Top 5 Trends That Will Impact Sales Operations in 2025 RevOps 10 min Imagine having a machine. A machine with all the parts in working condition, it’s even run daily but produces suboptimal outputs.  The issue is – ‘Oiling.’ Without proper and regular oiling, the various parts of the machine can’t function properly. To make the machine work cohesively, oiling is required.  Sales optimization tools can help with the oiling. It is done so that the sales function produces optimal results.  What is sales process optimization? Sales process optimization refers to refining and improving the steps in selling a product or service to a customer. The process typically includes steps such as lead generation, lead qualification, needs assessment, proposal creation, negotiation, and closing the sale. Sales process optimization aims to increase efficiency and effectiveness, resulting in more successful sales and increased revenue. How do Sales Optimization Tools Work? Sales process optimization is essential in B2B sales, where the sales cycle is often longer and more complex than in B2C sales. In B2B sales, the process typically involves multiple decision-makers and influencers, and the sales rep needs to demonstrate how the product or service will address the business’s specific needs. Here are some key ways in which sales process optimization works in B2B sales: 1. Identifying and targeting the right prospects Sales process optimization in B2B sales involves identifying and targeting the most promising prospects with customized messaging and outreach. This involves using data analytics to identify businesses that are a good fit for the product or service and creating targeted marketing campaigns to reach them. 2. Understanding the buying process B2B sales often involve multiple decision-makers and influencers, and it’s important to understand the buying process for each prospect. Sales reps need to identify the key decision-makers, understand their needs and priorities, and tailor their messaging accordingly. 3. Creating a value proposition In B2B sales, it’s important to demonstrate how the product or service will provide value to the business. Sales reps need to articulate a compelling value proposition that addresses the prospect’s specific needs and pain points. 4. Managing the sales process B2B sales often involve a longer sales cycle than B2C sales, and it’s essential to manage the process effectively. This may include using CRM software to track leads and opportunities, setting up regular touchpoints with the prospect, and managing the negotiation and closing process. 5. Analyzing and optimizing the sales process Finally, sales process optimization in B2B sales involves analyzing sales data and feedback to identify areas for improvement. Sales reps need to be able to adjust their approach based on what works and what doesn’t and continually refine their sales process to improve outcomes. A Closer Look At a Sales Optimization Process Now that we have understood the role of sales optimization in B2B segment, let’s understand the process in a step-by-step format:   1. Define your goals The first step in sales optimization is to define your goals. This may involve setting specific targets for revenue, number of sales, or other metrics that are important to your business. 2. Analyze your current sales process The next step is to analyze your current sales process to identify areas for improvement. This may involve reviewing your sales data, talking to your sales team, and gathering feedback from customers. 3. Develop a plan Based on your analysis, develop a plan for optimizing your sales process. This may involve making changes to your sales strategy, implementing new tools or technologies, or providing additional training to your sales team. 4. Implement your plan Once you have a plan in place, it’s time to implement it. This may involve rolling out new processes or tools, providing training to your sales team, or adjusting your sales strategy. 5. Monitor your results As you implement your plan, it’s important to monitor your results. Track your progress against your goals, analyze your sales data, and gather feedback from your team and customers to identify areas where you can continue to improve. 6. Continuously improve Sales optimization is an ongoing process, so it’s important to continue refining and improving your sales process over time. This may involve making small adjustments based on feedback and data analysis or making larger changes if your goals or market conditions shift. Let’s have a look at some sales optimization examples to understand the use cases of the above processes in real-life.  Use Cases of Sales Optimization Tools Sales optimization has a wide range of use cases in B2B sales, including automating lead generation, personalizing the sales experience, improving group intelligence, and implementing a sales enablement strategy. By leveraging sales optimization tools and techniques, businesses can improve their sales outcomes, increase efficiency, and drive revenue growth. Here are some examples of sales optimization that businesses implement to improve their sales outcomes: 1. Automate lead generation Businesses can use automated lead generation tools to identify potential customers based on specific criteria instead of relying solely on manual prospecting. This can help streamline the sales process and reduce the time and effort required to find new leads. 2. Personalize the sales experience Personalization can help sales teams better understand the specific needs and preferences of the stakeholders in a buying committee. This allows them to tailor their messaging and approach to each stakeholder, increasing the likelihood of resonating with each individual and ultimately closing the deal. By having insights into all the stakeholders, sales teams can also multithread better, meaning they can engage with multiple stakeholders simultaneously and build a rapport with each of them.  3. Open more doors with more active contacts Encourage multithreaded conversations by equipping your reps with additional contacts. Provide your representatives with more contacts automatically discovered from all sales tools.  4. Improved group intelligence Instantly grant your reps the knowledge of a buying committee map, so they know whom to engage, how, and when to best influence deal progress. 5. Real-time activity intelligence Automatically capture both structured and unstructured data and update it in real-time against active opportunities

