss out on 50-70% of the highly qualified contacts you could be nurturing to accelerate opportunities in flight and build multi-threaded relationships.
What Is a Multi-Threaded Deal?
Multi-threading originated as a software engineering term and refers to a model that allows multiple threads to be followed within the context of a single process. Marketers can help sales create a multi-threaded deal by ensuring entry points into multiple prospects within the same opportunity to hedge your bets if one of the stakeholders drops out or goes off the radar.
Help your sales team identify and engage those prospects within the same opportunity to give them the most advantageous position to win the deal or you can find themselves at risk. (Embracing a revenue operations mentality is just as critical. What does that mean? We cover marketing's role in a revenue operations team here.)
Why Should You Care About Multi-Threaded Deals?
The buyer in most B2B purchases is not just one person. It’s a team of individuals who work together to research and acquire a solution that solves a business problem. For marketers, this means identifying and/or nurturing only one contact within a target account isn’t enough.
On average, there are 7 decision makers involved in a B2B buying journey. For larger enterprise prospects, that number can balloon into many more — and any one of them could make or break the deal.
But when marketing has full visibility into the opportunity at hand, they can start identifying who the key stakeholders that are typically involved in such deals and build programs and campaigns that target them directly.
The Risk of Single-Threaded Deals
If you have major accounts that rely solely on the relationships with one or two people, that’s a lot of risk. Those key contacts can easily be promoted, move jobs, or lose influence within the organization. If any of those happen, you’ll find yourself starting from the beginning.
This scenario isn’t uncommon. Sales reps are busy and don’t always have time to properly map out the key players in a deal (or log them into the CRM).
Making sure accounts are multi-threaded is the key to giving your sales team a more secure foothold. We’ll get to that in a second, but first let’s cover the risks of single-threaded deals:
- Multiple Decision Makers. The decision-making process requires a variety of sign-offs from various stakeholders: finance, legal, security, etc… The more influencers you have in the ear of these folks, the better chance you have of pushing a deal through potential roadblocks.
- Influencer Abandonment. Even influential employees still need to get buy-in from others — and they may see it as more effort than it’s worth. They lose nothing by moving on, but it’s bad news for your sales team if they abandon your product.
- Champion Churn. Top-level decision makers stay at a single company less than three years on average, meaning you could very well lose your champion when it’s time to renew.
- Low Adoption. The actual buyer is not always the end user of the product. Without the buy-in from the latter it can be difficult to get the deal closed, let alone have a smooth implementation and adoption process — and low adoption means low chances of success.
Helping your sales team avoid these scenarios gives your revenue team a stronger foothold within the opportunity, so those hard fought leads don’t fall off the map.
Are You Missing Your Moment to Create Multi-Threaded Opportunities?
The more contacts you have for a single opportunity, the more opportunities you’re giving yourself (and your sales team) to make sure that deal gets done.
To be fair, this is not a knock on sales reps. Being a great sales rep is an intense, high-value job and the last thing reps should be doing is wasting selling time logging contacts.
This is where Clari's Autocapture comes in. Autocapture harvests meeting attendee data from your sales reps’ calendars, and uses it to automatically create new contacts and associate both new and existing contacts with the right opportunities. When analyzing meeting attendee data, we intelligently determine which account and opportunities a contact should be associated with, check for existing contacts to avoid duplicates, then sync updates with no manual work required by the sales rep.
For more ways on how marketers can drive revenue and impact the sales cycle, read our new ebook: How Growth Marketers Impact Revenue.
Interested in learning more? Schedule a demo with one of our revenue experts.