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Salesloft Acquires Drift: The Race To AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
Salesloft Acquires Drift: The Race To AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
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Salesloft, one of the industry leading sales engagement platforms, has acquired Drift, the industry leader of conversational marketing (aka website chatbots). No financial terms were disclosed.

The merger combines Salesloft's AI revenue orchestration platform, including Salesloft Cadence, with Drift's premier AI chatbot. It's a move that - according to the official press release - will result in a powerful end-to-end AI revenue orchestration platform servicing the entire buying journey.

But what does this merger mean for the wider sales technology market? And what does it mean for B2B buyers?

What's our take on the Salesloft Drift acquisition?

Firstly, it's a sign from the market (and their investors) that individually they could not meet projected valuations and revenue outcomes, but when combined together, the synergies might stand a better chance. As Salesloft CEO David Obrand puts it, the acquisition "introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform."

Except they weren't the first. The category of AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform had already been claimed.

For years, other companies like 6sense and Demandbase had been building around the idea of combining the sales technology and the marketing tool stack into an all-in-one solution to automate workflows on top of. Similar to Drift, 6sense and Demandbase primarily focused on the enterprise.

Warmly was the first AI powered revenue orchestration platform purpose built for the SMB. And it does so by giving you the option to plug in your existing tech stack.

SMBs typically require more automation because they don't have the same access to marketing teams, sales people, and resources as enterprises do. So we adapted to that need.

We call it signal-based revenue orchestration.

Trends in Sales and Marketing Tech Stack Consolidation

The Salesloft Drift acquisition seemingly follows an ongoing trend of sales and marketing tech stack consolidation, where market leaders are trying to become the all-in-one unified go-to-market solution.

Here's what we mean.

SaaS Mergers: Improving Sales Development?

ZoomInfo acquired Chorus back in July 2021 for $575 million, allowing them to compete with Gong.io, the industry leader in call recording and intelligence. But it's part of their larger acquisition strategy to increase net retention revenue outcomes year over year by upselling existing customers on new offerings that keep them sticky to ZoomInfo's platform.

Apollo.io took a different approach of natively unifying the sales tech stack by building everything in-house. The company started as a B2B contact database, then combined that with email sequencing, and recently raised $100MM in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures in August 2023 to create the full-stack sales technology platform. 60% of the funds are invested into product development. They have a PLG sales motion which has saved them from having to invest as heavily into a large salesforce.

Hubspot, the SMB CRM of choice, went the reverse of Apollo and started as marketing automation software that then added CRM capabilities later. And in November 2023 Hubspot acquired Clearbit, one of the top B2B data providers. For the first time, CRM, B2B contact data, buyer intent signals, and workflow all came under one roof.

As Whitney Sorson, CTO of Hubspot, puts it, "Picture having complete data on over 20 million companies right inside HubSpot. All with over 100 rich data points about the companies and their decision-makers. Then imagine being able to easily find high-fit prospects natively within your CRM. Finally, imagine that once those companies and contacts are in HubSpot, being alerted when those companies are showing buying intent."

With the rise of AI and ChatGPT, you can start to see sales technology giants leaning into consolidating the tech stack not only to improve the entire customer experience, but also because it breaks down data siloes to seamlessly integrate data across systems.

Entering the Era of Revenue Orchestration

Data is the new oil. It's the lifeblood of the orchestration. But data alone is not enough to accelerate pipeline conversion rates.

It needs to be combined with action.

As we combine sales workflow, data, and AI and automation, we move into the new era of revenue orchestration. And that means an ongoing arms race to reach B2B buyers.

Drift and Salesloft: A Tale of Two Giants

Let's zoom into the Salesloft Drift acquisition for a second, because there's a deeper story here.

Back in in 2021, Vista Equity acquired a majority stake in Drift, which valued the buyer engagement platform at $1 billion. In 2022 Vista paid an estimated 23x multiple for Salesloft, which valued it at around $2.3 billion.

These were during the good times of SaaS. But SaaS has taken a turn for the worse as we headed into 2023.

Drift: The Hero of SaaS

There was a time when Drift was the darling of B2B sales technology. Initially, it was Intercom that started the real push of website chat, especially in B2B. But while intercom pushed more into support, Drift moved into marketing.