Revenue leader’s guide to successful board meetings! GTM RevOps 10 min It’s quite common for sales leaders to get invited to board meetings. So, what do you do when called in to present your sales strategy and report card to the board? At Nektar.ai, we spoke to 72 professionals who have been Board members, VP Sales, Founders and CEOs and asked them this very same question. This playbook is a result of those responses and best practices. Just like for any deal in your CRM system, where you define your sales process, you need to break your board interaction as well into logical stages. Pre-meeting: What’s the construct of the board? Research about the board members and the role they play. What’s the preparation required for the board meeting? In-meeting: What’s the approach one can take to handle the board meeting successfully and build one’s credibility? Post-meeting: How should revenue leaders engage with boards and their CEO post-board meetings? Pre-Meeting Checklist Understand the dynamics of the board. A VP of sales must analyze his/her board similar to how they would draw an account plan and relationship map for a strategic prospect. Eg. Which board members are very involved in the strategy side and carry a big influence on the board? Which members are functional experts and tend to get operationally involved? What are the backgrounds of the various members? What role do they play? Know what matters. Spend time in advance or at the beginning of the meeting asking the question “What are the top 3 things you want to know about our sales strategy?” Going prepared with an answer to this question will help you to save a lot of time and trepidation. Begin with the end in mind. Before you begin, understand what they want. It can be tempting to spend a lot of time to prepare for every possible scenario of what they could ask for. You should know that there are probably only a couple of key things they want to know. In-Meeting Checklist Keep it contextual & crisp. They will never have the context, but you do. When you share your strategy, you need to meet them at their level. Most investors usually fly around 30k feet & do not have the time or interest in coming down. They need to be able to grasp your strategy easily & not get over-involved in a barrage of details. Remember, Less is More! Use frameworks. Your strategy needs to be at a framework level. The key question to answer is, can this strategy be applied to ‘N’ number of different companies or scenarios? A framework always helps! Articulate clearly and simply. Board members generally try to ascertain if the sales leader delivered the quarter because of some lucky save or it was a quarter-end “home run” deal, or because of a predictable sales playbook that’s well integrated into the revenue management system that is put in place leading to repeatable results. Build credibility. Building credibility with the board is important, once it’s lost, it’s hard to recover. Sales leaders should be forthcoming on the key problems in the business. You should be willing to tell and not just sell! Be critical: Even if it’s a great quarter, a VP Sales must take a critical view on what could be the areas of improvement. Board members want sales leaders to demonstrate that they are continuously iterating and finding ways to improve results, even when they are hitting the quota. Be a business leader & not just a functional leader. Boards of directors value sales leaders who can take ownership over the business instead of just demonstrating mastery of the sales function. Keep the presentations simple and consistent. Use a small set of leading and lagging data indicators to demonstrate the progress being made against the intended benchmarks and consistently highlight them during quarterly board presentations. Be prepared to wear a suited armor of data, trends, insights and examples to handle the spear-shaped questions thrown at you like – How do we win in the market? Why do we lose deals? What are the win/loss reasons in each deal? What is our action plan to fix the reasons we lose? What are the biggest objections we get from potential customers? How often do we hear them? Is our sales team enabled with the battle card responses to these objections? How do we train our reps to respond? Where conversations are going off the track during the sales process? What discovery questions should we eliminate or add to qualify the prospect better? Do we identify and engage the right influencers and decision-makers in the opportunity? Have we identified the Ideal Customer Profile and do we sell to the right persona? Why are you waiting till the end of the quarter to make the changes to the sales process? Why not do them earlier? For you to be prepared with these responses, you must have a well-defined sales process and playbook. If implemented and tracked well, the sales playbook and the deviations to the same will give you enough insight into: Why sales reps go off script during the calls? How do prospects respond to the discovery questions? When prospects ghost you during the sales cycle? Which reps are single-threading on key deals? or Which deals are at risk even though the internal effort on them is already higher than the deal value itself? Now imagine, if you can operationalize and track your sales process and usage of the winning playbooks, the answers to the probing questions with data-backed responses can be like: Based on the 15 deal reviews, we found a trend in discovery calls going off-script when sales professionals get to budget-related conversations. To fix this, we have modified our calling script to help the sales team be more confident when talking about our pricing and value delivered. We have identified the top 3 objections during the sales process, and they are usually asked after the proposal is sent. We have started to address those objections during our first call itself, and we have also

