It’s (almost) an unfair competitive advantage in sales
Knowing what your prospective customer is reading and how engaged they are provides you critical information during the sales process. You need to know when to pivot your sales strategy, before losing to the competition.
In a normal sales cycle, the customer’s interest will start with marketing content (brochures, data sheets, case studies), transition to a peak of sales-specific content (RFP questions, technical responses, SOW, pricing), and close with administrative focused content (EULA, warranty, legal).
If you knew exactly what your customer was viewing, sharing, and who they are engaged with, you could make critical decisions in your sales engagement strategy.
How engaged is your customer?
The “Lost” Opportunity
Below is a typical chart of a lost sales opportunity/engagement. Each color represents a different type of content shared with the customer over the course of a six-week sales process. There was a peak of interest by the customer early on in the marketing content (green), followed up by a request for a proposal (blue).
But, as seen below, the proposal/sales content was not actively viewed and the customer barely reviewed the related content. While there was typical exchange of marketing, sales and administrative content shared, the deal fell through due to a lack of engagement by the customer, as well as the sales rep.
What if you had the knowledge?
Ask yourself as a sales rep, beyond sending a prospect a bunch of emails, how do you get insight into this knowledge today?
If you had critical knowledge of how your customer was engaged, could you have:
- Pivoted your strategy earlier on?
- Discovered the disconnect with the customer and addressed the problem when you saw the length of time it took your prospect to open and view your next set of documents?
- Engaged with a different person/champion at the customer’s location?
- Prioritize your time to higher probability opportunities.
The “Won” Opportunity
Below is a similar graph, representing the same potential opportunity, with the same amount of content shared with the customer. However, this graph shows the result of a won opportunity, where we can see an engaged customer with the content that was shared with them — enabling the sales rep to focus their interactions in closing the deal. The sales rep going into a pipeline call on May 10th would have the knowledge of the customer’s engagement and interest and confidence in their forecast.
More importantly, this sales rep was able to customize their proposal based on what the customer was viewing in March. They knew exactly what information the customer was spending the most amount of time on, and was able to nurture the customer’s interest throughout April with additional information.
The “almost” unfair competitive advantage
Introducing Illumineto Spark
As a fifteen year sales veteran, I co-founded a company called Illumineto to provide this (almost) unfair competitive advantage. As a sales professional, I knew that if I had this critical information, I could have had a substantive and positive impact to my sales process as well as our pipeline.
There are many “email tracking” tools on the market. Most only tell you if your customer has opened your email. With Illumineto Spark, we’ve built a completely revolutionary approach that allows sales reps to easily create personalized web pages for each customer. These highly personalized pages provide a “WOW” moment for the customer, with the sales rep uploading marketing, sales and administrative collateral specific to a customer’s interest.
By creating an engaging and personalized Spark page for the customer, we can now track everything the customer is interested in, what and when they viewed, and who they shared it with. All customer activity is tracked and provided to the sales rep LIVE via email, text/mobile, and other systems (i.e. Salesforce.com).
Armed with this knowledge, sales reps can gain the “almost” unfair competitive advantage, leaving their competitors literally in the dark.