The eventually created the category and movement around conversational marketing and got chatbots to appear on all the websites. Their key pillar of its growth was B2B buyers from the SMB market.

Anybody could add a script tag to their site and you'd see the iconic Drift chatbot icon on the bottom right hand corner.

The Drift sales development team grew revenue quickly by doing one-call closes using their own product.

The sales team would chat directly to website visitors, post a Zoom Link in the chat, and close a $6,000 to $8,000 a year deal right on the website.

Drift grew from $6 million in revenue to $47 million in revenue in 2 years. It was insanity. It was around this period that that Vista Equity stepped in.

Enter Private Equity

After Vista Equity entered the proverbial chat, Drift was forced to move upmarket and stopped caring about SMB/the lower-middle market B2B buyers. SMB just isn't seen as a place to stay for an aggressive PE firm that wants predictable revenue outcomes. Small companies churned too quickly.

Plus, companies with high website traffic typically received the most value out of Drift, which by and large is a marketing tool designed to capture leads passively visiting the site. The more site visitors, the more leads.

Consequently, it was easier to prove ROI and justify a higher price tag. PE saw enterprise revenue as more stable, which meant a higher multiple could be attached to the conversational AI company.

Drift initially did have a vision to expand outside of its conversational marketing wedge and help service the entire customer experience from top of funnel marketing to bottom of funnel sales, as well engaging customer experiences post-sales .

But ever since Vista took over, Drift shut down all expansion and focused product development on enterprise features and sticking to the marketing use case.

Remember the days when you could add a Drift chatbot to your site for a couple hundred a month? Those are gone.

Today, Drift's lowest tier is $2,500/month ($30,000/year), which is ironically desc "For Small Businesses."


$2,500/month: Small Business?

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For Drift's Advanced and Enterprise tiers, we've heard our customers being quoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to upwards of millions a year. For Drift, the economics of the lower end of the market didn't make sense.

This showed in the product and buyer experiences as well. Complicated workflows, long implementation sessions, high price tags. It became a best-in-class point solution instead of an end-to-end platform, which put a ceiling on its growth.

There was a point where Drift wasn't even integrated in the CRM, a gap that Qualified exploited by building natively on top of the CRM to streamline the sales use case.

But moving up-market proved to be more difficult for Drift. Growth started to slow. And at the bottom, new entrants started popping up everywhere.


Chatbot software listed on G2

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At this time, sales technology company valuations dramatically decreased; many investors were told not to deploy capital and to hold; and B2B buyers stopped buying. And as a result, churn and downgrades increased across the board.

It's no surprise that Drift had layoffs, releasing 159 employees in 2023. Case in point: Drift's employee growth rate has regressed 20% in the last 2 years.


Drift's Employee Count For the Past Two Years

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Drift and Salesloft: A Merger of Equals

It made sense for Vista to combine Drift with Salesloft, two complimentary market leaders in sales development and customer engagement that are struggling to keep their dominance and justify their valuation multiples individually.

Salesloft has similarly come up against stiff competition from entrants like Outreach.io, Instantly.ai, Gong.io, Hubspot, ZoomInfo, and Apollo, all of which have their own sales prospecting capabilities that rival Salesloft's.

Tack on the fact that 93% of outbound emails these days are automated, with response rates generally reaching less than 2%, and it's obvious: the category of email sequencing is reaching a point of diminishing returns for its buyers.

Salesloft's acquisition of Drift, which we see more as a merger, is an opportunity for both companies to decrease costs, improve revenue outcomes, and leverage new synergies, especially fulfilling both company's initial visions of expanding beyond their own stage of buyer journey.

Salesloft CEO David Obrand posted on LinkedIn “[The acquisition] introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform that serves the entire buying journey. By closing the gap between sales and marketing, which has long been a major pain point in the revenue motion, go-to-market teams can now orchestrate a hyper-personalized, omnichannel buyer journey at scale.”

Typically, marketing tools don't cross over into sales, outside of ABX platforms like 6sense and Demandbase, so this would be one of the first acquisitions of its kind.

Naturally, it will take time to fully integrate the two sales technology platforms to create the AI-powered revenue orchestration experience that David Obrand has promised. And it won't be cheap: the point of consolidation is also to upsell offerings, especially if you're aiming at improving the entire buying journey.

