Along Thesis.
How to shorten your sales cycles and improve your closing rates by creating a data driven approach to understand buyer’s sentiments and purchase intent.
This exempt is focussed on helping B2B Tech firms and their c-level who sell complex multi-stakeholder deals (10k€+) and generate 6+ digit revenues by showing them how to unbreak / heal their late stage pipeline through new insights and transparency - transforming their firm into a truly customer centric organisation
The essentials
B2B firms selling products to a buying center with multiple stakeholders do not have a problem with closing deals and stretching sales cycles, because they employ bad sales reps or their solution doesn’t provide value.
They have a problem, because they face two dilemmas when selling to their buyers:
- The buying journey is becoming multifaceted and difficult to understand, which makes B2B purchases a complicated task. It requires various steps like:
- Multiple stakeholders (6-10 on average) to close a deal
- Multiple content pieces and materials (4-5 per stakeholder)
- Multiple streams, threads and channels
The result is confusion about the buyer journey and a reliance on AE's judgement without visibility into the landmines that might pop-up.
- There is no transparency in the demo-to-close motion and the entire process is based on subjectivity. The current insights are just PDFs with notifications, but no context or insights on the actual buyer journey. This results in guesstimations so:
- Reps start lying
- Sales Managers start lying
- CRMs become a headache, aren’t updated correctly and don’t feature the needed insights
The results are random successes and failures, so you invest large amounts of capital in understanding your pipeline without repeatable outcomes.
Today`s Reality / Problem
B2B firms use data driven approaches for their top of funnel activities in order to find leads, reach out, qualify and eventually schedule a demo with them.
The demo is often also optimized with tooling for voice tracking, analysis of sentiments or summaries for the sellers to use in order to get better.
However, after a demo the process gets messy, as sellers move from a data driven approach to a subjective one with the main drivers being gut feeling and eventually hope.
It starts with an email containing multiple links, attachments and other insights that is send into a black box as there is no information about what happens after.
Sales reps are left with gut feeling and the hope that prospects are doing exactly what they promised in the demo.
→ A rep’s only structure are internal methodologies like MEDDPIC, SPIN, SPICED, or N.E.A.T. and misleading email open rates that are falsified by anti-virus software or spam filters.
There is no insight into the actual buyer behavior and no data that is extracted from stakeholders or being summarized to gain an advantage. The process is primarily based on subjective judgements and abundance of objective data.
B2B firms spend a lot of resources, time, and effort on building structure until the demo before giving it all away to an inconsistent system excluding truthful insights. All of that at a stage where buyers are the closest to actually signing a deal.
The result is that sellers don’t really understand their pipeline and closing rates. They experience surprises like deal slippage, which is out of their control and creates unfair pressure on them.
They start blaming top of funnel and not having enough leads even though the real problem lies in their mid-to-lower funnel setup.
The consequences of not having objective data from your buyers:
- Deals don’t close and there is no understanding why
- Sales cycles stretch forever and reps don’t have insights on how to close them
- Opportunities in the pipeline cannot be understood and go unnoticed
- Firms don’t understand which deals to focus on or prioritize
- Processes aren’t consistent as reps follow their own structure and methods
- New reps can’t be properly trained without end-to-end processes
- Internal groups form and work in isolated silos
- Members of the Go-to-Market unit start blaming each other for underperformance
- Employees leave or get fired
- Company culture is destroyed
All of the issues above are putting B2B CEOs, their C-level and the rest of the org under immense stress and distracting them from their core business, which harms the future development of the company.
Along Method.
In order to close multi-stakeholder B2B deals in a consistent and reliable way, there are a few things you need to put in place. It isn’t much, but if you don’t set up the right processes, your revenue will crumble and any attempt at fixing it will result in failure.
To prevent this, we have created the Along method - an executable guide for you to follow and implement.
You need to create a reference point / hub for all stakeholders involved in your deal that is connected to your CRM.
Understanding your stakeholders at every step of your sales cycle is crucial - especially when it comes to closing. The necessary infrastructure to do so comes in form of a digital reference point that is shared with every stakeholder involved in the process and can be updated constantly. All your materials and next steps besides other relevant details for you buyers need to be included here step by step.
You have to collaborate with your buyers and analyze the engagement of different stakeholders at every stage of your demo to close motion in order to ideally understand and guide them.
The collective reference point needs to provide insights into the behavior of every visitor that accesses it and the engagement data needs to be analyzed / played back to you in form of highlights or recommendations for next steps.
→ These recommendations are ideally enriched by smart SQL data processing and AI.
Your buyer engagement data and recommendations need to be fed back into your CRM and pipeline becoming an essential part of your forecasting process.
You use insights from your buyer engagement as a silver bullet to augment your deal forecast and help buyers make a purchase.
Your insights from successful closing processes and the correlating steps leading towards it need to be fueled back into your deal motion to create an ever improving feedback loop.
The analytics in your shared reference point act as objective deal insights that help you understand your buyers better over time and learn from past successes.
Summary
As you can see, there aren’t a lot of complicated challenges to tackle. All you need to do is:
- Set up a digital reference point in connection with your CRM.
- Include all customer-facing information in it.
- Let smart databases and AI analyze your buyer behavior.
- Use their recommendations to close more and faster.
- Feedback the results into your motion and get better over time.
Your success map
You can try to use existing digital interfaces to patch up a solution, which fits the criteria above. Feel free to consume all readings and insights from our website and get going.
This will be the result:
- You will spend a lot of time exploring, selecting and setting up a solution that fits your requirements.
- You will have a hard time finding solutions that work and can provide you with insights / analytics while being able to integrate into your CRM.
- You will realize that a makeshift solution like Google Docs or Notion Boards can’t be used in professional sales settings that you are trying to optimize.
- You will stop using the solution and return to status quo suffering from the same problems as before after having spend money, effort and resources for nothing.
You can use Along, set up an Alongspace (the #1 digital sales room) in minutes, connect it to your CRM and get real time insights into your buyer behavior fueled by AI.
This will be the result:
- You can start for free and will spend little to no time deciding and setting up the solution in your CI.
- You will connect to your CRM in under 10 seconds.
- You will receive first insights and recommendations that will provide real value.
- You will start closing more deals in shorter time periods while realizing additional value in your pipeline you had no idea about.
- Your reps and the rest of your organization will be happy and your business will grow.
With the intelligent analysis of buyer engagement data and the following recommendations, Along functions like a co-pilot for your demo to close motion that helps every single rep in your org to become a better seller and achieve their own goals as well as yours.
You can hire an additional sales people in form of Alongspaces that add an objective perspective and truthful data to your demo to close motion for a fraction of the cost of a human rep.