What is Salesforce Tech Debt? And How Can You Reduce it? RevOps 10 min In a recent statement, Salesforce disclosed its intention to raise list prices across several product offerings, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries, and Tableau, with an average increase of 9%. Starting in August 2023, the revised list prices for certain Salesforce products will be implemented, targeting new customers and existing customers acquiring additional cloud services. Salesforce has outlined the following adjustments in pricing for their fundamental Sales and Service Cloud offerings: Professional Edition will increase from $75 to $80 Enterprise Edition will increase from $150 to $165 Unlimited Edition will increase from $300 to $330  These changes are going to affect a lot of organizations. Over 150,000 companies across industries use Salesforce. With specialized solutions for operations across sales, service, marketing, and commerce, it is no wonder that the hike in price would affect almost every industry. For companies using Salesforce, the major concern is: Salesforce Tech Debt.  What is Salesforce Technical Debt? Technical debt refers to the expense of having to do extra work later on due to opting for a quick solution in the present rather than investing the time in a more optimal approach. This concept is also commonly referred to as “Shift Left,” which emphasizes the idea that the sooner you identify and address issues, the more cost-effective it is to resolve them. Technical debt represents the additional effort required to rectify a hasty, less-informed solution chosen in the present (constructed quickly without a deep understanding of business requirements), as opposed to adopting a more time-consuming but superior approach. In a broader sense, technical debt encompasses any customizations, whether through code or declarative means, that were implemented when standard functionality wasn’t suitable or accessible. Technical debt can also contain situations where solutions were initially designed for a specific purpose, but as business needs evolved over time, small adjustments were tacked on. A more constructive perspective on technical debt is to recognize that virtually everything can be considered a form of technical debt, but it’s termed “debt” because it necessitates future efforts to address and resolve. In the past, technical debt was primarily associated with developers taking shortcuts in their code. However, in the era of low-code platforms such as Salesforce, technical debt can arise not only from coding decisions but also from the configuration choices made through user-friendly “clicks” within the platform. What Causes Tech Debt? Salesforce technical debt arises from rushed or suboptimal development practices, including quick fixes, inadequate adherence to best practices, complex customizations without proper planning, and neglect to update and adapt solutions over time. This debt accumulates when shortcuts are taken, making future maintenance and scalability more challenging and costly. Here are a few factors that can cause technical debt: 1. Modified or outdated design This occurs when the business requirements change, rendering certain functionalities unnecessary. However, it’s often deemed safer to retain these functionalities. 2. New releases This arises when the introduction of new platform features surpasses the capabilities of previous releases or custom development efforts. For instance, Salesforce Flows are taking precedence over process builders and workflow rules. 3. Intentional technical debt When a deliberate decision is made to expedite development, fully aware that it will entail higher long-term costs, but it’s considered the appropriate course of action. 4. Unintentional technical debt Accumulates when shortcuts are taken for various reasons, typically due to time constraints or concurrent workstreams. 5. Tacked-on technical debt Occurs when a particular functionality is continually extended incrementally and “bolted on” to maintain its functionality rather than undergoing a proper reconstruction. Up to this point, we’ve delved into the theoretical aspects of technical debt, discussing its causes and mechanisms. However, what does it actually manifest as in real-world scenarios? Let’s have a look: Common Forms of Salesforce Tech Debt Common forms of Salesforce technical debt include the accumulation of unused customizations, outdated roles and permission sets, complex and undocumented workflows, inadequate data modeling, and the absence of thorough testing. This technical debt arises when shortcuts are taken or best practices are overlooked during Salesforce development, making the system harder to maintain and optimize over time. Several prevalent forms of technical debt can be identified In Salesforce, including: 1. Visualforce component vs sales path Before the introduction of Sales Path, organizations required a visual means to depict the progress of an opportunity stage or process. To achieve this, they had to customize a Visualforce component. However, with the release of Sales Path by Salesforce, these visualizations became standardized, which subsequently led to an increase in the technical debt interest rate. 2. Adapting process automation The creators of 10K recognized the necessity of automating their invoice generation process. They initially developed an hourly function to create invoices, incorporating some basic rules. However, as their contract structures evolved, they found themselves adding more functions to their initially straightforward task. Managing these changes became increasingly challenging, prompting them to allocate time to rewrite the process based on the current state of their business operations. 3. Excessive customization As previously mentioned, Salesforce provides a user-friendly environment for creating custom Objects and code, even when a simpler declarative solution would suffice. For instance, opting for a workflow instead of resorting to triggers for scripting tasks. This form of technical debt often arises from an overly responsive approach, where every requested change is implemented without exploring alternative options within standard configurations. 4. Unused customizations Despite being promoted as a ‘no-code’ platform, Salesforce cannot handle every task declaratively. Changes in business requirements may render customizations that were once essential unnecessary. Unless these customizations are retired, they can introduce inherent complexity to every new change and potentially hinder end user adoption by making your Org more challenging to navigate. 5. Access controls You’ve likely encountered the concept of “the principle of least privilege.” On the flip side, we have the “principle of most privilege,” where users end up with excessive access as their roles within the organization evolve. While other forms of technical debt can impede progress, retaining unused profiles and permission