What would that look like?

Sales reps could do things like sequence prospects via Salesloft, then continue the conversation with the prospect when they visit the website using Drift.

Drift can cookie and track session activity for all website visitors, and once a target company is identified, teams can use Salesloft to multithread the conversation with all key stakeholders in that target account by adding them all to sequences.

All of this orchestrated by Conductor AI of course.

Salesloft and Drift: Legacy Software Under Fire

As Salesloft and Drift are sorting through the acquisition, there will be a window of opportunity for new entrants to claim the AI revenue orchestration category for themselves by adapting to the changing landscape of how companies successfully go-to-market. We predict that these companies will move quickly to establish themselves.

There will be companies like Apollo.io who will opt to build the unified go-to-market solution natively in-house. This is better than the acquisition approach because data can move seamlessly across all their sub products.

And there will be other companies that will keep themselves platform-agnostic and act as the unified API layer that stitches together the sales and marketing tech stack, resulting in the entire customer experience becoming more coherent. Call it go-to-market middleware.

It's difficult for a single platform to be #1 at every use case. There will always be niche use cases that are better served by specific tools.

In this scenario, you would be able to plug in your favorite tools that you're already using.

Maybe you like ZoomInfo data better than Apollo's, Outreach more than Salesloft, 6sense more than Demandbase. It would give you the opportunity to mix and mash the best-in-class point solutions for your specific market and revenue outcomes.

I think Zach Howland, a sales tech stack expert who has implemented multiple CRM and sales tools across various companies, said it best.

"Flexibility is enhanced utility. The market needs to be more nimble for the coming scramble to modernize sales technology as AI becomes more robust."

Warmly, the Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform

Hi! We're Warmly, the signal-based revenue orchestration platform, purpose built for the SMB market that Salesloft and Drift are neglecting.

Instead of building everything natively or consolidating, we give you the flexibility to plug in your favorite sales and marketing tools.

We then infuse your tech stack with the best-in-class intent and enrichment data from 6sense, Clearbit, and Bombora to automatically orchestrate the right sales workflows at the right time.

We're AI powered. We're free to get started. And you can be fully setup in minutes.

And you can save yourself the $30,000/year because we built a Drift competitor chatbot natively into our platform as well.

Find out how D2DExperts closed $80,000 in revenue from Warmly in the first 12 days of use.

Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform
Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform
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This article is Part IV of the 4-part series on the shifting landscape of B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed.

Here, you can read Part III, which goes over what AI-powered revenue orchestration is and why it's important in the age of AI and automation.

As Part I of the B2B SaaS evolution explained, the world's digital transformation also transformed the importance of the website.

Some studies have noted that 70% of the buyer journey is completed by the time the prospect speaks with a salesperson.

Dark social, through the internet's scale and maturity, has created tons of word-of-mouth channels for recommending products that don't get tracked by attribution software and don't create intent data. 

These channels include social networks like LinkedIn, content platforms like podcasts, internal communications like Slack communities, DMs, and text messages. Word of mouth through dark funnel activities increasingly plays a more influential role in buying decisions.

The trickiest part is knowing when to reach out to the right person with the right question since buyers' attention always changes.

Sending out unsolicited emails and making random phone calls is like taking a shot in the dark, hoping to catch the buyers at the perfect moment. But people don't answer their phones these days, and their email inboxes are overflowing.

At some point in every B2B SaaS buyer's journey, they may not see our ad, they may not read our email, they may not see our G2 reviews, but they will go to check out our website. And for ~8 seconds when they hit our site, we know they're just thinking about us.

“The average digital attention span is 8 seconds, according to media analysts and data scientists,” says Aydin Senkut, Warmly Series A investor, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis. “So the opportunity to catch a prospect while they are actively engaged with your content is fleeting. There is no time to chat to the visitor, upload a lead into a CRM, enrich the data, and add to a follow-up sequence. Warmly provides real-time orchestration of these tasks within that 8-second window.”

From: Press Release: Warmly Series A Announcement

How do you ensure the right follow-up actions happen at this exact moment in time, every time?

We call the solution signal-based revenue orchestration.

The Issue With Most GTM Teams 

How often have you heard one of your sales reps use the phrase, “I just don’t have time for that.”?

