How can revenue teams keep customers engaged in this new digital-first age of uncertainty? Despite the challenging market, many industries have the opportunity to come out of this crisis a winner—and the path to victory is through customer and prospect engagement.
The Harvard Business Review suggests brands connect with customers and prospects with a focus on empathy. Michael Hogan, Korn Ferry’s Vice President of North America Commercial Sales echoed this call to lead with empathy in a recent episode of our series, Masters In a Minute.
The best way to achieve this ideal is to be able to identify which accounts need attention, understand how you can fulfill their needs, and align the revenue organization to support those accounts. Are your teams equipped to achieve this?
Below, we share why measuring account engagement is critical for teams today and how to leverage account insights in real-time to super power your go-to-market strategy.
Digital interactions are twice as important now
While we've experienced our business world pivot to remote, our study reveals the depth of that change—and there's some good news. According to our COVID Revenue Impact Study:
- Prospect meetings increased by 14% in Q1 compared to last quarter.
- The number of emails increased by 16%.
- However, the overall ratio between sent emails and responses received decreased by 8% compared to the previous quarter.
Since sales teams have had limitations to meet with customers face-to-face and digital responses have decreased, every online correspondence is more critical than ever. A McKinsey Consulting study from April 2020 shared that revenue leaders rated digital-enabled sales interactions at least two times more important now than they were pre-COVID.
You can no longer focus only on outbound metrics such as calls made and emails sent to measure the health of a sales rep’s activity. It’s critical to quickly and easily understand how key accounts are responding to and engaging with your team.
However, tracking engagement creates two main challenges:
- Challenge #1: How do you measure your account’s activity and engagement in real time?
- Challenge #2: How do you digest those account insights to align departments on a strategy that closes more deals fast?
Clari’s Account Engagement can help.
Mastering Challenge #1: Measure in real-time
Gartner notes that only 45% of sales leaders have a high confidence in their sales forecast accuracy. This uncertainty is attributed to poor data governance, quality, and hygiene. Without clear visibility into your buyer and seller engagement, your teams can’t easily determine if their go-to-market strategy is working. Sales forecasts become inaccurate and outdated quickly.
To solve this problem, Clari’s Account Engagement automatically combines CRM data with activity signals from email, calendar, marketing automation, and other business systems—leveraging Clari’s time-series Data Hub—to provide a holistic view into every touchpoint and the history of every account. Account Engagement drives visibility and insights across the entire revenue process.
Clari’s time-series Data Hub ingests all of your CRM and activity signals in real time. Our AI and analytics engine then automatically illuminates insights in a user-friendly interface across both web and mobile. This means that you always have key insights at your fingertips when running your one-on-one sales meetings, forecast calls, pipelines calls and all other critical moments in revenue operations.
However, visibility is not valuable in a silo. Solutions need to empower confidence as well. Insights from Account Engagement enable you to proactively react as changes emerge throughout the quarter. By tracking account engagement in parallel with sales forecasting, revenue teams can ensure they meet their quota and drive predictable revenue quarter after quarter.
Mastering Challenge #2: Use insights to align departments and close more deals, faster
According to a study by Business2Community.com, 74% of B2B sales roles said their opportunities had decreased since the coronavirus outbreak.
That statistic is staggering. But it may not tell an accurate story.
Many revenue leaders are unable to track prospect and customer engagement effectively because their visibility is limited to outdated spreadsheets and CRM. They don’t have the time to manually update their systems or pull together siloed tools and stitch together a cohesive report that tells the full story.
With Clari’s Account Engagement, revenue leaders can leverage activity insights to confidently forecast their number and manage their teams to get there. This visibility helps the entire revenue organization—sales, customer success, and marketing—align their efforts, optimize territory coverage, and maximize the impact.
- Sales teams can quickly and easily see how buyers and sellers are engaging with accounts, identify accounts that are at risk, and track whitespace potential, so they can strategically allocate resources to increase penetration into new accounts.
- Customer success teams can manage how they are prioritizing their time to influence and drive renewals and expansions.
- Marketing teams can know they are investing their resources in the right accounts and provide a smooth handoff with the sales team to ensure reps follow up on engagements.
A perfect example of this alignment in action is how our revenue team pivoted in the face of COVID-19. The field marketing team, for example, had to shift their in-person events. Here’s their story.
Account Engagement in Action
Our field marketing team partnered with sales in a deal acceleration program, where the sales team measured their accounts by stage and engagement. The program enabled reps to send a strategic gift to their accounts.
With Clari Account Engagement, sales was easily able to identify accounts that weren’t engaged or had gone silent. Marketing quickly reacted and reinvigorated these engagements.
The visibility helped the team make the most of their resources, engage the opportunities that needed it most, and help the company grow even in such an uncertain time.
Unlock visibility into your Account Engagement today
So, what does account-level visibility look like in Clari? With Account Engagement, you can easily track account health by leveraging Clari’s time-series Data Hub to combine CRM data with activity signals from email, calendar, marketing automation, and other business systems. You can have a holistic view into every touch-point and the history of every account at your fingertips.
Learn how Account Engagement can empower your team today to identify risk, address opportunities, and take control of your accounts. You can not only survive in these times—but thrive.