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5 Ways Siloed Data is Burning Your Revenue

5 Ways Siloed Data is Burning Your Revenue There are various reasons why revenue might be falling for your company. Most of these reasons might be in your radar, and your strategy might include improving on those parameters in the next quarter.  But there is one silent killer in your revenue engine you might not be aware of. Ignoring this aspect can cost you heavily. This is the case of siloed data.  90% of organizations cite data silos as a challenge to growth. And data inefficiencies cost organizations an average of $12.9 million every year. Dependence on incorrect, incomplete, or stale data leads to erroneous decision-making that hurts revenue. Most of these issues related to data originate from data silos. What do we mean when we say data inefficiencies? Using incorrect data to drive decisions across the organization or basing a new revenue strategy on the shoulders of stale data in your systems are some examples of data inefficiencies. How can organizations make data-driven decisions that drive revenue? Is there a need for more data? Definitely not. Every organization has their own data that can be leveraged to make powerful data-driven decisions. But most of this data is stuck in systems that don’t talk to each other. Enabling this data to flow freely along the revenue engine can help capture critical information to understand your business better. Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire new customers, 6 times more likely to retain them, and 19 times more likely to be profitable. First Up, What is Siloed Data? Siloed data is information from revenue-generating activities like sales, marketing or customer success that is stored in isolated tech stacks. This data is controlled by one team but inaccessible to others. For example, marketing team might create revenue generating strategies with the data within their own tech stack. This data is not related to data that sales or customer success has. As a result, these departments keep working within their own confines, without having access to the same data, or devising ways to support each other. Such silos hampers organizations as revenue generation is no longer the responsibility of just sales or marketing. It’s a team effort that demands all customer-facing functions to come together and refer to a single source of data. This is where revenue operations thrives as a function. A data pile-up leaves everyone puzzled, and organizations pay dearly in terms of unaligned goals, internal competition, siloed thinking, and stunted growth. How is Siloed Data Created? Most departments don’t have access to unified, strategic data for cohesive planning. For instance, 47% of marketers blame data silos as their most significant problem for extracting insights from data. Why is it that data silos thrive? Here are three key reasons: 1. Siloed departments Departments within the organization often have individual goals to achieve. Along the way, they may miss the point of setting these goals – for the organization’s collective growth. As a result, they operate in silos concentrating on their own targets. It mainly creates problems when customer-facing teams – marketing, sales, and customer support – start functioning in isolation. The common objective is to increase revenue and retain customers, and these teams must collaborate closely for success. But with differentiated tech stacks for each team, it’s incredibly challenging to use one department’s data for another. As a result, sales and marketing teams often end up at loggerheads and can’t align GTM strategies. The numbers are shocking because as much as 90% of sales and marketing professionals report misalignment in strategy, among other things. And it’s estimated that this misalignment costs businesses over $1 trillion each year. 2. Cultural resistance Even as digital transformation sweeps the world, 54% of organizations manage customer-facing operations in silos. In organizations that don’t follow a culture embedded with data, teams face challenges in deriving valuable insights from data. Only 25% of employees think they can leverage data to their benefit. Then there’s limited knowledge of new technologies. Sometimes, leaders find upgraded systems challenging to comprehend. Since they hold key positions, accepting this shortcoming and stepping up digital transformation could feel overwhelming. 84% of employees think leaders should move to more modern tech stacks to capture business opportunities. The result of this cultural resistance? Organizations end up sticking with legacy systems thinking these will perpetually perform well. 3. Separate tech stacks 72% of customer interactions are now via multiple digital touchpoints. Enterprises with data silos store information from individual touchpoints separately, giving rise to irregularities as data collected from each can be vastly different. And companies that don’t keep up with digital transformation risk losing nearly $7 million. Moreover, as technology evolves, companies may add more tools to their tech stack for various functions and departments. With each clashing effort, this stack keeps growing and creating unmanageable siloed data if integrations aren’t in place. And while applications are on the rise, integrations aren’t increasing equally. In 2022, an organization had 976 applications on average. But only 28% of these apps were integrated. 5 Ways Siloed Data Is Damaging Your Revenue Maintaining data silos is doing more harm than good to businesses. While you must uphold customer confidentiality, not sharing a ton of other information will impact revenue adversely.  Below are 5 significantly adverse effects of siloed data. 1. Missed business opportunities 30% of respondents in a survey by CMO Council and Televerde stated they faced challenges in hitting revenue targets because of organizational silos. And that’s not all. 84% of employees are missing business opportunities by not moving to modern data solutions. Fostering a ‘data ownership’ culture over a ‘data sharing’ one has a far-reaching impact on identifying new prospects and nurturing those in the sales pipeline. Unhealthy competition among teams further motivates them to fulfill internal targets while ignoring external possibilities. It also deepens the rift when leads handed over from marketing to sales don’t come with the right set of data. 2. Unfavourable customer experience This lead handover also translates into cumbersome customer experiences. Most businesses have multiple customer touchpoints. If data from each is unlinked, sales teams have less visibility on which part of the

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6 AI for Customer Success Use Cases