This is one of the biggest issues among sales teams.

We’ve got all of these fantastic tools and a ton of great data to dig into, but we don’t really seem to get value out of it all.

Between firmographic data, conversation intelligence, and buying signals, sales reps have so much information to look at that it could take as much as an hour to absorb enough data to respond to a prospect with a sufficient level of context.

And by that time, a competitor has already responded and won the deal.

There is always a tension between speed-to-lead and contextual, personalized responses.

In most cases, speed wins out, especially since reps have lofty sales targets and activity goals. So they make mistakes. They don‘t do research as much as they could (or should). They stop personalizing outreach.

And, of course, conversion rates suffer.

The Last Defensible Marketing Moat Is Brand

In the hyper-saturated environments in which most companies operate today, brand is the last defensible marketing moat.

Competitors can copy and implement new features in weeks, if not days. Messaging can be replicated and improved upon even faster. So can the majority of your sales and marketing tactics and channels.

Brand is what distinguishes you from competitors. It's what creates an emotional connection with prospects before they are ready to buy. It's what allows you to influence buying decisions and to tap into the world of dark social and word-of-mouth referrals.

In our deep dive on warm leads, we spoke about a three-step process for driving qualified, high-intent leads to your site:

  1. Build a media brand (investing in content creation and distribution to position your brand as a leader)
  2. Create brand partnerships (working with likeminded brands in a similar space to increase reach and borrow brand equity)
  3. Engage with prospective buyers (get out there and talk with customers, rather than talking at them with outbound marketing communications)

All of these efforts lead back to one place:

The website.

Website As The Choke Point To All GTM Investments

The opportunity lies in the fact that as the world becomes more digitized, the website serves as the digital store, while the landing page acts as the digital shopfront.

Imagine you are the marketing team for your store. You invest significant money to attract foot traffic, hoping that people will pass by your store (website) and take a closer look at your shopfront (landing page).

If we have done a good job designing our shopfront, some people may enter our store. Some who enter may be our target buyers.

Our target buyers walk through our store daily, showing interest in what we offer. But no one's there to greet them. 

Instead, they are instructed to write down their information on a post-it note and wait for a response in a few hours or days, only to get a call from a rep who asks many questions but answers none of theirs. This is the typical process of filling out forms.

Or they are directed to a kiosk where they can provide their information and receive automated answers. Most chatbots operate in this manner, but this is not how people make purchasing decisions.

It's not surprising that, on average, only 3% of website visitors fill out forms.

Step one of maximizing marketing spend is figuring out which qualified accounts are visiting our website, and from there, the accounts are actually in-market for our product but not raising their hand.

Otherwise, how do we know what marketing efforts are working and where to double down?


~3% of your site traffic converts (and not always the traffic you want)

Quality Data Delivers Qualified Leads

When it comes to B2B buyer intent data, first-party data is always the most reliable source, followed closely by best-in-class third-party intent data from the likes of Bombora.


With these warm buyer intent signals in hand from website visitor behavior, you’re going after the lowest-hanging fruit because these are the companies that are familiar with your brand.

That’s why we’re starting with website intent because only 3% of website visitors fill out a form, so you’re missing out on a huge chunk of what could be qualified prospects,

As the state of signal-based revenue orchestration develops, we’ll be adding additional data sources like job change alerts and job posts.


Introducing Warmly: AI-Supported Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration

Warmly is our signal-based revenue orchestration, born out of the need to respond to warm leads fast and to ensure that as much context and personalization as possible are present at every touchpoint.

Warmly is designed specifically for the SMB, with a flexible pricing structure to suit. Most ABM and revenue-focused solutions are out of range for this market segment; they’re targeting enterprise buyers.

As such, those platforms generally take a human-first approach since enterprise companies with enterprise budgets for enterprise tools also have the budget for a huge GTM team.

SMB buyers don’t have that luxury.

So, we built Warmly with an AI-first approach. This way, you get the best out of what modern machines can offer (speed, scale, and data-driven contextual communication) and only loop your reps in when the human touch is needed to close the deal. This allows humans to focus on what they do best which is building relationships and being strategic.