How Nektar Automates Buying Committee Engagement RevOps 10 min In today’s complex B2B sales environment, understanding and engaging with buying groups is crucial for driving revenue. Modern B2B buying decisions are made by groups, not individuals so traditional methods, like tracking Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), are no longer sufficient. This shift necessitates a new approach to tracking engagement, one that leverages advanced technology to automate and streamline the process. Nektar offers a powerful solution for sales teams looking to stay ahead. By automating the tracking of Buying Group Engagement, Nektar’s features ensure that every interaction is captured and analyzed, providing deep insights into the buying process. Features such as Automated Opportunity Contact Role Creation, Conditional OCR, Intelligent Meeting Tagging, and Contact Participation (Meeting Intelligence) work together to create a comprehensive and automated engagement tracking system. In this blog, we will explore how Nektar’s advanced capabilities can transform your sales process, making it more efficient and effective by automating the tracking of Buying Group Engagement. We’ll delve into each feature, highlighting its benefits and real-world applications, to show you how Nektar can help your team achieve greater success in today’s competitive market. Understanding Buying Group Engagement Buying Group Engagement refers to the interactions and activities involving multiple stakeholders within an organization who collectively make purchasing decisions. Unlike the traditional focus on individual leads, Buying Group Engagement acknowledges the collaborative nature of B2B purchases, where various roles such as decision-makers, influencers, and end-users all contribute to the final decision. In modern B2B sales, it’s essential to track and manage these engagements effectively. Understanding who is involved in the buying process, their roles, and their level of participation helps sales teams tailor their strategies and communication. This approach not only enhances the relevance of sales efforts but also increases the likelihood of closing deals by addressing the needs and concerns of all key stakeholders. By automating the tracking of these engagements, sales teams can gain comprehensive insights into the buying dynamics, enabling them to engage more effectively and drive better outcomes. How Nektar Automates Buying Group Engagement Choosing From 5 Types of Sales Territory Mapping Nektar’s innovative approach to automating Buying Group Engagement leverages several key features that streamline and enhance the process of managing interactions with multiple stakeholders. Here’s a detailed look at how each feature contributes to a more efficient and effective sales strategy: 1. Automated Opportunity Contact Role Creation Nektar’s Automated Opportunity Contact Role Creation feature automatically identifies and assigns contact roles to opportunities within your CRM. This automation ensures that all relevant stakeholders are accurately documented and associated with each opportunity, reducing the manual effort typically required. Benefits: Time-Saving: Eliminates the need for sales reps to manually input and update contact roles, freeing up their time to focus on selling activities.Accuracy: Ensures that all contact roles are correctly and consistently assigned, reducing errors and improving data integrity.Visibility: Provides a clear view of all individuals involved in the buying process, helping sales teams better understand and manage their interactions. 2. Conditional OCR (Opportunity Contact Role) Conditional OCR allows for the creation of contact roles based on specific, predefined conditions. This feature enables sales teams to customize how and when contact roles are created, based on criteria that are most relevant to their sales processes. Benefits: Customization: Tailors the contact role creation process to fit the unique needs of different sales teams or business units.Efficiency: Automatically applies the right conditions for contact role creation, ensuring that only the most relevant contacts are included.Scalability: Supports the management of complex sales environments with numerous stakeholders and varying engagement scenarios. 3. Intelligent Meeting Tagging Nektar’s Intelligent Meeting Tagging feature automatically tags meetings with relevant information, making it easier to track and analyze interactions with buying group members. This feature leverages AI to identify key details from meetings and associates them with the appropriate contacts and opportunities. Benefits: Enhanced Insights: Provides detailed insights into the content and outcomes of meetings, helping sales teams understand engagement levels and follow up effectively.Consistency: Ensures that all relevant meeting information is captured and tagged correctly, enhancing the quality of data in the CRM.Productivity: Reduces the manual effort required to document meetings, allowing sales reps to focus more on strategic activities. 4. Contact Participation (Meeting Intelligence) The Contact Participation feature tracks and analyzes the participation of contacts in meetings. By monitoring who attends and actively participates in meetings, sales teams can gain valuable insights into the engagement levels of different stakeholders within the buying group. Benefits: Engagement Tracking: Identifies key influencers and decision-makers based on their participation and engagement in meetings. Actionable Insights: Helps sales teams tailor their follow-up strategies based on the involvement and interest levels of different contacts. Data-Driven Decisions: Provides a data-driven approach to understanding and managing buying group dynamics, leading to more informed sales strategies. How GuideCX got Visibility into $1.7Mn Inactive Pipe Every company wants to squeeze out every drop of revenue from its active pipeline. Missing out on achievable quotas and letting potential revenue slip away due to inactivity and poor engagement have become the biggest sins in Sales. But what if there was a way to bring these dormant deals back into the spotlight for the sales teams? This is the scenario we explore—a practical challenge met with a pragmatic question, setting the stage for the journey ahead. This is the story of GuideCX and how they transformed deal prioritization using process automation, powered by customized rules that considered the engagement data that Nektar captured in their CRM. This helped GuideCX gain instant visibility into $1.7M worth of inactive deals, which otherwise would have been lost forever.   Ready to revolutionize your sales process with automated Buying Group Engagement? Discover how Nektar’s advanced features can help your team capture every interaction, gain deep insights, and drive better outcomes. In this blog