6 AI for Customer Success Use Cases With the goal of efficiency looming large, the past year has compelled organizations to re-evaluate their tech stacks. If a particular tool doesn’t offer enough value to improve ROI, it’s eliminated from the tech stack. The difference between sticking to a tool and letting go becomes significant for sellers. And the key to resolving it? Having a meaningful relationship with customers. On average, loyal customers place order values that are 67% higher than new customers. Plus, you have a 60-70% chance of upselling to existing customers than a 5-20% chance of converting new ones. With so many growth benefits on offer, businesses are turning to artificial intelligence (AI).  AI can help improve your net retention rate (NRR) and customer success processes. Unfortunately, most companies are late to the tech party. And they don’t know how to deploy AI for customer success. It’s 2023, but over 66% of customer success reps still don’t use AI in their current role. It’s not optimal for business at all. Because AI isn’t coming. It’s already here. This blog aims to understand why AI for customer success is critical and how you can build use cases for it. How Has Customer Success Changed Today? In the past 12 months, here’s how customer success has evolved for organizations. 1. A shift in customer behavior Most notably, customer preferences, pain points, and interests have evolved since 2020. As a result, customer success needs to be agile and quick to adapt to these changes. 2. Remote operations More and more customer success roles are going remote. Alongside this, companies are incorporating tools and processes that are completely hybrid. 3. Digital-led operations Customer onboarding is now being automated. Generative AI in chatbots quickly resolves customer complaints based on account intelligence. 4. Evolving growth outlook Businesses have moved from a “growth at all costs” outlook to “resilient growth.” During tough economic situations, capturing new customers is difficult. On the other hand, retention assumes more importance. Subsequently, companies have learned to find ways to drive more ROI from existing tools without incurring extra costs. 5. Churn prediction Importance is increasingly placed on monitoring customer health to identify potential churn. So that customer success managers (CSMs) can step in early and change the account’s sentiment. All of the above changes show how important it is to use AI for customer success correctly. Why You Need AI for Customer Success Now As pointed out earlier, retaining customers is more important than ever today. Plus, it’s important to continually drive value from your solution for customers and do it efficiently. But driving value becomes an insurmountable challenge when so much data is up for grabs. As per recent estimates, the human populace generates nearly 330 million terabytes of data daily. That’s not just huge; it’s MASSIVE. Imagine searching for customer behavioral data in this mammoth pile. Even if you somehow gather the data, your CSMs may need to learn how to use this information to build unforgettable customer experiences. And so, clients feel forgotten. They are clueless about how to make the most of your solution or simply resolve their day-to-day queries. Coupled with the business shift to driving more value from existing tools while keeping costs low, customers are left in a lurch. As a result, they derive no value from associating with you. So, how do you grow by optimizing retention? You leverage data for building AI-based customer success models and prevent churn. Even a 5% increase in customer retention increases revenue by 25-95%. Here are some more reasons to consider deploying AI for customer success: AI automates workflows. It doesn’t replace humans but drops over-reliance on manual intervention. Consequently, customer success reps have more time to build relationships. It boosts your productivity and efficiency. It can dive into that massive pile of data and surface more accurate, complete, and reliable data. The cleaner the data, the better your insights. AI alerts you when customer sentiment changes from positive to neutral to negative. It also suggests the next best steps to course correct immediately. You can use AI to show customers new ways of exploring your product. This constantly drives additional value. With AI for customer success, your actions are more proactive than reactive. When you know everything about your customer, you can tailor your communication approach. You may also recommend upgrades or use cases at the right time. Overall, AI boosts customer satisfaction. Let’s dive straight in if this is reason enough to consider AI for customer success. 6 Use Cases of AI for Customer Success To Prevent Churn To truly prevent churn, it’s best to encourage your CSMs to help customers drive value from the time they first use your solution. Here are 6 ways how AI for customer success improves NRR: 1. Quick onboarding a. Avoid high operational costs AI ensures a seamless customer experience, starting with onboarding. Instead of assigning reps, you can use digital means to avoid high operational costs and lengthy processes. For example, a chatbot embedded in your product can guide the customer through initial onboarding. This makes it less time-consuming for everyone involved (who would otherwise spend hours on the task). b. Accelerate TTV Secondly, with quick onboarding, you can accelerate your customers’ time to value (TTV). You can determine the use cases that encouraged their purchase of your solution. And get right down to helping them deploy the use cases for maximum value. AI also optimizes the time between educating customers about new features or releases. Plus it optimizes the business value they achieve from your solution. 2. Monitor renewal group activity a. Concentrate on building relationships AI lets you automatically capture critical data instead of manually logging in each customer success activity. Your team need not worry about losing insights. This activity data includes information from emails, meetings, virtual messaging apps, and more. such as the integration of a message forwarding app to streamline communication across multiple devices. b. Attribute data to source Not only can AI capture this data, but it can also attribute each data point to its source. And it can harvest this information in only a few seconds or minutes.

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10 Salesforce Tools To Empower Your Reps in 2025

