“B2B companies now have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift share meaningfully—through greater orchestration, integration, and personalisation.*”

Relationship-driven sales

In industries where the sales person is critical to the delivery of the product or service, conducting business involves building a relationship of trust between yourself and your client. The client must trust you to understand their needs, find the right person and price, and to deliver the best commercial outcome possible for both parties. However, building trust is an expensive and human-centred business. This nuanced, trust-focussed sales process requires a very clear understanding of your company’s network to deliver the best results, quickly and efficiently.

Company networks are far larger than businesses ever realise and there are opportunities everywhere, if you know how to find them. Unfortunately, as networks become larger, they also become more and more complex as digital communications increase in volume and importance. In industries which revolve around relationship-driven sales, such as capital markets, insurance or executive search industries, fully leveraging your and your company’s commercial network is the key to driving maximum revenue and building a lead over your competition.

The challenges for relationship-driven sales industries

If you struggle to keep track of and understand all of the relationships that exist across your firm, you are not alone. Our conversations with sales professionals and client relationship managers across relationship-driven B2B sales industries have all confirmed this to be a challenge. There are just too many people, too many interactions and not enough clarity. Gaining access to, and fully-leveraging these existing relationships is the key to capitalising on the dynamic post-pandemic environment and unlocking a huge opportunity to increase market share.

Relationship-driven sales professionals are still using systems which were designed in the 1990s, for markets which were completely different to today’s high-paced, digitised environment. Today, orchestrating a relationship-driven sales process involves constantly responding to emails, setting reminders in Outlook, tasks in your CRM or using excel spreadsheets to help you keep on top of all the people you need to be in touch with. Traditional CRM systems, while still vital for maintaining contact lists and customer data, are no longer sufficient in today’s ultra-digital, complex and nuanced digital relationship environment.

Outdated 90s systems are no longer fit for purpose

New research by Validity found that 44% of CRM users say poor data quality costs their business 10% of annual revenue. Dooly’s Happiness Sales Index revealed that 95% of sales professionals feel that reducing time on non-revenue-generating activities such as manual CRM inputs would help them meet quotas and 81% of recipients said they would generate more revenue for their company. These are statistics repeating themselves the world over, with ZoomInfo predicting that more than 42,000 medium to large sized companies would spend an estimated $4.6billion on their CRM integrations in 2022.

When you add in the specificity and depth of networking that is required for success in relationship-driven sales industries, it is clear that traditional CRM approaches will not enable companies and sales people operating in these industries to capitalise on the opportunity for revenue growth which is presenting itself currently.

Shifting successfully into the new era

The number of statistics out there about the expense of CRM implementation is overwhelming, but they are nothing when you think about the statistics of bad outcomes because of a reliance on these outdated approaches. That’s why we are committed to providing an intuitive, fully automated, plug and play system to instantly provide actionable insights about your company’s commercial relationships from day one without the need for a single manual input from anyone.

FeedStock generates all the required relationship data and network analysis automatically from users’ inboxes, without any of the expense or inefficiencies of large-scale change management. We enable companies that have been stuck in the time and money drain caused by 1990’s systems to shift seamlessly into a new approach – leveraging their existing networks to the fullest extent to maximise revenue growth.

FeedStock provides valuable insights with zero manual inputs, zero employee onboarding, and zero disruption to workflows, and in the words of one recent new client the ROI is “immeasurable”.

References:

* Arun Arora, Liz Harrison, Candace Lun Plotkin, Max Magni, and Jennifer Stanley, McKinsey & Company, The new B2B growth equation, (February 2022) Link

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