These tools are also largely forcing customers into a specific ecosystem. ‎Salesloft acquired Drift and is focused on building an all-in-one GTM solution. Same thing is happening with ZoomInfo, and with the HubSpot acquisition of Clearbit.

But SMB buyers need flexibility. 

So, our approach to revenue orchestration is about being the middleware that orchestrates the best-in-class tools that you choose so you can have flexibility. 

How Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Works

You Run Demand Gen As Normal 

All of this begins with the various demand generation strategies you’re running.

Remember, only around 5% of your total addressable market is actually ready to buy. By the time they get to one of your lead generation devices, they’ve already done the majority of their research.

If you’re not present during that whole customer journey, educating the prospect and guiding their buying decisions at every turn, you’re unlikely to be in the final consideration set.

So, keep on doing what you’re doing. Build that content machine, publish and distribute, and drive traffic back to your website so prospects can learn about how you solve their common problems.

Warmly Deanonymizes Visitors To Your Website 

Once a potential buyer lands on your website, Warmly kicks into action.

This begins with website visitor deanonymization.

We can uncover 65% of the companies who visit your site and 15% of the actual people without you having to do anything.


In some cases, we can provide LinkedIn accounts and even email addresses for these buyers, all of which are then quickly synced back to your CRM and sales engagement tools.

Best-In-Class Data Integrations Help Identify Buying Committees 

We then pull in firmographic data from best-in-class sources such as Clearbit and 6sense, both at the company level and at the contact level.

This helps you to identify who might be on the buying committee and who else at that company might be responsible for the purchase decision.

For example, a marketing associate might have visited your website, but Warmly has identified (based on your ICP information) that the CMO would more likely be the decision-maker here.

This data is also routed to your sales tech stack, helping to build out the account and allowing you to understand more about who you need to talk to in order to influence a purchase.

This comes from a proprietary data waterfall strategy designed to ensure you have the best coverage and accuracy (better than anyone else). We layer together the best data for you so you don’t have to go through the headache.


Warmly Orchestrates Multi-Threaded Omnichannel Outreach 

Here’s where the power of AI really kicks into gear.

We’ve enriched your CRM and sales engagement tools with all of the account data related to the prospect in question. We’ve combined metadata and tech stack data with best-in-class buying intent data to translate buying signals into meaningful and actionable sales actions that can be automated.

We call this multi-threaded outreach.

By multi-threaded, we mean that our AI engine isn’t just communicating with one person.

It’s using powerful sales and marketing automation to push personalized email and LinkedIn messages to multiple stakeholders, all of which appear to be coming from a member of our sales team.

As all good revenue teams know, each stakeholder in the B2B buying team has different buying motivations. The CMO is going to want to see results or proof of concept that are different from what the marketing associate might see.

So, our AI outreach engine crafts contextual messaging based on those roles and the value your product can provide them.

All of this is orchestrated via a single platform connected to your existing sales engagement tech stack. It’s high-value work being done in the background that your reps don’t have to worry about.

Use Case Examples For Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration

Top of Funnel Orchestration

If a qualified ICP account visits the website for the first time without any associated CRM deal, we automatically create the account in the CRM. Then, we enrich new CRM fields to track the account's digital footprint and analyze trends. We automatically source the buying committee via Apollo, PeopleDataLabs, and ZoomInfo integrations.


The contacts are then synced to the CRM, assigned the appropriate account owner, and automatically added to an educational nurture sequence sent via email and LinkedIn (via our Salesflow integration).

As the buying committee members engage with the content, the signal on the account strengthens. Over time, we may see the account transition from the awareness stage to the consideration stage of the buying journey. And instead of just searching for your category in Google, they're searching for your brand.

Middle of Funnel Orchestration

The account's buying committee has started to show interest in your offering, as evidenced by repeat visits to your website from multiple IP addresses. They have shown interest in case studies and pricing pages and have recently engaged with marketing nurture emails. We bilaterally sync web activity associated with each buying committee member into the CRM, including the referral source, time spent on each page, and specific pages visited. This synchronization helps prioritize accounts, tailor experiences, and involve relevant parties.

As committee members are directed to your site via nurture sequences, we will send personalized messages through our AI chat. These AI chat messages are contextualized to the content consumed and the account's surrounding context. As the conversation progresses, your human seller will be notified through Slack and can engage with the prospect in real-time via video call on the website.


