May’23 Product Update: Granular Activity Capture and Actionable Revenue Intelligence

The secret to what makes something good, great, and best lies in the granular details. The same applies to revenue teams. To go from good to best, identifying and doubling down on what’s working, while eliminating what’s not working is key. Delivering this granular visibility into revenue activities is Nektar’s mandate.

In the recent product release, we focused on offering granular data points within your Salesforce and are launching 2 (1 in beta) big capabilities! So, let’s unwrap May’s product release.

Actionable Revenue Intelligence in the Workflow

For a little over a year, we prioritized building the best-in-class activity capture solution – Data+, which captures unmatched depth and breadth of buyer contacts and revenue activities.

Beginning of 2023, we decided it was time to build out our insights capabilities. But we did not want to build yet another dashboard. B2B revenue leaders have enough dashboards to work with. Our research highlighted the ‘real pain’ of a revenue leader – converting intelligence locked within dashboards into actions and processes across the revenue team.

It takes a significant amount of time for revenue leaders to:

1. Go to a dashboard
2. Navigate the right tabs
3. Study the data and charts
4. Derive key insights
5. Strategize the next best steps
6. Put the strategy into actions

Revenue leaders’ time is far more valuable. What if steps 1, 2, 3, and 4 were eliminated? What if insights – strategic and operational, complex and simple – were at your fingertips so that you can focus on driving actions and processes? This is what we’re promising with the beta launch of Buzz, an actionable revenue intelligence solution.

Buzz delivers timely and reliable insights to the right people at the right time on Slack or MS Teams. We consciously chose to bring the same depth and breadth that dashboards offer without the dashboards.

Whatever insights revenue leaders need – leads-related, opportunity-related, forecast-related, team-related, process adoption-related, win-loss analysis related – Nektar has a Buzz for that. Essentially, Buzzes can be configured for every part of the revenue funnel.

Slack and MS Teams are tools built for driving collaboration. They are widely adopted by revenue teams every day. So there’s no additional work needed on training and enabling teams or solving tool adoption issues. Buzz seamlessly fits into your workflow and so it requires no change management. By delivering the right insight to the right people in the right channels, Buzz enables seamless collaboration and instant revenue actions.

This is a closed beta feature and is available for all our customers. If you still haven’t got this enabled, please speak with your CSM.

De-Risk Deals with Visibility into ‘Incoming-Outgoing’ Buyer Engagement

Why stop at knowing just how many activities are happening in an opportunity? Go deeper. Know exactly how many activities were done by your team and how many were done by your prospects or customers.

Nektar automatically marks emails and calendar invitations as incoming or outgoing on Salesforce. This is fully reportable (of course you can configure a Buzz as well). So revenue leaders and RevOps teams gain detailed insights into buyer-seller engagement, and how that is influencing ongoing deals. This single data point can act as a leading indicator across several areas:

1. De-risk ongoing deals

While your reps may be hustling hard, maybe your buyers have not been responding. Maybe an executive nudge or a physical meetup with the buyer can help move the needle. No response from buyers acts as a leading indicator of deal risk. Nektar can surface this risk and highlight the deals in which buyers have not been responding to your reps’ efforts.

2. Rep and CSM productivity

Buyer engagement directly correlates with win rates. Instantly gain detailed visibility into which reps are actively engaging buyers through emails and meetings across their ongoing deals. Effortlessly know who is hustling and who needs to hustle more. The same applies to CSMs as well. Know which customers are your CSMs engaging and how often.

3. Account and customer risk

A leading indicator of customer risk is inactivity, even more so if the inactivity is from the customer. Now that this data point is being provided by Nektar, you can run Salesforce reports against all your accounts to identify accounts with poor engagement. Additionally, instead of creating reports, RevOps/SalesOps teams can configure Buzzes to deliver detailed insights on such risks to the right stakeholders.

4. Identify champions

With data on which buyers from the buying group have been actively engaging – replying or initiating – you can identify who is actively involved in the deal. The frequency of engagement can indicate levels of interest, and this can help identify potential champions.

5. Identify best practices/winning patterns

With granular data on buyer-seller engagement, you can identify what drives success. Which job titles have been actively engaging? What is their role in the buying group? How often should we engage the buying group every month or in every sales stage? Slice and dice this data against different segments or different industries and go deeper into what’s working.

Some of these insights can then be baked into your sales process, while some can remain as thumb rules. For example, in the SMB segment, a good mix of incoming-outgoing activity could be 30-70%. While in the enterprise segment, the mix could be 45-55% since there are more buyers involved.

Do More of What Wins with Automated Activity Tagging

In a 4x100m relay race, be it in track or swimming, a common combination is:

• 1st leg – second-fastest runner
• 2nd leg – third-fastest runner
• 3rd leg – slowest runner
• final leg – fastest runner

Depending on the individual strengths of runners, their training regimes, their health during the competition, competitors they’re up against, and other factors, this formation can be optimized for the best results.

