Sales, particularly in the B2B world, is an intricate process often involving multiple stakeholders and sales cycle stretching to months if not a year or more.
Also, as each of the prospects requires a significant nurturing period, the sales process is known to be slow and resource-intensive with SDRs in constant fear of being ghosted by their prospects.
So isn’t there a better way? Sure there is but before we discuss that, let’s take a quick look at the current process:
Companies determine their Total Addressable Market (TAM) and ICP
Sales reps build their targeted lists
SDRs and marketers start filling up the top of the funnel with leads from both inbound and outbound channels
Prospects slowly move through different stages of the funnel and finally trickle down as customers
It is worth noting that prospecting and nurturing are continuous processes with varying degrees of effectiveness for different targets. One prospect might take months to transition from discovery to opportunity stage while others might be converted within days.
Given such variance, there is always an air of uncertainty that often slows down and impedes sales success.
Embrace Activity-Based Selling
As the name suggests, activity-based selling is based on the core premise that if you just keep track of activities and take action on that basis, the selling would take care of itself. The term “activities” here refers to the activities of prospects.
It dictates keeping track of their evolving business needs based on any new events. For instance, if you sell software to companies with over 100 employees, and a company with 80 employees suddenly increases their headcount to 110, they become a ripe target for outreach and are even more likely to convert.
Similarly, if your target company has recently raised any funding, it would be a smart move to reach out to them immediately.
While most sales and marketing professionals testify to the effectiveness of such strategies, the problem lies in difficulty tracking such activities. After all, a single sales rep might have hundreds of companies on their target list making it simply impossible to keep track of them all.
This is why top sales professionals use sales intelligence tools like SalesIntel for that purpose.
These tools offer what is generally called intent data to help SDRs finetune their outreach efforts based on real-time information. Be it the addition of any new tech stack, upsizing/downsizing, fundraising, M&As or virtually any activity that has a direct or indirect impact on the buying behavior, is quickly flagged and is made available to SDRs to take appropriate action.
Using this activity-based selling approach, sales professionals are able to not just quickly build and verify their target lists but also consistently track them for any new opportunities. The only thing you need for that purpose is a robust sales intelligence platform.