Bottom of Funnel Orchestration

When an account is in the decision phase and on your website, we alert the assigned Account Executive (AE) both audibly and via push notifications when these accounts visit our site. This enables the AE to meet the visitor where they're at, on the website via our live video chat. If the AE can't act immediately, the notification provides the phone numbers of the buying committee (when available) for a direct call.


Simultaneously, we draft personalized emails or LinkedIn messages using GPT and relevant data pulled from all integrated systems. The AE would approve these messages before they're sent, ensuring timely and relevant follow-ups with the prospect.

Lead Scoring & Revenue Orchestration

Signal-based revenue orchestration can (and should) be set up to run different playbooks based on the level of intent and warmth the prospect demonstrates.

Here’s how we score and route leads at Warmly, for instance:

As you can see, leads we judge as cold receive simple inbound chatbot workflows, whereas hot and medium prospects get a proactive AI chat playbook.

These distinctions are made using our proprietary warm lead scoring matrix.


A combination of ICP filters (for example, the size of the company) and intent signals (from third-party site activity and engagement on our own website) determines how hot the lead is, automatically filtering prospects into the relevant workflows.

PS. Our full-length article on Warmly implementation goes into detail on how to set this up.

Advantages of Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration

We only loop in sellers when an account is ready for a human conversation. Otherwise, we're continuing to deliver multi-threaded, omni-channel experiences across all your accounts automatically.

We think that human systems are inherently difficult to scale, especially as deals become more complex and involve more stakeholders, each with individual nuances.

The difficulty is in holding attention long enough to synthesize all the information collected on an account/individual to craft the right experience before their attention goes elsewhere. It takes time to research, time to draft, and time to send. When a rep reaches out, the window of opportunity might have closed, and the prospect is visiting a competitor's site. Or the rep never reaches out, and we would've missed an opportunity to build a relationship with the prospect earlier in their buying journey.

Orchestration's ability to reduce the relevant information from your systems into the right multi-threaded actions, combined with AI's ability to generate personalized messaging, has the following advantages over traditional Account Based Marketing:

  • Fit - To ensure that the best-fit companies (based on your ICP) get high-touch workflows, stopping low-intent leads from clogging up sales pipelines and speeding up sales cycles by acting as a filtering mechanism and stitching together various data inputs. 
  • Speed - To engage with the prospect through the right channel, with the right message in that ~8-second window when they're thinking about you
  • Scale - To engage with all accounts visiting your website across all stages of the buyer journey and across the entire buying committee, not just the person visiting the site at that moment
  • Consistency - To immediately mobilize and scale up an army of AI SDRs to deliver consistent messaging that would resonate with the right buyers so you can test and iterate what works best at scale
  • Personalization - To deliver the right messaging at the right time, via the right channel, AND being human while doing so
  • Reduction - To measure the value of each of the dozens of buying signals you have access to, and weight them based on how strongly they indicate intent, and reduce it to an overall intent score

Consolidate Tools to Create a Seamless Buyer Experience

To stitch together these event-driven systems, you would need ZoomInfo or Clearbit to enrich the data, 6sense to gather the website intent, and Drift to engage with them live on the website. Now you can do it all in one.

Layering data from disparate systems and reducing the complexity through orchestration leads to derived insights. You can skip analysis done by a human toggling between three screens and pinpoint critical moments in a buyer's journey. You don't need to ink deals with 6-7 vendors and spend time getting systems to talk to one another. You can focus on one core vendor and push them to innovate to create seamless buyer experiences.

That will allow you to save money on tech spend, repurpose reps' time on more strategic problem-solving for the customer, and have robust data to run models and AI against to automate processes further.

Setup Warmly in Minutes, Not Months

Larger platforms may require weeks to months to set up correctly, involving multiple teams, onboarding sessions, and alignment meetings. The hidden cost of setup starts to eat away at the ROI.

For Warmly, you can begin receiving hard ROI in 20 minutes by:

  • Adding a code snippet to the site
  • One-click authenticating into your systems (Hubspot, Outreach, Apollo, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.)

You can immediately start to improve conversion rates by de-anonymizing and enriching the traffic coming to your site, sync this data back into your CRM, and then routing hot accounts to the right rep.