Configure Contact Roles on Salesforce to Unlock Immediate Efficiency Gains Discover how defining OCRs can enhance visibility into your buying committee, improve sales execution, and boost win rates. RevOps 10 min Let’s begin by simply defining what is an opportunity contact role (OCR). An OCR is a standard object on Salesforce within the Opportunity object that links Contacts to Opportunities, specifying the Contact’s role in that Opportunity. Having great OCR hygiene means sales leadership teams gain better visibility into the buying committee for each opportunity. Better visibility helps monitor if reps have at least identified the necessary people needed to win the deal. If the necessary people are involved, then sales leaders can guide their teams on the right engagement playbook to navigate the deal toward success. While sales teams know the importance of identifying and engaging the entire buying committee, not many follow this through to execution. This becomes worse when we consider the OCR data available in a CRM. Open any CRM today, and you will notice that a majority would have an average of 3 contact roles. Of those 3, one is usually a required field made mandatory by the revenue/sales operations or CRM admin. In companies that practice MEDDIC (and its variations), the ‘Economic Buyer’ and ‘Champion’ are identified and added to the CRM, but the remaining buyer roles are either identified but not added to the CRM or not identified at all. So why should OCRs matter? The answer to this question lies in whether or not you’re working on improving sales execution, rep efficiency, win rates, and forecasting. You’d be surprised if we told you how often we hear prospects say “We have no idea who our sellers are talking to” or “We don’t know how often we’re engaging buyers in open deals”. ‘Who’ you are talking to and ‘how often’ are you talking to buyers are the fundamental units of generating revenue. The ‘process’ of generating revenue can only be improved by tracking and measuring such fundamental units. You may be doing a great job with creating contact lists from third-party data tools like Zoominfo or Lusha or by auto-creating contacts in accounts with tools like Clari or Gong, but if such contacts are not being linked to opportunities, you are losing out on critical data. Technically, in CRM terms, opportunities are won, not accounts. And so having contact data is not good enough. You must aim to have granular and comprehensive contact role data. Introducing Configurable OCRs Using AI, automation, and graph inference, Nektar automatically creates contacts in the relevant accounts present in Salesforce. Until recently, Nektar would automatically associate these contacts as OCRs within the relevant open opportunities. There was no configuration needed. However, through customer feedback and research, Nektar is excited to announce ‘Configurable OCR’. An OCR record is only useful if it is: associated because it is actually involved in the deal a buying role was identified and assigned to it With configurable OCR, you can define rules using buyer-seller engagement data that Nektar has already added to the (open) opportunity and account. For example, a rule can be: “If engagement with contacts in an account is more than 5 times in the last 10 days, and if there is an open opportunity in those accounts, then associate such contacts as opportunity contact roles.” This example considers the recency and frequency of buyer engagement. So, only those contacts that are frequently engaged by the seller will get added to opportunities as OCRs. As a result, sales leaders gain instant visibility into who is actually involved in deals. This is just a simple, straightforward example of a rule. You can define your own rules. Additionally, you can customize the rule for the different segments you may have. For example, have a rule specifically for strategic accounts, expansion accounts, new business accounts, vertical-specific accounts, or any other segmentation you may have. Next, you can configure the second component – the buying role. If you’ve used Nektar, you would know that it extracts job titles from email signatures. A default capability we’ve always offered is to map out job titles to the respective buying roles. With this one-time configuration, as and when Nektar links OCRs, it also assigns a buying role to the OCR based on the corresponding job title. Now, using genAI automation you can define rules to assign an appropriate buying role. You can consider a combination of job titles and engagement trends, job titles and seniority, job titles and engagement and segment – whichever factors address your requirements. After all, the process of generating revenue is unique to a company. The best part is that all this is done using the standard Salesforce records, so they are easily reportable on Salesforce. This can also be achieved for your historical opportunities by backfilling them. Benefits of configurable OCRs Nektar customers use this OCR data for deal inspections, win-loss analyses, playbook optimization, and enhancing their multithreading strategy. Every opportunity has only those contact roles that are involved in the deal while the remaining stakeholders such as legal remain in the account as contacts. So sales leaders are able to monitor which job titles and buying roles are being engaged. Since historical data is also plugged in, you can study buying committee engagement for won and lost deals to analyze what worked and did not work. Some of our customers identified new personas in their closed deals, and have now started prospecting this persona actively to generate new pipeline. By studying won deals, you can also track the engagement pattern and work towards improving your multithreading strategy. Lastly, playbooks can be transformed. For example, one of our customers now has made it mandatory to have a specific number of contact roles if the deal is in stage 3 of the sales process. Similarly, answers to who, how often, and when should different people of the buying committee be engaged can be detailed out. Outside of the sales team, a clean and

