For those complex B2B sales, a unique strategy is necessary to close the deal.
Businesses must gear up their sales team for an approach that harmonizes sales with multichannel interactions.
This strategy is known as sales orchestration. Why do businesses need it?
Customers, especially B2B customers, get confused when the dots aren’t connected. And confused customers don’t buy.
With sales orchestration and innovative platforms like Breadcrumbs, sellers can connect the dots between people, processes, technology, and information.
Understanding Sales Orchestration
It’s no longer enough to have a great product. Buyers want more personal connections.
When your sales tools are well-orchestrated, you can create personalized customer experiences. And when customers receive a better customer experience, 86% of them will pay more for your product or service.
They’ll also buy more often. Nearly 50% of buyers make impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience.
Sales orchestration involves coordinating data from multiple platforms to create a more connected buying experience. This enhances sales efficiency, customer experience, and sales processes.
For example, Pumpkin, a pet wellness company, uses its website to promote its cat insurance offering.
Pumpkin’s website provides valuable information about cat health, wellness, and insurance, as well as testimonials, FAQs, and a free quote tool.
The bottom line: Pumpkin offers multiple touchpoints that educate and persuade potential customers.
The Role of Multi-Touchpoint Sales Strategies in Complex B2B Sales
B2B buyers tend to stall in the purchase journey because they have to confer with multiple stakeholders and navigate through the complexity of B2B products.
And if that’s not enough of a challenge, Gartner estimates that sales reps have roughly 5% of a customer’s time during their B2B buying journey.
So, engaging B2B leads at various stages of the buying cycle is extremely important. This involves using a variety of channels to reach and engage with prospective buyers.
From ads to social media to email marketing, there are various multi-touchpoint strategies to nurture, engage, and guide B2B leads down the funnel.
The above LinkedIn ad is just one example of how B2B brands can drive interactions with potential buyers.
But the true power of multi-touchpoint strategies doesn’t lie in the variety of marketing channels at your disposal.
It lies in the potential to tailor these strategies based on lead preferences and behaviors to drive engagement and conversions.
When you use sales and marketing strategies that your leads are more likely to engage with, this increases the chances of conversions and can even shorten the B2B sales cycle.
Let’s look at a few examples of this in action.
Blooming Connections
Imagine a scenario where your B2B company is nurturing a relationship with a potential client based in Florida.
Using data, you learned that one of the company’s key decision-makers wants a personalized experience beyond what anyone would expect.Instead of the traditional follow-up methods, you might partner up with a local Fort Lauderdale florist and surprise the prospect with a beautifully arranged bouquet delivered straight to their office.
While this strategy might seem far-fetched, it adds a personal touch that sets you apart from competitors and opens the doors to key decision-makers.
Nurturing Future Scholars
Consider Campus.edu, a community college with an online application form. When a prospective student doesn’t finish filling out the form, the institution may send out a follow-up email to nurture and re-engage the lead.
The email might include more information about their programs or an introduction to some of their top professors.
Tailoring Finance Content
MOS, a banking app catering to students, consistently produces captivating and relevant content on their social media channels, specifically tailored to their followers’ needs and interests, such as financial aid information.
This strategic approach ensures that MOS remains top-of-mind among its audience, fostering a strong and lasting connection (on the platforms they enjoy).
Integrating Lead Scoring into Sales Orchestration
We know that lead scoring is the process of prioritizing high-value leads. But this is difficult when only 5% of sales reps say the leads they receive from marketing are high-quality.
How can sales orchestration help with this? Well, understanding the behaviors and preferences of your leads can help you refine lead scoring criteria, which helps guide your sales efforts.
This is where sales orchestration comes in, as it facilitates personalized communication with leads. Using lead scoring data, your sales teams can tailor their messaging and content to address each lead segment’s specific needs and interests.
Breadcrumbs is a sophisticated tool that enables complex B2B sales surfacing intent coming from all of your company’s tech stack, which might include a CRM, MAP, product usage, or data enrichment tools.
You’ll no longer have to manually update your CRM, MAP, and other data sources. Breadcrumbs can help you implement sales orchestrations to enhance, clean, and sync your critical data automatically.
4 Strategies for Effective Sales Orchestration
So, we’ve discussed the importance of sales orchestration and how you can implement it into other sales processes.
Now, let’s discuss how to carry out an effective sales orchestration strategy.
1. Collect and Analyze Data
Collect data on leads, prospects, and customers. This includes gathering information from observing their behaviors, preferences, and interactions with your company.