10 Salesforce Tools To Empower Your Reps in 2025 The largest software investment for a company is Salesforce. Yet, most Salesforce CRMs fail to deliver the value they promised. Salesforce tools can help companies derive better ROI from their Salesforce CRM. And justify the steep investment to their management. If you are looking for top Salesforce tools to invest in 2024 to drive rep productivity, we have got you covered. Here is a list of top Salesforce tools for you to consider in 2024. Why Do You Need Salesforce Tools? Of course, we all want our sales team to perform at their best and be as productive as possible. This means ensuring that they spend their time effectively, doing what they do best. Closing deals. The right tool shows exactly where sales reps are spending their time Teams that are able to utilize these tools efficiently can generate more leads and convert those leads into revenue compared to lesser productive companies. In fact, 79% of sales executives say that improving productivity among their reps is the way to hit new targets. Sales is not just limited to emails and calls. It needs software to gather and organize an all-around view of the company’s relationship with the client. Sales also entail a lot of activities that are not directly sales-related, like admin work, answering emails, updating the statuses of prospects, etc. (which consume a good chunk of time) Identify the key stakeholders in every deal with the right tool Sales professionals spend 17% of their time entering data into the CRM. If this process is automated, you can reclaim lost time which can be utilized for more important tasks. Top 10 Salesforce Tools for 2024 Here are the top Salesforce tools for you to consider in 2024: 1. Nektar Most Salesforce CRMs miss more than 50% of critical buyer contacts and sales activities. Reason? Sellers do not update a CRM. Poor Salesforce adoption results in poor CRM data, which translates into poor insights for revenue leaders. Making Salesforce a wasted investment. Nektar completely transforms this with AI-enabled CRM automation resulting in achieving unmatched Salesforce ROI. Nektar self-heals all bad, stale, or missing data. With Nektar, you can gain a data-packed Salesforce CRM that continuously maintains the highest data integrity. Key features: Contact Automation Bring together all the contacts into your CRM automatically Pipeline Progression Identify pipeline risks early before they become a threat Rep Productivity Scale revenue-winning patterns across teams Pipeline Creation Get complete visibility into all prospects stages and understand which deals are expected to close Relationship Intelligence Understand key stakeholders involved and get ideas of the fastest journey among stakeholders to close deals Salesforce ROI Plugs in the gaps in Salesforce CRM to bring together all the information to convert leads into ROI Pricing: Nektar’s pricing is flexible depending on the business and solutions required. Nektar also offers a free CRM scan to identify key gaps on where revenue is being lost in the sales process. 2. Cirrus Insight Cirrus Insights is a sales productivity platform that effortlessly combines Salesforce with your email inbox, enabling your sales reps to streamline your sales workflow and boost productivity to the max. Key features: Email Integration Sync emails, contacts and calendars with Salesforce Calendar Scheduling Schedule calls and meetings directly from your inbox Email Tracking & Analytics Track email open rates, clicks, and engagements in real-time Template & Document Management Create & use email templates with ease of sharing documents Follow-up Reminders & Tasks Set up reminders & tasks to stay organized with your sales teams and activities Team Collaboration Share winning templates or mails strategies with teams for faster conversion Salesforce Data Access View and update client details and information on Salesforce Mobile App Available as a mobile app to download and update on the go Pricing: Cirrus Insight offers a free trial for most of its plans for users: Salesforce Sync Plan – $10/year/user Pro Plan – $21/year/user Expert Plan – $29/year/user Sync+ Plan – $4/user/month/year 3. Demandbase Demandbase is an account-based marketing and sales platform designed to help businesses target and engage key accounts in a personalized and effective way. Companies can align their marketing and sales teams, gain deep insights into account activity, and drive revenue growth through strategic account-based strategies. Key Features: ABM Marketing Engage targeted accounts with personalized emails, content, campaigns, and messaging Account-Based Sales (ABS) Entrust sales teams with account intelligence, prioritization, and collaboration tools. Sales and Marketing Alignment Grow collaborations between sales and marketing teams, ensuring a unified approach to ABM. Account Orchestration and Analytics Manage and track account activities, measure the engagement and gain actionable insights. Multi-Channel Engagement Reach targeted accounts through multiple channels, including email, social, and advertising. Relationship Intelligence Gain visibility into account relationships, understand influencers, and identify key contacts. Check the gaps in your salesforce reports, with an no-obligation free CRM scan report. Pricing: The pricing is available upon request. To get detailed pricing information and explore the best package, you can contact the Engagio sales team directly through their website or by reaching out to their sales representatives. 4. ZoomInfo SalesOS Zoominfo SalesOS is a sales intelligence and productivity tool designed to help the sales team connect with the ideal prospects more efficiently. It provides insights into high-quality data on companies and provides a suite of tools to help boost sales productivity, stay organized to close maximum deals.  Key features: Sales prospecting Superior search and filtering capabilities to identify prospects based on various criteria like industry, job title etc Company and contact data Access to the latest information on companies and various decision makers Sales engagement Automating calls and emails with personalized templates, scheduling and call recording Sales intelligence Insights on trends and updates to help reps send latest and custom messages Pricing: ZoomInfo Sales OS offers flexible pricing plans based on the size of your sales team and the features you need. 5. Dooly Dooly is a sales enablement platform designed to help sales reps close deals faster by eliminating manual data entry and automating workflows. Key features: Automated Workflows Ability to automate tasks like data entry, lead routing, and follow-up reminders Salesforce Integration Seamlessly sync

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RevOps Best Practices to Increase Quota Attainment

RevOps Best Practices to Increase Quota Attainment Eddie Reynolds, RevOps Leader and CEO at Union Square Consulting recently spoke to Abhijeet Vijayvergiya about how misunderstood RevOps and quota attainment is. And what can be the right way to approach both, in a way that they work symbiotically. Let’s dive in. Sales quota attainment rates continue to drop as we speak. Digital selling has been harder for reps, exacerbated by the current market conditions when buyers have a tight grip over their budgets.   Revenue operations comes as a respite to aid this situation for businesses. But terms like quotas are often misunderstood. RevOps is still fairly new to help sales teams succeed better in uncertain times.   We spoke to revenue expert Eddie Reynolds on what he thinks of the two facets independently, and together. He busted some myths around quotas, sales productivity and our favorite – RevOps.    Read on to hear what Eddie has to say about the selling world today, rep productivity and what areas of RevOps he is really passionate about.    If you’re short on time, here is a quick summary of the conversation. If you enjoy our discussion, check out more episodes of our podcast. You can follow on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the episode. Revenue Operations is Beyond Just Setting Up Tools Abhijeet: Hi Eddie. Love what you’re doing at Union Square and I think it’s great to see your focus on revenue operations. It’s so exciting. Eddie: Yes, it is exciting! I’m very passionate about this topic. A big part of revenue operations is setting up tools, but something that I’ve always been so passionate about is all the other areas of revenue operations. How do you take these tools and turn them into part of an overall revenue engine that ultimately drives revenue and provides visibility to leadership on what’s working, what’s not, and what direction you’re headed in? And that’s something I’ve been very passionate about, probably since the first moment that I ran into Salesforce and even before, and trying to think, okay, as somebody who’s actually selling every day: How can I use this tool? How can I use the data in this tool?  How can I build a better process so that I can sell more, market them or serve customers better?  It’s really interesting to see how much revenue operations has grown in the last few years, where a number of years ago you didn’t even hear that term. And now you hear it everywhere. And I think it’s a really amazing thing for business in general.  Abhijeet: I love the fact that you’ve been an operator yourself. You’ve sold, you’ve been into the weeds. So you understand it quite well compared to a lot of folks who are not into sales. You have that unique experience and you can appreciate what the user goes through, and you can actually bring that into practice. Eddie: I was just going to say, I think that is a big piece of maybe not what’s missing, but challenges that folks have. And I have no issue with somebody entering RevOps that comes from a technical background, an admin background, a finance background or just starts in operations.  But one challenge is that those folks really need to sit down with the sales people, sit down with the marketers, sit down with people in customer success and understand what they do every day, what motivates them and the challenges they face.  If you’re working in a silo and you’re just looking at data and tools, you’re going to miss a lot of the nuance of what makes jobs like sales so challenging, and you’re not going to understand why. You get resistance to trying new tools. Why do you get resistance to adoption? Why are things like data entry difficult? You have to be in their shoes, or atleast sit down with them to try to understand the challenges in their job. Eddie Reynolds The Link Between RevOps & Quota Attainment  Abhijeet: Definitely. The next thing I want to know more from you is as a rep, the most important thing is quota, right? I think more than half or at least half of the salary is linked to variables or commissions that are all quota.  You’ve been an AE yourself, you understand how quota is important for salespeople. And RevOps plays a very important role here. They can really create the right process, systems, tools, as well as enablement in some cases to make salespeople become more successful. Now that you’ve been an AE, and you’re also into RevOps consulting through your company, what’s your take on improving sales quota attainment? There are reports out there which talk about the quota attainment dropping year after year. Whereas the proliferation of tools, if you look at it, they’ve grown like 7X from the number of tools that existed in anybody’s tech stack just a few years ago. These two don’t seem to correlate, right? There are so many tools out there to help the sales people, but at the same time, quotas are abysmally low. So I’d love to hear your perspective on what’s going wrong.  Eddie: Well, in regards to the tools, they’re only as good as the team using them. You can give me Tiger Woods’s set of golf clubs and since I don’t play golf, I’m not going to perform very well.  And he could go buy a set of golf clubs at a garage sale and wipe the floor with me. It’s the same thing with any tools that you’re using, whether it’s revenue tools or any tools in life in general. They’re not going to fix broken processes and broken strategies. Or poor assumptions on things like quotas.  One of the biggest problems that we see with quotas is that oftentimes they’re based on hopes and dreams and not real data.  Eddie Reynolds The cliche is that the revenue leader says, “Well, we