Then we would set you up for an onboarding call with our CSM for 30 minutes to help you define your ICP accounts and buying committee personas in Warmly so that we can set website prospecting on auto-pilot by turning on AI chat and AI prospector. This would run all hours of the day to line up conversations for reps even as they sleep.

An example: within the first 8 minutes of turning on AI chat, Kandji was able to book two qualified meetings. You can read more about Kandji's case study here.

Read more about what our customers have to say about us:

The Rise of AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
The Rise of AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
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This article is Part III of a 4-part series on the shifting landscape of B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed.

You can read Part II, where we introduce account-based marketing and how it improves the buyer experience to get past the noise explained in Part I.

In the previous two parts, we talked about the problems facing revenue teams today and how we got there. Account-based marketing is a step in the right direction, as it adapts how companies engage with buyers depending on the stage of their buyer's journey. 

Right message, right person, right time, through the right channel.

However, having implemented ABM solutions ourselves and talked with many current or former users of ABM, we've seen that there are hard setup and maintenance costs, as well as difficulties in running such a complex operation effectively - particularly speed, coverage, and consistency.

People are influenced into deals rather than pushed into them like before. Demand creation and dark social are starting to become a key part of people’s strategies.

Understanding Demand: Creation vs. Selling

‎(Image Source: Freepik)

Demand creation focuses further up the funnel at the awareness and consideration stages of the buyer's journey. It's about finding ways to get our brand in front of the 97 to 99 percent of our total addressable market who may not be actively in the market but have the potential to become prospects in the future. This involves utilizing channels like LinkedIn, Reddit, ads, webinars, blog posts, and influencers to educate and engage with our target audience.

Demand capture is about capturing the buyer in the decision and purchase stage. Again, only 1 to 3 percent of people are currently in the market and showing purchase intent. This is where all of our sales team's efforts should go. There's typically a high cost for sales spending time on accounts that are not in-market.

The need to split between demand creation (mostly marketing, though there can be some assistance from sales) and demand capture (mostly sales but with some marketing influence) is to fulfill the buyer journey experience.

One common mistake companies make is the tendency to allocate most of their budget towards demand capture, even though 70% of the buying journey has already occurred by the time a seller is involved. By then, the buyer already has a top 5 list of vendors they are looking to evaluate.

By neglecting demand creation, we risk commoditizing ourselves among competitors and miss the opportunity to distinguish ourselves as a leader.

If we truly solve a problem, our buyer will be in the market for our solution one day. And if we did demand creation right, they'll be googling for our solution via branded search terms rather than typing our category name, where we may not even rank in the first four search results.

The Importance of ICP Creation

When we look at the difference between high-performing and low-performing SDR teams, there’s one thing that stands out across the board:

The best teams are getting fed with better pipeline.

That is, the leads coming through are of higher quality. They’re a better match for the company’s ICP, so they have an easier time closing deals and waste less time on leads that would never close.

For this, you need to have your ICP clearly nailed down and ensure your demand-generation activities are tailored to that specific audience.

It is not just about finding a fit on demographics, though.

You also want to know that the company is growing. Do they have NRR over 100%? Are they retaining customers? Is revenue increasing?

If these signals are all met, it means you’re less likely to have churn issues in the future because the buyers got laid off.


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Wasting Time on The Wrong Activities 

The other problem with many low-performing SDR teams is that they aren’t focusing on the right actions. Only 20% of their time goes to activities that create progress. The other 80% is just wasted time.

They aren’t working on the right deals at the right time, with the right people, through the right channels.

Revenue orchestration helps sales teams prioritize the best leads and deprioritize the worst ones so they can work on the activities that actually move the needle forward.

Advantages of AI-powered Revenue Orchestration

Fit 

AI-powered revenue orchestration helps ensure that the leads that do make it through to a conversation with sales reps are highly aligned with your ICP.

Instead of funneling all potential prospects through to a demo (like a standard chatbot or meeting booker would), a revenue orchestration solution:

  • De-anonymizes the site visitor.
  • Enriches your CRM data on that account with other firmographic info (such as identifying who else might be on the buying committee).
  • Extracts third-party buying intent signals from external providers to understand where the prospect is at in their buying journey.
  • Understands the current health of the company by pulling publicly available growth metrics.
  • Matches that collection of data against your ICP construct to determine what conversational path to put them down.
  • Orchestrates communications across email, social, and live chat.
  • Nurtures the prospect until they demonstrate a sufficient level of intent, triggering an alert for a salesperson to take over.