9 Best Account Based Marketing Tools for 2025 Marketing RevOps The rapid growth of Account Based Marketing (ABM) tools proves a couple of things. One, you can’t please everyone – not in today’s competitive B2B market.   And two, you better focus on the markets that really matter. But running multi-channel ABM campaigns at scale is no joke.  That said, the latest ABM tools make the job a lot easier.  They turn you into a master strategist with real-time insights at your fingertips. Let’s look at the top ABM tools that you can consider in 2025. What is ABM? Account Based Marketing or ABM flips the traditional marketing funnel on its head. In it, marketing and sales work together from the get-go to: Identify high-value accounts that fit ICP criteria, Engage them with personalized content   Find key decision makers Lead them to closure Stay engaged to tap future opportunities ABM is not about one-and-done selling.  Rather it drives customer lifetime value. And there have been some incredible success stories here. 9 ABM Tools for 2025 1. 6 Sense Revenue AI 6Sense allows marketing teams to identify high-value accounts, predict their buyer journey based on account activity and engage them with the right messaging across touch points. Features: Updates contact lists automatically with additional information Segments users into cohorts based on specific behavior patterns Can track user activity across channels and attribute to the respective account. Pricing:  Varies based on the number of users, use case, etc. 2. Demandbase Demandbase comes with a comprehensive suite of features built around the Account-Based Experience concept.  It has three modules – ABX Cloud (ABM), Advertising Cloud (campaign management), and Data Cloud (integration support) Features: Provides account-level insights for campaign execution and orchestration Supports multiple ad formats allowing global reach Easy integration Pricing:  Varies based on the use case, number of users, etc. 3. Terminus Terminus offers full-funnel ABM capabilities including account management, execution, and reporting. It is designed for multi-channel campaigns and offers easy scalability. Has its own built-in database. Features: In-depth segmentation options including buyer intent Supports campaigns across multiple channels Pricing:  Varies based on the number of users and features needed 4. RollWorks RollWorks is a good fit for marketers who rely primarily on paid ads for lead generation. Features: Provides useful targeting recommendations based on historical campaign data Maps account to key decision-makers and present their contact information Provides contextual client information such as organizational changes, mergers, acquisitions, etc Pricing:  The Starter plan is $975/mo. For information on their other plans, contact customer support.  5. Triblio If personalization is a priority for you, Triblio could be the perfect solution.  Its USP is predictive orchestration which automates segmentation and targeting for higher personalization. Features: Visual campaign builder with drag-and-drop functionality Calculates conversion probability based on user intent and account activity Pricing:  Varies based on the number of features, use case, etc. 6. Vainu This is a sales intelligence tool that lets you find high-value accounts from its extensive global database. Vainu speeds up list building and provides contextual information on target accounts. Features Creates targeted contact lists based on ICPs and filters chosen Updates new contacts automatically Provides a single view of contacts stored across tools Pricing:  Free trial Team plan: EUR 4200/yr Business plan: EUR 9900/yr Global plan: EUR 12000/yr Custom Enterprise plan 7. Apollo.io Apollo offers prospecting, campaign orchestration, and sales engagement capabilities.  It lets you push personalized messages to target contacts and optimize your revenue strategy as you go along. Features: Lead database of 250m people and companies Engagement Suite for creating personalized marketing sequences based on ICPs Intelligence Suite with tracking, analytics, and targeting capabilities Pricing: Basic: $49/mo Professional: $99/mo Custom enterprise plans Free plan with limited features 8. Uberflip Uberflip is a content creation, curation, and distribution platform that helps marketers deliver relevant messaging. Features: Aggregates and serves personalized content based on intent data Built-in analytics for measuring content performance and strategy planning Pricing:  Varies based on the number of users and features 9. Alyce Alyce is an AI-powered gifting platform with ABM as a key use case.  It provides personalized gifting options for marketers to engage, convert and retain customers.  It offers gift tracking, budgeting, and reporting capabilities. Features: Comes with CRM integration and inventory management features Built-in analytics for monitoring spend, conversion, and ROI So How Exactly Does ABM Work? In ABM campaigns, marketers think of buyers not as individuals but as companies.  They work with sales to identify target businesses, nurture contacts (in buying teams), and engage key decision-makers. Both teams will work together to create personalized messaging for each key prospect to drive purchase intent.  This can include unique sales pitches aimed at dramatically increasing the odds of conversion. ABM may involve a lot of research and coordination but the returns (deal size) are well worth it. What are the Big Challenges of ABM? ABM comes with its own set of challenges. Let’s look at some of the big ones: 1. Poor sales and marketing alignment Sales and marketing alignment is crucial for succeeding at ABM. The challenges are many: Both have different KPIs and processes Incomplete or inaccurate lead data Reporting issues These problems can be mitigated by: Integrating workflows so that both teams can function effectively   Syncing campaign management and reporting 2. Flawed key account mapping Many ABM practitioners fail to find the right contacts which affects campaign performance.  The solution? Put buyer behavior in context with their organizational structure and business goals.  Caveat: you have to be looking at the right data points. 3. No clarity on attribution metrics Finding the right attribution metrics is another problem B2B teams struggle with.  Firstly, the raw customer/activity data may be unstructured as the number of channels increases. Then there are multiple buyers with different needs. For these reasons, aligning marketing and sales attribution for ABM is hard. The right ABM tools can make things much easier though. 4. Lack of scalability ABM is high-touch marketing.  It requires relevant messaging at scale – a tall order if you have a large audience.  The solution: create a base template of

