Guide Your Team to Successful Personalization at Scale with Technology

 

Unfortunately, when the quantity of messages increases, the quality of the outreach often suffers.

And in a post-COVID world where people are starved for human connections, CSOs need to ensure their need for speed doesn’t get in the way of personal, meaningful communication.

So, how do you combine personalization and volume?

The answer is simple — technology. Unfortunately, implementing it isn’t quite as simple.

Today, we’re going to show you how to use technology to set up a process for personalization at scale.

The Demand for Personalization in Sales

While cold outreach has long been a crucial component of the sales cycle, the best teams know that cold doesn’t have to mean frozen, stiff, and impersonal. Even a little personalization to a basic email can add some warmth to your messaging and strengthen your company’s future relationships with potential prospects.

In the book, Tech Powered Sales: How to Unleash the Modern Sales Stack, Justin Michael and Tony J. Hughes note that personalization is the force multiplier of sales.

Show your customers that you understand them from day one, and they’ll want to interact with you.

Unfortunately, while it’s easy to personalize messages for a handful of customers, it’s much tougher to apply personalization to a large volume of prospects and clients.

Currently, only around 31% of consumers believe that marketers get personalization right. The figures aren’t any better for sales teams. And while a mass-market approach to sales can be useful in finding more leads and generating awareness, it does little to improve conversion rates.

The good news is that this presents a huge opportunity to stand out. If you can figure out what your consumers need and answer their questions before they ask, you can get the edge in this new sales landscape.

Are you an Outreach user? Read: How to Do Personalization at Scale with Outreach

Personalization at Scale: Leverage Tech for Volume and Value

Technology is the key to achieving personalization at scale. This may not be news to you, but it still surprises me how many people try to do their outreach manually or just do mass messages without any thought to true personalization.

The right tech can help you collect information at scale, segment your target audience, and even send the right messages at the right time. And those three things together are how you make your prospects feel like you’re speaking directly to them.

Getting to Know Your Audience

Technology gives you the power to collect huge amounts of data and convert that data into meaningful insights for your team.

For instance, A CRO solution or sales engagement platform can pull information from multiple touchpoints in your buyer journey. You can track emails to individual clients, open rates, responses, and even sentiment about prospective clients.

As you gather this information, it’s important to make sure you’re selling to individual people. Don’t just grab random information from a LinkedIn profile. Everyone knows this trick, and this demonstrates minimal effort on your part. Instead, look at the customer’s website and profile, see what they’ve been doing lately, and what role they play in their business. That is the kind of information that will allow you to speak directly to your prospect’s individual needs and issues.

The more information you gather through online analytics, CRM tools, phone conversations, and market intelligence, the easier it is to build a rich profile of your prospect or customer. And the richer your profile, the better your personalization.

Pitching Solutions to Problems

When selling at volume, a lot of companies make the mistake of making the sales message all about them and what they can do.

Your sales message needs to focus on the problems your customers are facing. Look at the information you gathered in the previous step and in previous conversations.

What kind of questions do your customers often ask before considering a sale?

How much information do they need?

Is there a pattern for the kind of proof customers want to see?

Start with an outline of the points you want to make and then use references and examples the buyer can resonate with.

Usually, your sales engagement tools will give you insight into the most relevant trends to the different segments of your audience. You can apply those ideas to different segments and use them to craft better scripts for your sales teams to use when writing emails or making calls.

According to Gerry Moran, Tech Marketer and Founder of Marketing Think, the best relationships start when you put the other person first. Focus your sales strategy on what the customer needs and wants from your brand to create a more personal experience.

Improving Sales Techniques

You can also use sales technology to improve your employees’ processes and practices to connect with customers.

For instance, you may use automation to implement personalization tactics for all outreach strategies by immediately launching a buyer profile for a sales team member when they’re writing an email or making a call. This will allow the employee to call the customer by name and even reference their business title or area of expertise.

Encourage your sales teams to ask your prospect’s as many questions as possible. The more you learn, the easier it will be to segment your prospects based on the kind of sequences that you may need to use with them.

For instance, if you’re selling to a client that sells complimentary products to yours, has its own sales development teams, and operates in your target industries, you might create a formula for various touches over 90 days. This formula could include everything from LinkedIn conversations to calls and emails.

Pay attention to customer preferences when they make them obvious too. Make sure it’s easy for an employee to quickly add information to a customer profile noting that they prefer to communicate by phone, for example. When the next agent picks up the profile, they should know not to continue the sales cycle with a standard email, but use a phone call again.

Automated suggestions and sales playbooks can offer an excellent launching pad for better sales conversations. However, make sure that your employees feel comfortable going off-script at times too.

Change Your Sales Metrics

If you want to upgrade your sales processes, you’ll need to adapt how your team measures success.

According to a survey by CMI, 91% of content marketers personalize their content to a decision maker’s needs. That means, if your sales team isn’t measuring its ability to personalize, you could be missing out on opportunities.

Updating your metrics and the way that you identify success will help drive your agents in the right direction. You can try testing your approaches by allowing half of your sales team to continue business as usual, while the other half takes a more personalized stance.

As Elinor Stutz, Founding Member of the Sales Enablement Society, says, the worst approach in business is making assumptions. Guessing at what someone’s situation is like rarely works well.

So, devote some extra time to talking with customers. Don’t make assumptions and find out what metrics are most important to track. Creating a closed-loop sales environment where you can ask your customers for feedback on the sales experience is a great way to build new opportunities for the future.

You can also get feedback from your sales teams about which strategies and solutions they think work best.

Leading Your Team to Ongoing Revenue

The right set of sales engagement solutions makes it easier for business leaders to guide their team towards more repeatable revenue. However, that doesn’t mean your people should be using the same approach for every customer.

Divide your clients into segments that will make it easier for you to customize the sales strategy to suit their needs.

Stronger relationships between companies and customers are key to success. While that has always been the case for sales teams, it’s particularly crucial in the era after COVID. Today’s customers need to know that their companies have their best interests at heart.

The only way to help your team understand your customer is to give them a complete view of the sales journey. That means not just focusing on CRM technology insights or emails but looking at everything in one unified environment.

The right sales engagement and enablement tools can help you do this by combining all of your essential information into something more comprehensive for your teams to use when they’re approaching clients.

At the same time, better information will make it easier for your employees to maintain relationships with existing customers. Remember, it costs five times more to attract a new customer than keep one.

As your teams continue to learn more things about your customers from sales conversations, you can use your tools to collect that information and enhance your playbooks.

Sales Should Remain Personal at Volume

Selling at scale is a crucial part of business growth. However, there’s more to sales than throwing something at the wall and waiting to see what sticks.

Personalization at scale isn’t easy, but in today’s world, it’s necessary. So, don’t skip it.

As we head into the future of the business landscape, ensure you’re empowering your team members with the right selection of tools to allow them to connect personally with every prospect — even at scale.

The more information and guidance your employees have when it comes to supporting the sales cycle, the easier it will be for them to reach their goals.

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