"In B2B, the buyer is nearly always a group of people working together rather than an individual acting alone."
I pulled this quote from a slide in a webinar I attended recently. The quote rings true for me and has for a while. Unless your prospect is a sole proprietor or president of a small corporation, you’re most likely selling to a group of stakeholders representing different roles in the decision-making process.
To hear Forrester expand upon this idea and how it relates to sales and CRM processes, check out the webinar: “Say Goodbye To MQLs, No Thanks To MQAs, And Hello To Opportunities.” Their advice is to attach all stakeholders to a CRM opportunity (not just one contact) very early in the cycle, market to all, and keep an eye on everyone, so you get a better read on where the group is vis a vis the progress of your sales process.
Putting this concept to work
A concept related to this way of thinking is scoring leads at the organizational level rather than the individual level. If buying decisions rely on groups, shouldn’t we be looking at group scores?
Obviously, you need some sort of scoring engine to make this work. A good marketing automation solution will score leads based on any number of signals, such as website visits, form submissions, email opens and clicks, etc. We use ClickDimensions. Dynamics 365 Sales Insights uses an AI-driven method of scoring opportunities based on activity levels, estimated revenue, number of touches, etc.
Scoring at the Lead level
Let’s look at scoring individuals vs. scoring a group and what that looks like for a user. Looking at individual lead scores, it’s hard for a user to see the forest for the trees. Look at this–it’s messy and doesn’t help in the context of measuring engagement within a buying group.
Scoring at the Company level
Let’s look at this same data through another lens–the aggregate score within a group. I filtered my leads, including only the personas commonly involved in the purchasing decision. I put the company name of our prospective customer on the y-axis and the aggregate lead score on the x-axis. Here’s what that looks like in the chart editor. Now I can prioritize my time and focus on the companies that are most engaged with us.
Doing this at the individual opportunity level is more complex, but you get the picture. By changing how we look at data in our CRM, we get a better picture of our prospect’s interest level.
By Mark Abes, Vice President, Dyn365Pros, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner, San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles
