How to increase revenue by eliminating guesswork

Busi­ness has always been about gain­ing an edge over com­peti­tors. And com­pa­nies’ sales and mar­ket­ing teams are some of the most vital cogs in help­ing busi­ness­es eke out that advan­tage, bring­ing in new cus­tomers and find­ing new seams of growth to tap into.

But the process isn’t with­out its issues. Though both func­tions are high­ly skilled, there’s a large amount of guess­work that goes into craft­ing a suc­cess­ful sales and mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy for a busi­ness. “Peo­ple hear ‘guess­work’ and at first think, ‘that’s so rude’,” says Latané Conant, chief mar­ket offi­cer at 6sense, a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny that helps busi­ness-to-busi­ness organ­i­sa­tions improve rev­enue growth by util­is­ing big data and AI. “But the real­i­ty is when you’re look­ing at small sam­ple sizes of data, it’s like tak­ing two points and extrap­o­lat­ing a trend.”

That’s by neces­si­ty: the data sets that mar­ket­ing teams have access to are often lim­it­ed, and first-par­ty data sets that busi­ness­es may col­lect in the course of their oper­a­tions aren’t always that use­ful. “We’re only look­ing at around 10% of the pic­ture,” says Conant. It’s what 6sense calls ‘the dark fun­nel’, where buy­ers often remain anony­mous through a large pro­por­tion of the pur­chase jour­ney, only sur­fac­ing when they’ve already made up their mind to buy or not – and from whom.

To try and plug that knowl­edge gap, busi­ness­es extrap­o­late, assume and guess. They pic­ture ide­alised cus­tomers and try to tar­get them with mar­ket­ing mes­sages in the hope of hook­ing in cus­tomers they think will want their prod­ucts or ser­vices, doing so from the scant amount of data they do have. But it’s not always accu­rate, and it often is waste­ful.

As belts tight­en and bud­gets become more con­strained, there’s a press­ing need for com­pa­nies to get smarter about their busi­ness­es. Increas­ing rev­enue and pur­su­ing strong growth strate­gies is the goal of any busi­ness – but the chal­leng­ing con­di­tions in which we live today make that more press­ing than ever. “I guar­an­tee that every sin­gle CMO and CRO recent­ly had a board meet­ing where they were direct­ed to do more with less,” says Conant.

Com­pa­nies are los­ing $2tn in poten­tial rev­enue by using out­dat­ed sales and mar­ket­ing process­es, accord­ing to Boston Con­sult­ing Group. “It’s from things like guess­work, a lack of align­ment and poor data qual­i­ty,” says Conant. “Because you don’t real­ly under­stand the pat­terns in the dark fun­nel, you end up spend­ing a lot on things like adver­tis­ing,” she con­tin­ues. “It’s not a bad thing to do, but it’s broad. Of course, that’s going to cre­ate a lot of waste.”

It’s a waste that exec­u­tives are keen to tamp down on at a time when uncer­tain­ty rules the mar­ket. But squeez­ing out the extra advan­tages – doing more with less – isn’t as easy as it seems. “Your first blush is to say: ‘Well, it’s not like I’ve been doing less with more’,” says Conant. “We’re already maxed out, and peo­ple are already burned out.”

She sug­gests that a fun­da­men­tal change is need­ed in the sales and mar­ket­ing func­tions of busi­ness­es. “The good news is that when peo­ple start to under­stand and unpack where that waste is, all of a sud­den you think: ‘hell yeah, I can do more with less’. There are a lot of easy areas, but it takes a change.”

Those easy areas to pick off as a busi­ness include focus­ing sales pri­ori­ti­sa­tion to do things smarter, rather than broad­er. Sales head­count is a huge expense for busi­ness­es, and putting them to the right tasks is a quick and easy way to tack­le inef­fi­cien­cies in your com­pa­ny. Anoth­er area to tack­le is han­dling web­site bud­gets – and dri­ving traf­fic to them – more tight­ly. 6sense con­duct­ed a study across mul­ti­ple indus­tries that showed just 3% of web­site traf­fic fills out a form. “All that time, all that mon­ey and all that ener­gy are spent to know about 3% of users,” says Conant. “What about the 97%?”

Learn­ing about them is tough – but can be done. Big data and the deploy­ment of AI allow busi­ness­es to peek into the deci­sions that go into a busi­ness pur­chase. “One of the stark­est dif­fer­ences between B2B and B2C is the num­ber of peo­ple involved in a buy­ing deci­sion,” says Conant. “It’s not just one buy­er or one per­son.” Busi­ness­es’ pur­chase deci­sions go through teams and lay­ers of bureau­cra­cy that big data can help cut through. “All of a sud­den you can opti­mise your com­plete go-to-mar­ket motion based on tim­ing,” says Conant. “Tru­ly where the jour­ney is. Not where you think the jour­ney is, but where it actu­al­ly is.”

For some busi­ness­es, the idea of dab­bling in big data and AI seems daunt­ing, but 6sense takes out the com­pli­ca­tions. “We’ve built our com­pa­ny on mak­ing it easy,” says Conant. Cus­tomers who approach 6sense often wor­ry their data is so bad and so dis­parate that it can’t be trans­lat­ed into mean­ing­ful insights. “If our com­pa­ny relied on peo­ple hav­ing decent data, we’d have no busi­ness,” she jokes. “We’ve per­fect­ed the onboard­ing process of bring­ing their data in, and mar­ry­ing it with our data.” 6sense fills in the gaps in knowl­edge, pro­vid­ing bet­ter insight into pur­chas­ing deci­sions.

For some com­pa­nies, it can be a strug­gle to win over their sales team to a new, data-led way of work. “We found the key to sales adop­tion is show­ing the why, she says. 6sense presents the data into users’ work­flow and adds con­text so sales and mar­ket­ing staff under­stand why deci­sions are made and where. “That’s crit­i­cal for build­ing trust,” says Conant.

The com­pa­ny stud­ies its cus­tomer data every quar­ter, and sees increas­es in the sales veloc­i­ty for­mu­la – the aver­age sell­ing prices, win rates and cycle times. “That is so tremen­dous­ly mind­blow­ing,” says Conant. “We see it over and over and over again.”

To find out more, vis­it 6sense.com

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Pro­mot­ed by 6sense