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RevOps Starter Guide – Building a Successful RevOps Roadmap

RevOps Starter Guide – Building a Successful RevOps Roadmap Consider a soccer game. We know the key parts of a team are the players and the coach. If we’re to draw a comparison, “sales” is the striker, while “RevOps” is the coach that analyzes, strategizes, and develops the game plan to win more games.  In the real world, RevOps helps your organization run an interconnected business. It streamlines the end-to-end revenue process and GTM functions. It, consequently, breaks down operational silos and improves efficiency and predictability.  Businesses today are better understanding what RevOps is. And companies that have a RevOps function report 69% higher revenue growth and 59% improved win rates. It’s unsurprising, then, that 75% of the highest growth companies in the world plan to deploy a RevOps model by 2025. With data’s growing significance and an increasingly complex tech stack, organizations are relying on RevOps to maximize revenue generation by strategically removing sales roadblocks. And align the entire organization towards a single goal – revenue generation. That’s where a RevOps roadmap comes in.  Source If you don’t know how a RevOps roadmap helps, let the expert rein you in. We spoke to Briana Yarborough on The Revenue Lounge podcast to find out what is a RevOps framework and how businesses can create one. Briana is a seasoned RevOps leader and co-founder of a RevOps solution in development. She serves as an advisor and executive leader for several high-growth startups. She’s also an active thought leader of RevOps in multiple communities and was most recently recognized as one of the Top 25 trailblazers in the space. Look at the full discussion below and keep reading to know more about building a revenue operations roadmap. What is a RevOps Roadmap? A RevOps roadmap, in its simplest form, is a strategic visualization of your team’s upcoming projects. For leaders, it’s a goal-oriented tool communicating the clear scope of activities and outlining how these activities tie back to revenue. It enables managers to align the team and focus on activities that maximize the value of converting prospects to buyers.  For reps, it is a source of truth to highlight “what” work is being done and “why.” A RevOps roadmap can be followed seamlessly when everyone on the team understands it. Therefore, it’s important to get these 5 attributes right when creating an effective roadmap: Strategic: Focus areas and strategies Simple: Short, crisp, and visual Goal-oriented: Key deliverables and activities Easy to communicate: No jargon, straightforward Collaborative: Cross-functional cooperation  5 Attributes of an Effective RevOps Roadmap A RevOps Roadmap Clears The Path To Revenue Success Adding a strategic layer of RevOps to your Go-to-market functions connects all activities which otherwise exist separately in a vacuum. Here are some key reasons why you need a RevOps framework: 1. Prioritization One of the primary benefits of having a RevOps roadmap is giving teams the necessary visibility. They can prioritize high-impact projects and focus on those that positively affect revenue. Teams can avoid off-plan requests that distract them from hitting predictable targets. Additionally, it doesn’t let your weekly meetings run in divergent directions based on unhinged queries from Sales or Marketing teams. 2. Alignment  A GTM alignment is possible when teams improve buying experience by breaking down cross-functional silos. Through sales and marketing alignment, the RevOps roadmap serves as a single source of truth to unify people, processes, and platforms. This alignment drives full-funnel accountability and helps you grasp inconsistencies and develop a baseline for improvement. 3. Understanding A roadmap helps you dive deeply into the “why” behind revenue generation activities, including business goals and supporting resources. It provides clear definitions for and sets up the priority of each project, timeline, and initiative to measure progress effectively. Simultaneously, a RevOps roadmap restricts confusion among different departments. Also, a roadmap empowers leaders to develop a vision for the business and ensure a solid system is in place to make this reality. Now that you know what a RevOps roadmap is, are you inspired to build one for your business yet? Let us help. Creating a Successful RevOps Roadmap You can strategically and tactically achieve the roadmap to a successful RevOps plan with several key steps and considerations in place. For beginners, it’s best to start with the 4 primary phases. But remember – a RevOps roadmap will differ for each organization based on its maturity stage and resources. For this blog, we’ll dive into a summarized version of a beginner’s RevOps framework. You can check out the ultimate in-depth guide here. Phase 1: Discover Research is pivotal in understanding the problems in relevant operational areas before solving them. The initial analysis, aka discovery, seeks to lay down the “state of play” before designing the roadmap. Discovery presents a comprehensive awareness of stakeholder expectations and gaps in the customer journey, starting with a thorough audit.  Use these questions to set the direction of your roadmap for stakeholders: Does each team clearly understand what they’re working on? How does the team determine the next best steps? Can each operational initiative be mapped back to a gap felt by customers? Is there a shared understanding of the company’s goals/values? It not only helps identify the problem but also the reasons for the problem and the missing link. Discovery gives you insights to narrate the stories behind the roadmap more effectively. You can also incorporate this information into ongoing and forthcoming projects. Interview relevant stakeholders such as the VP, managers, and executives in sales, marketing, and frontline operations. For this task, you can use surveys, one-on-one interactions, and team feedback. Here are some key questions for individual stakeholders: These questions will help you find the blind spots and leverage proven methods like Rumsfeldian Knowledge Matrix or 3VC. The Rumsfeldian Knowledge Matrix places gaps in four categories and maps what you know and don’t know. Rumsfeldian Knowledge Matrix Moving on to the 3VC analysis (Volume, Velocity, and Value), you can analyze the sales pipeline and identify the gaps adversely affecting revenue. Next, you can list down the existing processes across the organization. A process audit includes looking at your teams’ approach to,

