More than ever, selling in today’s economy means discerning precious signals from a sea of noise.
From VPs and CMOs to entry-level reps and account managers, everyone is inundated by data. Without a modern go-to-market strategy that can turn signals into action, the flood of data can mean greater administrative overhead, higher margins of error, and even lost revenue.
Gaining greater insights into sales and marketing data has been a consistent theme in many recent conversations with our customers, and it’s a topic that ZoomInfo founder and CEO Henry Schuck believes in passionately.
Schuck recently sat down with Pete Kazanjy, cofounder and chief revenue officer of sales management platform Atrium, for a Modern Sales Pros webinar to discuss the current landscape of sales and how forward-thinking companies are modernizing their go-to-market (GTM) strategies.
Taking a More Holistic Approach to Intent Data
One of the most significant advances in modern GTM over the past decade has been the increasingly sophisticated application of intent data and signals that indicate strong commercial interest.
In earlier days, companies had limited visibility into intent data signals, such as a company’s decision to invest in a specific software solution.
As Schuck notes, this relatively limited information still had value — if a company was adopting more sophisticated financial tools, for example, it stood to reason the company might also be considering investments in other solutions, such as its cloud infrastructure.
But modern GTM’s true potential, Schuck says, is realized when companies are able to bring multiple sources of data together — technology investments, key hires, rich company profiles, website visitor data — to give sales and marketing teams a holistic view of a prospect and their needs.
“Conceptually, that is the Holy Grail,” he says. “Prioritizing who I should be contacting, and why, because I want to deploy my limited sales resources in the most impactful way possible.”
Breaking Down Barriers to Entry
A decade ago, the computational costs of managing data from multiple sources was often prohibitive to companies seeking to build more effective GTM motions, particularly for smaller companies with limited resources.
Over time, however, those costs — and the associated barriers to entry — have fallen. This means that even smaller companies can effectively compete with large, established players in their industry.
Fortunately, there are many steps businesses can take toward modernizing their GTM strategy, even with limited resources.
“Today, it’s much less expensive to pull all that data together,” Schuck says. “If you’re not deanonymizing your website traffic and building an automated motion, just start there. If you’re not doing anything with intent data to prioritize your accounts, start there. If you’re not identifying when your key buyers are changing within an account you want to sell to, start there.”
Embracing a Culture of Experimentation
According to Schuck, perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to modernizing GTM efforts. Many businesses are missing significant opportunities to engage new audiences and reach new markets because they’re waiting until conditions are “perfect” to begin experimenting with modern GTM.
What these businesses don’t realize, however, is that modern GTM is within reach of virtually every business today.
Schuck encourages revenue operations professionals at companies of all sizes to begin experimenting with motions that can eventually be automated and personalized at scale. Start by speaking with your top-performing reps to identify specific tactics that have proven successful, then use those tactics as the basis of scalable, repeatable motions that can eventually be fully automated.
“Identify the play, run it in a manual, ad-hoc way, and you’re going to learn how that play might feel [when] automated, and where you might want to insert a person,” Schuck says. “Obviously, that requires a great data foundation, good tracking, and systems that map. But when you stack GTM plays on top of GTM plays, you create lots of really interesting opportunities for your business.”