A sales cycle is just like this relay, but more complex. The different legs highlight the different stages of a sales cycle. Each stage is usually governed by certain dynamics – different buyer roles get involved in different stages, each stage has its own set of goals, the approach to buyer engagement changes, and so on.

Just as the relay formation can be optimized, in a sales cycle, different stages can have certain activity patterns that increase the probability of ‘Closed-Won’. One such pattern is what are the different activity types in every sales stage and how often they take place. Nektar now provides visibility into this with automated activity tagging.

Based on specific keywords in emails and meeting invitations, Nektar will automatically assign a tag that helps identify what activity type it is. For example, if keywords such as product walkthrough, demo, demonstration, and solution overview are grouped under a category called ‘Demo’, then every email and meeting invite that contains any of the above keywords will be marked as ‘Demo’ on Salesforce in the task or event objects.

This field is reportable. So RevOps or Sales Ops can generate insights on Salesforce. Why should this data point matter to you:

• Identify winning patterns: Knowing the right mix of meetings and emails in every stage is one thing, but knowing what activity types are taking place in a sales cycle can help establish some best practices. For example, the won deals in the enterprise segment for the last 2 quarters may have had on average: 5 demo meetings + 13 demo emails; 2 proposal meetings + 3 proposal emails; 2 pricing meetings + 6 pricing emails, and so on. Such insight could act as a soft benchmark to guide reps on ongoing deals.

• This can be further dissected to set benchmarks or best practices for different segments – Small, Mid-Market, Enterprise, Large Enterprise, or for your key verticals/industries.

👇 Pro Tip 

Nektar Customers should also be seeing activities getting synced at a contact-level, if the contact was an activity participant. Combine this contact-level activity data with incoming-outgoing activity data and activity tags to get granular visibility into buyer-seller engagement.

Optimize Partner Programs with Partner Activity Capture

2023 is proving to be a tough year for many businesses. With ‘do more with less’ being the underlying theme, businesses are looking to partnerships, alliances, and channels as an effective growth strategy. Nektar wants to support this strategy.

With Nektar, you can now capture partner activities. The captured buyer contacts and activities get synced into the associated accounts and opportunities, while the partner contacts get added to partner accounts.

Essentially, revenue leaders and partnership leaders can now unlock granular insights into partner programs. Answers to questions such as:

• Why are deals sourced by certain partners closing more frequently?
• How are your different partners engaging in your active deals?
• How are they contributing to closing your deals?
• How active are certain partners compared to others?
• How is the internal engagement between the partner and AEs?

and more, can be got effortlessly. Using these insights, revenue leaders can optimize their partner programs for greater efficiency and success.

Nektar has now truly become a full-funnel data capture solution. We started off with capturing data for sales teams. Then we moved into capturing data for prospecting teams – BDRs and SDRs. Recently we started supporting customer success teams. And now, we support activity capture for partner and channel teams.

Partner activity capture is already live, and if you have partner programs running or are planning to start one, please reach out to your CSM to get this implemented. If you’re not a Nektar customer, please get in touch with our Sales team.

Heads up!

Here is what’s coming up in the next 2 weeks:

1. Auto-Update Meeting Status

Are buyer-seller meetings getting canceled, abandoned by the buyer, or getting rescheduled, or completed as planned? This data point provides deep visibility into deal management and progression. Nektar will automatically dynamically mark the status of meetings on Salesforce depending on how they evolve.

2. Smart Fill – Automate Specific Data Entry

Found a competitor in an email? Found pain points mentioned in an email? Were the reasons for losing a deal mentioned in an email? Let Nektar automatically update your competitor fields, lost reasons, next steps, pain points, or any other data you wish to have on your Salesforce. Simply define the keywords you want Nektar to monitor in sales conversations, and accordingly, Nektar will update the respective Salesforce field with the relevant data as and when those keywords get mentioned.

3. Auto-Create Leads on Salesforce

When buyer contacts get captured from sales conversations, Nektar will start creating them as Leads on Salesforce if there is no Account on Salesforce that matches the domain in the captured email address.

4. Nektar Activity Log

Measure the impact of Nektar’s data capture with Nektar Actions. Starting June 2023, you’ll gain granular visibility into everything Nektar captures – contact created, job title updated, lead phone number updated, and so on. Essentially, this is an activity log of every Nektar action – what was the activity, and where did it happen?

We’re here to guide you.

If you want to know more about any of the above new features, please reach out to your CSM if you’re a Nektar customer.

If you’re not a Nektar customer, our sales team is here to show how Nektar can put your revenue operations into auto-pilot. Get in touch with us here.