CRM Data Cleansing: How to Keep CRM data Pristine CRM On average, in a B2B company, the volume of prospect and customer data doubles every 12-18 months.  This massive influx comes with a significant risk of errors, duplicates, outdated records, and other inconsistencies creeping into your CRM. The longer this dirty data sits in your CRM, the worse the outcomes of your CRM would get much like a snowball rolling downhill. What can you do?  Implement robust CRM data cleansing practices. These practices include conducting regular CRM data audits, using CRM data validation techniques, and leveraging automated tools to keep your data clean and credible.  Ep #12: Driving Revenue With Clean CRM Data ft. Jacki Leahy In this article, we will learn all about CRM data cleansing and how automation and AI ease the process of data cleansing.  Let’s get started with the basics.  What is CRM Data Cleansing? Imagine you are going on a trip and need to pack your stuff. Will you be able to do it in a messy room full of stuff scattered everywhere? You’d spend ages just trying to find your things, let alone packing them efficiently. But when everything is neatly organized, you can do all the packing in a fraction of the time. Well, CRM data cleansing is similar. It’s all about taking that chaotic, messy data and transforming them into well-organized and accurate datasets.  In a nutshell, CRM data cleansing is the process of identifying and fixing inaccurate or incomplete data in your CRM database. It involves detecting and eliminating duplicate, outdated, or irrelevant data, ensuring that the CRM database remains accurate and up to date informing smarter and reliable business decisions. How Poor CRM Data Hygiene Affects Your Revenue For great results, you need to be careful of what you feed your CRM system. Or else, it becomes a classic case of “garbage in, garbage out.” You cannot expect great results from CRM insights if the source of the data in it is unreliable.  Data lies at the heart of gaining visibility on where to make improvements, drive focus on leading indicators and fix the revenue funnel before it breaks. If the data in the CRM in itself is plagued, you cannot expect insights from it that drive revenue.  In fact, it is quite the opposite. In a recent survey, 44% of respondents estimated their company loses over 10% of annual revenue due to poor data quality. Such data inefficiencies are causing revenues to leak through your funnel in myriad ways.  Some of them include: 1. High employee turnover CRM users aka your employees are reaching a saturation point. 64% of them say they would consider leaving their current role if organizations don’t invest resources in a CRM data quality plan. In a world where talent is scarce, employees leaving would mean so much more time and resources gone in hiring more people, onboarding them and keeping them engaged. 2. Poor sales forecasting The quality of your sales forecast has a direct impact on your revenue. A poor sales forecast is a result of bad data fed into your systems that fail to predict how much revenue will be closed quarter after quarter. The result is wasted resources on avenues that lead to no result. 3. Poor ROI from tech stack Revenue leaders invest in different tools as a part of their tech stack, CRM being one of them. But all these tech stacks can only deliver ROI when they have the right data to work with. Without quality data, these tech stacks will just remain as shiny objects that eat up budgets without delivering any meaningful value to revenue.  4. Poor targeting Picking up all contacts from a CRM and running a uniform campaign for all is passe. Today’s customers want hyper-personalized messaging, which requires marketing teams access to high-quality data that tell them more about their contacts than simple name and email ids.  CRM data tells marketing teams who to target for their campaigns. It fails to address the “why.”  Bad data aggravates this problem by sending wrong messages to the wrong customers for solutions they might not even be looking for, thus putting the reputation of a brand on the brink of damage. Advantages of CRM Data Cleansing  Leverage the power of a clean CRM to drive business growth in the following ways:  1. Effective prospect communication Clean data ensures you reach the right people with the right message at the right time. By having accurate contact details, preferences, and purchase history, you can personalize your follow-ups, build effective marketing campaigns, and provide exceptional customer service. 2. Improved productivity Outdated or incorrect data leads to wasted time and effort. We are not the only ones saying this, a report by Mckinsey says that employees spend 9.3 hours a week simply searching for the data they need.  By keeping your CRM clean, you avoid redundant tasks, such as contacting the same leads multiple times or dealing with undeliverable emails. It streamlines your processes, increases efficiency, and allows your team to focus on what matters most—building valuable customer relationships. https://youtu.be/-Zi6T1Ny9jI 3. Improved conversion rates 78% of businesses say that the data they collect helps them increase customer acquisitions and lead conversions. Reliable CRM data enables your sales team to target the most promising leads and opportunities. By eliminating duplicates, outdated leads, or invalid contacts, businesses optimize their sales efforts, increase conversion rates, and close deals more effectively. 4. Cost savings Maintaining clean data prevents unnecessary expenses. By avoiding mailing or marketing to incorrect or inactive contacts, you save on time and costs. Additionally, you reduce the risk of penalties associated with non-compliance, such as sending messages to individuals who have opted out.  Here’s something to cement our claim, data quality issues can cost a lot of revenue around 1/5th of the sales to be precise. 5. Better customer segmentation  Clean CRM data allows you to segment your customer base effectively. By organizing and categorizing customers based on accurate data points like demographics, purchase history, and preferences, you can create targeted marketing campaigns and personalized