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Signifyd’s Journey of Moving from a Siloed GTM Structure to a RevOps Model

Signifyd’s Journey of Moving from a Siloed GTM Structure to a RevOps Model Most fast-growing B2B companies come across silos as they scale. A RevOps model helps break this silos and align GTM teams towards common goals. But it’s easier said than done. Moving from a siloed GTM structure to a RevOps model requires great planning, focus and execution. In this article, we explore how a company successfully made this transition and how it has been worth it. Here’s a detailed breakdown of our conversation with Dan Jiao, Senior Director of RevOps at Signifyd.  Dan’s path to Signifyd has not been linear. Coming from a chemical engineering background, he worked his way through sales and sales ops in different organizations, gradually advocating for RevOps. His insights into breaking down silos put him at the forefront of change at Signifyd (an eCommerce fraud protection platform).  We discussed a live RevOps model Dan is responsible for implementing within the company. You can listen to the entire conversation here: Understanding GTM Operations Before we approach the deeper end of revenue operations, let’s get the basics right.  Since we’re focussing on GTM heavily, here’s how Gartner defines GTM: A plan to show how an organization can engage with customers to convince them to buy their product or service and gain a competitive edge. Gartner GTM involves streamlining multiple functions, including pricing, sales, communication channels, buying journey, new launches, updates, and product rebranding or introducing a new market.  As a strategy, it needs all hands on deck, i.e., all revenue-generating functions must work together using complex workflows to sync multiple ops.  Siloed GTM Ops Create Revenue Bottlenecks When teams need to be tight-knit, silos can create significant revenue bottlenecks. Here’s an example of what silos can do in a fast-scaling B2B company. Your organization is growing, and so is the team. The total number of people in GTM ops just touched 25. Simultaneously, customers love your product’s use cases.  If this winning streak continues, you may double your team size in the next year. Instead, as your teams grow, problems start cropping up.  It may begin with the MoM quota attainment taking a sharp nosedive. Alongside, sales and marketing clash over poor quality SQLs entering the pipeline. Customer churn rate increases as teams and new hires fail to keep up with the customer journey, creating friction in handoffs. Subsequently, rep productivity decreases, and attrition rates increase.  Breaking down silos isn’t simply a hypothetical situation. It’s a real problem that several growing organizations face as they shift focus to scaling.  It was also a problem that Signifyd wanted to solve at their company.  How Silos Manifest in GTM Ops Silos can manifest in any of the 4 GTM areas – tools, systems, processes and data.  1. Tools and Systems But as Dan points out, Today, every organization (big and small) has a relatively sizable tech stack to make GTM workflows actually work. This tech stack also supports growing teams.  Each tool in the stack has specific use cases like conversational intelligence, forecasting, analytics, or something else. But with a disintegrated tech stack, you could just be piling on tools with similar or the same functions for different teams.  That’s what Signifyd noticed in 2021 before Dan arrived at the company. They invested in several tools, coming off the back of a funding round. And while Signifyd still uses several of those tools to maintain a good tech stack, some tools have overlapping functions.  2. Data Data plays a significant role in building or breaking down silos. It’s at the very center of the GTM tech stack, keeping all teams in the loop about leads, customers, and revenue performance.  Data helps you dig into insights and make critical decisions.  But as businesses grow, so does the volume of data. Plus, as technology progresses, the amount of data generated keeps increasing.  That’s where silos in data can hamper even near-perfect GTM operations.  For 90% of organizations, data silos are a major challenge to growth.  Siloed data is stored in isolated tech stacks, wherein each team uses its own tools. Data is controlled by the team that owns it but is inaccessible to others. Siloed data takes away from what GTM is meant to be—a unification of efforts between revenue-generating functions.  Data silos are not good for business. They create confusion, misaligned goals, internal competition, isolated thinking, and stunted growth.  Make the Move to RevOps for Breaking Down Silos Dan pointed out the biggest pain point cropping up, courtesy of silos. Here are 5 more reasons why you should turn to RevOps for breaking down silos.  1. To Provide a Connected Customer Experience Over 54% of organizations still find it difficult to provide a connected customer experience across multiple channels. A streamlined experience increases customer engagement and pipeline visibility for you. 2. To Improve Cross-Functional Collaboration RevOps facilitates shared goals, processes, and a common language between all customer-facing teams. It helps in breaking down silos so each team understands the other’s goals, objectives, and responsibilities. This clarifies each team’s role and overall contribution to GTM. 3. To Stay On Top of Business Opportunities Using reliable data, RevOps creates clarity on pipeline visibility, upsells, and cross-sells. And with visibility comes deeper insights into business opportunities. Organizations that believe in clean data are 23 times more likely to acquire new customers, 6 times more likely to retain them, and 19 times more likely to be profitable. 4. To Make More Effective Forecasts Less than 25% of sales organizations have a sales forecasting accuracy of 75% or higher. RevOps can improve your forecasting effectiveness with shared information presenting a more complete picture. 5. To Simplify Work for Everyone Involved RevOps makes work easier for all teams and leaders involved in GTM by breaking down silos. It improves productivity and enables more streamlined workflows. Instead of spending time searching for information and going back and forth with each other, teams focus on aligning their individual goals with the business. Breaking Down Silos at Signifyd With RevOps Signifyd formally introduced its RevOps process in November 2022. However, a soft initiation was already underway since mid-2022. Before

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Using Data Analytics to Improve Customer Experience: A RevOps Guide