Analyze this data to gain valuable insights into customer journeys, pain points, and preferences.
As you analyze the data, try to identify patterns and trends. For example, consider the effectiveness of lead sources. Or determine which of your sales tactics yield the best results.
Armed with this data, your sales team can better target their outreach, personalize communications, and carry out more effective sales strategies.
2. Facilitate Cross-Team Collaboration
A lot of businesses give their B2B sales reps access to training and resources as well as a website to work with. These companies expect sales reps to somehow manage all of it independently.
However, the sales world is vast and complicated, especially when considering complex B2B sales.
The whole organization can work with sales to help them streamline the sales process and close deals.
For example, marketing or product management can send over qualification questions, steps to take, or links to helpful content like sales videos and demos.
Sales trainers and consultants can define their best practices through this system. They can make sure this system can integrate with your existing tools and systems.
From there, you can put it in the hands of your sales team, which now has a clear plan that everyone can follow.
They’ll know the right questions to ask, where to find helpful materials, and the best steps to take to win a deal.
Sales orchestration enables data collection and integrates it with tools your company may already use, such as CRMs and task management systems. You can also connect to other systems using an API.
Breadcrumbs offers a variety of integrations to help you centralize and maximize your tech stack.
So, sales orchestration can get everyone on the same page rather than leaving sellers with just a CRM to fill out. They use the same plan, follow the same processes, and tell the same story to customers.
3. Leverage Technology
Sales orchestration is all about organizing your sales efforts around your existing systems.
Leveraging technology can help you achieve this by automating and optimizing sales orchestration.
CRMs, marketing automation tools, and sales enablement platforms can help manage leads and interactions efficiently.
Then, sales orchestration platforms can help you push data externally via APIs, acquire new contacts using AI, and improve data quality to match leads to accounts.
These workflows running in the background give sales teams more time to focus on higher-impact activities.
4. Strive Toward Continuous Improvement
Sales orchestration is an ongoing process of improvement and optimization.
- Use sales metrics and regularly assess your sales processes. This will help you figure out what areas need refining and which ones don’t.
- Encourage feedback from your sales team. After all, they’re on the front lines, which means they have firsthand knowledge of what’s working and what’s not. Regularly check in with them to get their input on the orchestration process.
- Use A/B testing to test different aspects of your sales orchestration. Test different versions of your processes and messaging to see which ones are better at driving conversions and closing deals. These real-world outcomes can help you fine-tune your approach.
- Empower your sales team with ongoing training and education. That way, they’ll become more adept at using orchestration tools and strategies effectively.
Best Practices and Challenges
In B2B sales, deals often involve many steps and take time. It’s vital to understand every step a potential customer takes. That’s where identity resolution comes into play.
It’s like solving a puzzle, each piece being a customer interaction. Identity resolution connects these interactions, both offline and online.
With a complete picture, your business can better meet customer needs and improve their chances of making a sale.
Hightouch’s identity resolution feature allows you to create accurate customer profiles with all your data, no matter where it’s stored.
Here are some other best practices for implementing sales orchestration and multi-touchpoint strategies.
- Define clear objectives.
- Segment your audience.
- Create and deliver relevant content that aligns with your prospect’s needs and interests at each touchpoint.
- Create strong sales and marketing team alignment.
- Use automation tools like Breadcrumbs.
- Implement lead scoring to prioritize needs based on their readiness to buy.
- Regularly track performance.
Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Challenge: Incomplete or inaccurate data.
Fix: Invest in data cleansing and integration tools
Challenge: Multiple touch points that lead to complexity and inconsistency
Fix: Create a sales orchestration plan that outlines each touch point and use integration tools that deepen the insights that live within your existing tech stack.
Challenge: Time-consuming content development for multiple touchpoints.
Fix: Create a content library for sales teams to repurpose and tailor for different segments and stages.
Future Trends in Sales Orchestration
Sales orchestration is a relatively new concept, so there’s no telling where it’ll take us, especially when technology is involved.
39% of B2B organizations are already experimenting with chatbots for conversational marketing.
Emerging trends like AI and machine learning partnered with predictive analytics will make sales orchestration efforts all the more powerful. This synergy will open the doors for more personalized customer journeys.
Wrapping Up
Like any sales strategy, sales orchestration requires practice, finesse, and a constant ear to the ground.
Plus, as the B2B landscape evolves, embracing this multifaceted approach helps you build a competitive advantage and boost your bottom line.
So, are you ready to conduct your sales symphony and turn prospects into harmonious partnerships? Let the art of sales orchestration be your maestro.