Evergage, a personalization and customer data platform, launched the Evergage Data Warehouse solution, which is designed to give business analysts access to the company’s unified customer and prospect data for building and analyzing segments and monitoring campaign performance.
When you’re looking to buy something, which situation do you prefer? Getting instantly accessible information that’s specific to your needs and decision-making process or sifting through an amalgamation of random content and items? It’s a no-brainer, right?
Conversica, an AI marketing and sales software provider, has launched new capabilities designed to help users personalize conversations with prospects and customers.
In the early stages of launching my company Grapevine6, we met with all kinds of businesses to find a fit for our social engagement tool. One of those early conversations summed up the negative perception of social selling. The director of an inside sales team asked, “Why am I paying our reps to spend half their time on LinkedIn when they’re just building their résuméto get another job?”
Management should have known better. Salespeople are driven to generate revenue and don’t spend half their day doing something that doesn’t drive sales. Social isn’t just for wasting time or finding a job. It’s a powerful resource for advancing the buying cycle and is especially effective for considered purchases where trust is key. It’s a Rolodex that’s never out of date, a network you can be in front of 24/7 and a treasure trove of background information on every contact you want to reach.
It seems obvious now, but it took a few early adopters to prove the business case. Global technology giant SAP jumped in early and had so much success that it scaled up to a global social selling program. Building over 1 billion Euros in pipeline across 15,000 salespeople around the world, SAP proved that social selling was a game changer.
Sales wasn’t alone in using social media. Early on, marketing recognized the stickiness of social, which created a huge opportunity to drive brand awareness and more importantly, build credibility. The Edelman Trust Barometer consistently showed that companies had a trust problem. Consumers trusted their friends, not brands. Social marketing was a way to tap into that social proof.
The technology supporting the first wave of social marketing specifically served brands. Highly complex tools sifted through the firehose of social content to identify brand mentions and orchestrate multi-touch campaigns. While effective, these technologies demanded dedicated expert resources to operate, which restricted access to mid-to-large enterprises. There was a gap in the market to make social and content marketing more accessible to individuals and small businesses.
The one-size-fits-all approach to content was particularly frustrating for the sales team. Sales was the most interested in engaging customers on social to build relationships with buyers, but posting the same brand content as everyone else was turning customers off. They needed relevant third-party content that was authentic, helpful and could build a personal brand that buyers could connect with and trust. Employee advocacy tools elevated the company brand, but a new wave of tools was needed to that elevate the salesperson’s brand.
The key to creating an authentic brand on social is personalization, but marketing could never manually curate personalized content for an entire salesforce of thousands. AI changes the game by enabling differentiation at scale. The next wave of social selling tools is here and has content and AI at its core. Tools like Grapevine6 use AI to read through the thousands of articles published yesterday to find the 10 that are most relevant to each salesperson’s brand.
AI also enables scaling regulatory and risk management in social selling. Digital risk tools from Proofpoint, SafeGuard Cyber, ZeroFox and ThetaLake can inspect content, including video and images, for dozens of different types of risk that impact corporate brands. They can also secure social accounts from security risks, like hackers.
As both the market and tools mature, companies that sell on relationships must be actively engaged in social selling. The practice has moved past the early adopter stage and is becoming table stakes for a modern digital salesforce. Today, with the right tools, salespeople in any industry can be empowered to develop an authentic personal voice on social and leverage the full potential of these channels without posing a regulatory or reputational risk to their employers.
Mike Orr is the Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer at Grapevine6, where he is responsible for product delivery. Before joining the Grapevine6 team, Mike spent several years in management consulting, working with some of Canada's marquee brands. He led a skunkworks and project management team at one of Canada's leading digital advertising agencies on projects that won global awards and recognition.
In the current content and email-saturated landscape, B2B marketing and sales professionals are constantly challenged with crafting relevant messages that stand out from a sea of “Hello, [first name]” subject lines. Naturally, the topic of personalization is often talked about in content marketing and sales enablement, but what many organizations don’t realize is that delivering personalized messages to acquire new business is much different than personalizing for existing customers.
Cliently, a lead generation and outreach automation solutions provider, is designed to enable marketers to increase lead engagement by as much as 50%. The platform is positioned to help users easily segment and personalize content, as well as automate outreach to save time and keep their brand front and center with prospects.
As digital channels grow more crowded, B2B marketers are pouring more of their marketing dollars into events, where they hope to meet with new buyers face-to-face and strengthen current relationships with key accounts. According to research from Bizzabo, 41% of marketers say live events are the most critical channel for achieving business outcomes and 50% say they spend at least 21% of their budget on events. To ensure event success, B2B companies such as Merkle, GumGum and SAP are incorporating end-to-end personalization and partnering with influencers to take their event strategies to the next level.
PFL’s Tactile Marketing Automation (TMA) solution aims to combine the convenience of the modern martech stack with the power of direct mail. It is positioned to help marketers drive results by incorporating high-impact printed and mailed pieces into their marketing campaigns and customer journeys.
Folloze, a B2B customer engagement platform, launched Personalization Engine, a new product positioned to use data and AI to create content-based experiences that drive engagement throughout the buyer’s journey. The company also announced a new integration with Demandbase.
This year’s SiriusDecisions Summit in Austin put a bright spotlight on the importance of cross-organizational alignment to drive a customer-obsessed revenue engine. According to analysts, the alignment between product, marketing and sales teams is the key to high performance. Yet, many organizations still struggle with it.