Using Data Analytics to Improve Customer Experience: A RevOps Guide Customer experience holds a significant place at the center of the RevOps universe. Companies that excel at customer experience have been seen to achieve more than 2x of revenue growth. And for businesses, improving the customer experience has increased: Sales revenues by 2 to 7%  Profitability by 1 to 2% Shareholder return by 7 to 10% There’s no avoiding it. A laser-like focus on customer experience is critical for sustainable and long-term growth. It can give you the impetus to outperform competitors and craft a compelling growth story for employees and investors.  But inconsistent and unreliable data can clog the revenue wheel, stopping revenue-generating teams from responding effectively to customer needs.  So how can you use data analytics to improve customer experience? Our conversation with Mollie Bodensteiner, Global RevOps leader at Deel, throws some light on the topic.  Tune in to the full podcast episode here.  Link Between Data Analytics and Customer Experience RevOps can help spot and solve the data problem using data analytics to improve customer experience.  Mainly, it smooths out context, so you can: 1. Determine the right strategies to drive ROI Successful experience-led growth strategies increase customer satisfaction by at least 20% and offer significant financial benefits for businesses. In particular, they improve: Cross-sell rates by 15 to 25% Companies’ share of wallet by 5 to 10%  Improve customer satisfaction and engagement by 20 to 30 dollars With data analytics, you can action your data to refine the buying journey, determine how to generate revenue and delight customers simultaneously.  You can better understand your customers’ emotive elements through tangible information and build marketing and sales strategies to solve the pain points.  Plus, you can use data analytics to improve customer experience by mining dark data. On average, 52% of a company’s data could be dark. Dark data is captured in your systems but not leveraged for insights. It could contain hidden customer profiles, behavior patterns, past buyer champions, and lost customer relationships.  To sum it up, strategic alignment supports data analytics to improve customer experience.  2. Do more with less The slowdown in growth has pushed companies to chase value. And in doing so, companies are still figuring out how to “do more with less.”  How do you define what is “less” and determine the business trade-off?  RevOps uses data analytics to improve customer experience by gathering insights into processes for reps and stakeholders. It tries to understand: How to make these revenue-generating workflows more effective, and How to help marketing, sales, and customer success be more productive than before Data analytics gives RevOps the much-needed information to identify shortcomings, prioritize improvement of limited resources and generate more revenue.  3. Use the right message at the right time Data analytics gives you the information to dig into the customer’s journey and deliver the right message to the right customers at the right time.  It enables you to live up to (and even surpass) customer expectations by giving them what they want without the customer asking for it.  You also get to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes and manage both good and bad interactions to produce the next best action.  And while the next best action may not always generate revenue, it must meet the customer’s needs and keep them happy. How Revops Facilitates Data Analytics to Improve Customer Experience  RevOps primarily aims to connect teams to drive predictable revenue and boost growth.  When it comes to data analytics, RevOps leverages it in three ways to align teams: Customer data (demographic and account data) Functional data (operational data and metrics) Financial data (link back to value) Here are 6 ways RevOps facilitates data analytics to improve customer experience throughout their journey, not just at the point of sale. 1. Get complete pipeline visibility Revenue leaders are focusing on driving value, efficiency, and compelling growth in the current business environment (which is undergoing a slowdown).  Reaching this goal requires undisputed access to clean, accurate, and reliable customer data. This data, particularly first-party data that’s reliable, provides powerful insights.  In reality, however, companies are drawing insights from stale, incorrect, or incomplete data. The result—missing out on critical revenue opportunities to create exceptional customer experience.  That’s where RevOps plays a crucial role in identifying gaps and building systems to capture customer data in a bulletproof way. It provides a 360-degree view of customer engagement that lets you better define and execute customer experience priorities.  Another benefit is you can identify the champions so you can engage with them to see the deal through. Also, you can prioritize accounts that aren’t adequately multithreaded.  RevOps uses data analytics to improve customer experience by maintaining a healthy pipeline and eliminating bottlenecks.  You can ensure data is well managed with a unified view across the business as RevOps connects your tech stacks and aligns your systems. 2. Personalize the customer journey RevOps uses data analytics to identify patterns and trends in customer behavior to foster a customer-centric approach.  Teams leverage analytics to personalize the customer experience by periodically modifying the ICP to achieve the right audience. By constantly evaluating the ICP, you segment your audience, understand each segment’s pain points and improve personalization.  Data analytics also provide revenue operations teams with a better understanding of the following: Who do you sell to How do you sell to them How does the buyer make a decision And, how does your solution fit their needs Not only that, but teams can also determine the role of each stakeholder in the buying committee and share personalized content (that’s relevant and valuable). You can isolate specific pain points for each stakeholder and solve them.  For example, if you’ve missed adding stakeholder contact data as they get added to the process during the deal, you may be engaging with the wrong champion entirely.  With data analytics, RevOps optimizes the sales playbook by blending relationship intelligence with buyer engagement.  It looks for patterns in buyer-seller interactions across segments, territories, and verticals so you can personalize the journey for them.  Simultaneously, you can build use

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How To Analyze Sales Data Across the Pipeline: A Comprehensive Guide