Your CRM Contact Data is the Key to Drive Sales Efficiency. Here’s How. Sales Activity Capture Driving sales efficiency remains the ultimate goal for most businesses. Going after the right deals, building long-lasting relationships with multiple buyers in an account is key. This evolving landscape demands sales teams to be agile, strategic, and, most importantly, armed with the right data.  And at the heart of this data-driven revolution lies B2B contact data – a crucial element in the arsenal of sales teams striving for success. Having access to contact data can open several doors for sales teams.  Organizations already have a wealth of contact data. Unfortunately, they are trapped across various applications and tools in siloed Go-to-market (GTM) systems. Think of crucial data trapped in phone calls, emails, meetings, calendars and countless other tools that your reps use.  The CRM, intended as the central hub for this information, often becomes a repository of incomplete, inaccurate, or rapidly decaying data. Manual updates are sporadic, and the consequence is a compromised ability to engage effectively with prospects. The result? Critical data about prospects and buyers never make it to the CRM. And your sales team ends up targeting the wrong people and chasing the wrong deals. That’s the opposite of efficiency.  Merely having a vast pool of contact information is not enough. Tracking the dynamic relationship between sales teams and prospects is table stakes. Every interaction – phone calls, demos, emails, and notes – needs to be meticulously recorded. And shared in a unified manner for sales and marketing teams to be on a common page.  Enter AI-led Contact Data Automation The solution lies in automating contact data capture into CRMs and deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) for real-time actionable insights. This not only streamlines the process but also ensures that the data is consistently accurate. AI provides a unified, comprehensive view of prospects, enabling sales teams to deliver an exceptional buyer experience at every stage of the journey. Benefits of AI-led Contact Data Automation Introducing AI-led automation into your contact data strategy can yield several benefits across the buyer’s journey. Let’s look at the top ones: 1. Clean, Complete, and Up-to-Date CRM Data AI can automate the process of collecting, cleaning, and updating contact data, ensuring that your CRM is always equipped with accurate and current information. This improves the reliability of your data and allows for more effective communication with leads and customers. 2. Automated Manual Tasks AI can take care of time-consuming tasks like data entry, freeing up valuable time for your sales team. This allows them to focus on more important tasks, such as building relationships with leads and closing deals. 3. Actionable Insights AI can analyze contact data and provide actionable insights about leads and buyer behavior. This can help sales teams understand their target audience better, tailor their sales strategies, and improve the effectiveness of their campaigns. 4. Predictive Analytics AI can use historical data to anticipate future trends and behaviors. This allows sales teams to stay ahead of the competition by identifying potential opportunities and risks in advance. 5. Unified View of Deals and Activities AI can provide both sales and marketing teams with a unified view of data, allowing for better collaboration and alignment. This ensures that both teams are working with consistent and accurate data, leading to more effective campaigns and sales strategies. Use Cases for Sales Efficiency From the first point of contact to nurturing long-term customer relationships. AI-led contact data automation can address various gaps in the sales process. And real-time insights into deal status and buyer behavior can become the foundation for driving sales efficiency. Let’s look at some of our top use cases that contact automation can drive for sales: 1. Contact-Level Engagement Insights for Effective Multithreading Pushing deals from creation to closed-won requires strategically engaging every member of the buying committee. Quite often, sales leaders do not have visibility into who their sales reps are engaging in every deal. They rely on a download from the deal owners during the pipeline review calls. But almost always, most deal owners simply talk about champion and/or economic buyer engagement. It’s rare to discuss buying committee coverage, which can have 10-30 members involved if we consider enterprise deals. What makes this worse is that the opportunities in CRM would also only show 2-4 contacts. Sales leaders and managers continue to be in the dark. They don’t know what they don’t know. By automating contact data capture, sales leaders instantly get visibility into buying committees. Combining this with good Salesforce reporting, they can gain visibility into the depth and breadth of engagement with each member of the buying committee. Such insights enable sales leaders to guide deal owners to execute more effectively. While this is the age of AI, the truth remains that people buy from people, especially in high-touch B2B sales. This mandates reliable visibility into the strength of buyer-seller, or rather buying committee-seller relationships. Each buying committee member is like a door. All doors lead to the same destination, in this case, that destination is ‘closed-won’. But the path to closed-won can vary behind the door. Some doors can open long paths, some short. So every door must be opened because you never know which door has a shorter and quicker path to achieving a closed-won deal. 2. Sales-Marketing Harmony for Account-Based GTM If you’re a sales leader or an operations leader planning an account-based GTM strategy, ask your marketing counterparts if they have unprecedented access to clean and complete contact data. There’s a very high chance that their response will be ‘limited’. And don’t be surprised or offended if they blame your sales reps for not adding contacts to the CRM. Your marketing teams are forced to rely on third-party data vendors for contact data, when in reality, there’s an abundance of those in your sales reps inboxes and calendars. The result? Irrelevant marketing campaigns due to poor audience targeting. This is where sales reps start blaming the marketing team for poor air-cover.