How To Analyze Sales Data Across the Pipeline: A Comprehensive Guide Meeting sales targets and productivity goals has sales reps in a bind. To make the job easier, one of the first few tasks you may have undertaken is deploying technology. However, adding tools to the mix may not be the solution. As more and more sales tools come into play, you increasingly rely on digital systems and an increasing amount of data. You need actionable insights and predictive signals extracted from large amounts of data. This drives more value from analytics in real-time. It’s done using signals that suggest the next best action to move deals forward. It can seem intimidating to find these insights without first understanding how to analyze sales data. In this guide, we take a deep dive into how to analyze sales data and use it to maximize growth. What Is Sales Data? Before we move on to analyzing sales data, let’s get a clear understanding of the sales data definition. Sales data is the information gathered by tracking your sales activities, from customer touchpoints to engagements. Different types of sales data include: What Is Sales Data Analysis? Sales analysis evaluates the sales data and revenue generated over a specific period. It leverages technology and processes to analyze sales data and extract insights. You can improve rep performance in the short and long term by analyzing sales data. Plus, you can identify, model and predict sales trends or outcomes. Sales analysis is categorized into four types: 1. Descriptive A descriptive sales analysis shows you what happened in the past or what’s happening in the present. It tracks historical data and compares it to current performance. 2. Diagnostic Diagnostic analyses aim to find out the “why” behind sales performance data. It also tries to understand what actions caused a particular situation to occur. 3. Prescriptive Prescriptive sales analysis determines how to solve a specific problem to improve performance. It first assesses the data and prescribes (or suggests) the next best action. 4. Predictive As the name suggests, predictive sales analysis learns from past and current performance to gauge patterns. It then makes educated predictions of what will happen in the future. This gives you insights into building forecasts and setting optimum sales goals. Why is it Important to Analyze Sales Data? 97% of sellers say that sales intelligence tools are “very important” or “important.” But why is it so important for you to analyze sales performance? We found 8 reasons why: 1. To optimize future performance Analyzing sales data equips you with the insights to build better revenue strategies. Using actionable insights, you can improve future performance. Moreover, you can identify the actual sales figures to build accurate and reliable forecasts. As a bonus, your reps avoid chasing prospects with low intent. 2. To make informed decisions As leaders, you make better decisions when you have information you can act upon. That’s what analyzing sales data does for you. It shows you the areas of improvement. Not only that, it also helps you figure out which channels work best, which ones you can double down on and what locations or industries you should serve. Say you’re focusing on LinkedIn, but most of your leads come from email marketing. Using sales analysis, you can prioritize successful channels. 3. To understand the market The reports from sales analytics give specific insights into demand for your product(s). If there’s an increase or decline, you’ll know it. But that’s not all. Analytics also helps you round up the possibilities for demand changes. For instance, a decline could mean that your competitor offers a better product or better features. With market insights, you can determine when it’s time to find a new target market, improve your features or add more. You also get an assessment of market prices and the value of your product(s). 4. To drive better use cases Customers may use your tool for specific needs, or there may be features they prefer. Insights from analyzing sales data can drive better use cases for other buyers. When customers get a unique perspective and solution for their problem, they’re more likely to stick around. 5. To personalize the sales process Analytics evaluates your Historical sales data Patterns in closed-won and closed-loss deals Buyer needs Industry data It gives you a distinct peek into the buyer committee, defining individual stakeholder roles. Which means you get to personalize interactions suited to their needs. Buyers will more likely consider your business if reps engage in research. What buyers are looking for in sales interactions (Source: LinkedIn, 2022) 6. To drive productivity Find out which sales motions lead to more wins using analytics. Following this, you can double down on these motions and replicate them for all reps. Plus, you get rich insights and data-driven feedback for qualitative coaching. With these workflows in place, reps can focus on what matters most – personalized selling and winning more deals. 7. To improve cash flow Sales is one of the primary sources of cash flow. Analyzing it gives you a better understanding of your current cash position. You can take steps to refine your sales process in a way that benefits cash flow and your business. 8. To get on the growth track Change the path of your business by getting on the growth track with sales analytics. Use it to improve sales processes and, subsequently, revenue. With an improved cash flow, win rate, retention rate, productivity and forecasts, sales analytics can back you up for funding opportunities. The better the health of your business, the better your chances for acquiring investment. How To Analyze Sales Data? The following steps show how you can analyze sales data systematically. Step 1: Identify the sales data to collect You can identify what sales data points to collect using metrics. Below are some key metrics to watch out for: 1. Sales revenue It shows the total revenue you’ve earned from sales over a specific period. Use sales revenue to determine if you’re in a healthy growth situation, if you’ve hit business goals or if you’re setting

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7 Salesforce Data Enrichment Tools

7 Salesforce Data Enrichment Tools When data in Salesforce is stale and incomplete, it canhamper sales operations. This outdated and incomplete data can be filled using tools for data enrichmentthat will fill up the gaps. Best Data Enrichment Tools: Nektar.ai: It’s an all-in-one stop shop for everything Salesforce. It automatically updates contacts and opportunities with first party data as well as historical insights. ZoomInfo: Has a vast collection of firmographic & technographic data perfect for finding decision makers. Clearbit: Offers real-time appendage of data and integrates with marketing tools for lead segmentation. Crunchbase: Concentrates on startups, gives company profiles, funding history, industry trends. (Free tier available) Leadgenius: Customizable web crawlers that collect niche-specific information. Cognism: Blending of data enrichment with automation and multi-channel engagement. Ringlead: Ideal for telemarketing through features like call scripting as it cleanses and enriches B2B contactdata. Choosing the Right Tool: Think about your industry type, what kind of information you are looking for (firmographics or technographics), how much you want to spend, and whether you would like real-time updates or automation happening. What is Data Enrichment? Introduction Your ideal customer is not just a name or address. It is a full-fledged human with certain buying habits, persona and social media footprint that screams of “perfect- fit”. Your salesforce data might only present a distorted or very limited picture of your buying committee. It can act like a dusty attic with crammed boxes full of half- remembered details. Your CRM is the backbone of your business decisions and you can’t rely on skewed numbers. You would want to make it as much valuable as possible to base your future plan on a solid strategy. This is exactly where data enrichment can help you. What is Data Enrichment? Data enrichment helps to fill out complete information about your leads like contact number, address, company and even company related details like size, industry, location etc. Imagine you get a lead of someone names Adam Doe, from Acme Ltd. It might sound promising but what is Acme all about? Who is this guy Adam beyond his email address and phone number? Data enrichment snoops in and pulls out information from social media activity, business directories and even internal purchase history to prepare a 3D persona. Now, Adam Doe is a tech enthusiast with a knack for technology updates and purchase history of high end gadgets. There you go! It’s time to tailor your pitch and win Adam over. Your lead has become a real person with real interest who can be engaged with at a personal level. Data enrichment precisely adds valuable information into your existing customer data on Salesforce. This additional intel can give you a holistic picture of your target audience and prospects. It can be performed in three ways: Direct: Your leads might decide to provide complete information about themselves by filling out a survey. Internal: You combine scattered information about your lead across different databases into one External: You source this out to third party data enrichment services that can access external records. Salesforce data enrichment allow teams to create a single, unified source of all CRM data so that team members can make decisions efficiently. Data can be enriched via: Data Cleansing: This means getting rid of obsolete, duplicated, partial data and making the datasets error-free. Data Appending: By collating data from multiple sources, a unified dataset can be created that offers a complete customer profile. Why do you need a Salesforce Data enrichment tool? As per studies, 77% organisations struggle with data quality issues. While the reps are already grappling with an increasing buying committee data enrichment can essentially make their life easier by providing them as much information as possible about their leads. With right kind of data enrichment, sales teams can: Leverage better quality data: Data enrichment gives valuable context to the data by removing redundancy. This can help in creating an effective sales pipeline for your reps with less manual efforts. Craft Messages that Matter: You can uncover salient aspects about your prospects’ likes and dislikes like their favorite sports, hobby etc. This can help you tailoring your message in a way that grabs their attention and strikes the right chord with them. Target the Right People: With complete picture about your prospects’ company, you can understand the actual stakeholders and invest your efforts with accuracy. With better understanding of the buying committee, your reps are more likely to chase the right prospect and build effective account plans. Predict Success: Having proper data lets your reps understand their buying committee’s behaviour precisely. They can better equip themselves with the essential background information and forecast pipelines accurately. Bonus! Data enrichment can elevate your internal data too. Reps can identify patterns and discover new information by connecting dots and prevent potential customer churn. Our top 7 picks for Data Enrichment Now that we understand the importance of putting your CRM in a better quality. Let’s talk about the top tools that can help you achieve this. Nektar.ai Nektar.ai is a contact and activity capture solution that keeps and recovers client contacts as well as their participation details throughout various stages of the buyer’s journey, thereby becoming an invaluable resource for groups trying to harmonize their CRM procedures. It is first party data platform with zero user adoption, meaning that the admin teams don’t have to worry about adoption and enablement challenges. Why use it? Automated Contact & Opportunity Management: Teams using Nektar can automate the addition, editing and deletion of contacts in Salesforce. Contacts are automatically linked to opportunities so you are able to tell who is really going to make a decision. Its self-healing artificial intelligence (AI) makes sure that actions are taken based on current happenings and new information. Depth and Breadth of Activity Data: It has every single mail and information exchange between buyers and sellers across the customer journey. This enables syncing activity within leads, opportunities, accounts and their contacts for granular contact-level engagement visibility as well. Data Automation: Revenue professionals can define certain logic on

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Everything You Need to Know About Sales Territory Mapping

Everything You Need to Know About Sales Territory Mapping RevOps 10 min Successful sales strategies play a key role in achieving business goals. But what drives these strategies from inception to execution, improving sales operations and on-ground performance? Sales territory mapping.  Without the right sales territory map template, your sales team could face challenges, namely: Poor productivity Revenue mismatch or imbalance Subpar revenue performance  Poor customer experience Leading to the loss of clients, and Waste of valuable resources  So, how do you get sales territory mapping right to achieve business goals and grow your revenue? Let’s find out in this blog. Sales Territory Mapping: Setting On-Ground Sales in Motion Sales territory mapping defines and visualizes the area, sales amount, and revenue your sales team will target. It divides and categorizes customers based on specific characteristics within your ideal customer profile (ICP). A sales territory map template also helps you assign categories and customers to the salespersons best equipped to serve them.  It lets you reach the right customers in the right areas with the right characteristics to achieve targets and improve growth.  The task of aligning your sales plan with business goals in the most profitable way lies with sales managers.  From the larger business perspective, sales territory mapping is part of location intelligence. Today, location intelligence helps segment customers and find more relevant target markets for revenue success.  How Is Sales Territory Mapping Instrumental to Business Growth? A sales territory map template does more than act as a blueprint. Here are 6 more ways in which it contributes to growth.  1. Ties Back to Business Goals Sales territory mapping creates a blueprint for achieving your business goals. It clearly lays out sales targets and directs reps to the most profitable customers or verticals by strategically assigning territories. 2. Maintains Balance One of sales territory mapping’s primary objectives is to secure a balanced and fair distribution of work among sales teams. It moves and optimizes resources effectively to maximize revenue potential.  3. Increases Selling Time Reps can increase facetime with clients by cutting down time spent on planning. This is specifically made possible with sales territory mapping tools that decrease planning time from months to minutes.  4. Improves Win Rates Naturally, when reps spend more time selling, they can nurture clients better through the sales funnel. Moreover, each assignment is backed by data. This data offers more visibility into customers and prevents deals from slipping through the cracks.  As a result, reps can improve customer experience and uncover new leads to increase win rates.  5. Boosts Morale A sales territory map template encourages intelligent planning, further improving sales productivity. Additionally, when reps can increase win rates, achieve their quota, and earn more, it boosts their morale. And if reps are happy, it means your attrition rates are lower.  It’s not just that. A sales territory map template also highlights improvement areas useful for coaching.  6. Extracts Hidden Insights Sales territory mapping helps measure sales data by connecting the map to the CRM. Therefore, when multiple salespersons are involved in a deal, you can attribute the sale to the right person.  Recognizing the benefits of sales territory mapping is the first step in setting up your own template. Step two is understanding its different types.  Choosing From 5 Types of Sales Territory Mapping Conventionally, sales territories were based on locations. However, you can customize them today as per your customer, market, or even product needs.  Let’s take a look at the 5 types below.  1. Geography Geographic sales territory mapping is the most commonly used and also the oldest. It classifies your market based on, you guessed it, geographical locations—cities, states, countries, and zip codes.  For example, Sales Team A can serve Texas, while Sales Team B covers California.  To get geographic mapping right, your sales team must have a regional, cultural, and linguistic understanding of the territory they’re allocated.  It’s also important to ensure that the selected sales team is available when customers are active in the designated regions.  2. Product Product-based sales territory mapping can be used when you have multiple offerings. You can categorize and assign reps to specific products or technological offerings.  This method is useful when certain reps have in-depth expertise on specific products. For example, Team A has expertise in CRM solutions and is assigned to this offering, while Team B caters to clients looking for Digital Advertising software.   Assigning your reps to the right products will ensure they can sell to clients more convincingly.  3. Customer  The third way to divide your sales territories is based on specific customer characteristics like demographics or roles.  For instance, Sales Team A may sell to clients with a yearly revenue of $500,000. On the other hand, Sales Team B focuses on the higher margin clients with yearly revenue of $1 million and upwards.  4. Industry  Industry-based sales territory mapping assigns reps to specific industries or verticals.  It works best when your product caters to individuals or businesses from multiple industries.  For example, Team A sells to the construction industry, while Team B covers the education sector. Similarly, Team A could be selling to the education industry overall, while Team B handles specific verticals–like universities or higher education–and Team C is responsible for schools.  5. Sales Channel An upcoming type of sales territory map template categorizes territories per the sales channels your reps or clients use.  That’s because buyers now use ten or more channels, on average, as they move through the buying process. They use a combination of digital self-serve channels for certain activities and videos or in-person channels for others.  Consider this example. Team A is responsible for selling via digital channels like social media, and Team B sells through offline channels such as cold calling.  You may also get more granular by assigning reps with expertise in certain platforms to those mediums. For instance, Rep A sells via emails, and Rep B may use LinkedIn.  Knowing the key types of sales territories is awesome. But figuring out the type of

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