This means those website visitors you aren’t a fit for your ICP don’t clog up your sales teams’ meeting pipeline, which translates to faster sales cycles and stronger conversion rates.

Speed

When a target company exhibits buying intent, the window of opportunity that the buyer is thinking about you could be seconds.

If a buyer visits the site and has a question about the product but is unable to meet with a rep until a day later, that may be too late if the budget discussion is tomorrow. By the time a sales rep reaches out, the moment may have passed, and the buyer has gone to a competitor.

Here's an example of how orchestration could solve this.

The VP of Marketing tells a B2B marketing manager at SaaS Co. to research an intent solution to get more in-market leads. SaaS Co's marketing manager asks the Pavilion Go-to-market community for alternatives to 6sense because 6sense is so expensive. Someone mentions Warmly.

The marketing manager visits Warmly's homepage, the case studies page, and the pricing page. On the pricing page, the chatbot pings - it's an AE at Warmly asking if they have any questions.


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The marketing manager doesn't realize he's speaking to an AI. But by now, the actual AE has been notified and jumped in to take over the conversation, initiating a video call. They arrange to catch up again after SaaS Co's budget meeting (that's tomorrow). The marketing manager notes the solution in his deck and calls it a day.

But the orchestration doesn't end there.

  • Immediately after, the SaaS Co.'s CFO receives a LinkedIn connection request. It's the Warmly AE, enquiring about their precarious financial position. They detail exactly how Warmly integrates into SaaS Co's existing tech stack and maximizes the ROI of marketing spend. The CFO ignores the message but keeps Warmly in mind.
  • The rest of the buying committee (the VP of Marketing, CRO, VP of Sales, and Head of Sales Development) receive custom emails addressing all the risks Warmly would help eliminate.
  • The CRO finds a surprise in her message - an explanation of how Warmly eliminates revenue leaks, a topic they had recently read up on. The CRO clicks on a link in the email, arrives on the Warmly homepage, and reads case studies about how Warmly solved revenue leaks with SaaS Co's competitors.

The orchestration system automatically generated these experiences immediately after that initial call. AI carefully selected the message, buying committee members, and channels based on the surrounding context and historical data.

In the past, such an analysis and outreach would have taken hours. This took minutes. Plus, the call recording was synced to the CRM, transcribed, and processed alongside all other relevant data collected on the account.

So, onto that all-important buying committee meeting. What do you know? Warmly is top of mind.

The marketing manager reaches out to Warmly's AE to schedule another call with the VP of Marketing, CRO, and Sales. The AI, always doing more, includes the CFO on the call because they're deemed vital.

And in less than two days (there could be just 24 hours between the initial website visit and that buying committee meeting), you've got a prospect ready to buy.

Scale

A similar story plays out a hundred more times during the working day as companies visit the site, are qualified in or out, and the orchestration platform delivers the right experience. A single rep can only handle one account at a time, but an orchestration platform can simultaneously service every single account at every stage of the buyer journey.

The previous example discussed a possible experience delivered to the account if they were in-market.

What about those that aren't in-market?

They receive demand-creation experiences, like display ads or personalized emails that route to educational blog pages or videos.

When the target accounts finally enter the "buying window," Warmly's content has already shaped their opinions. The account is primed, and we move to demand capture involving the sales team.

The target accounts arrive on Warmly's landing page, the AI qualifies them as in, notifies the rep when a human needs to be in the loop, and the cycle repeats.

Flexibility

‎The best AI-powered revenue orchestration solutions give GTM teams the flexibility they need to plug into their existing tech stack and coordinate sales and marketing activities.

That’s not the case across the board, though.

Right now, we’re seeing a consolidation of the GTM tech market.

Salesloft bought Drift. HubSpot bought Clearbit. Leedfeeder merged with Echobot to become Dealfront.

You’re also seeing tools like Apollo.io and ZoomInfo build out unified GTM suites in-house.

Others, like Warmly, are more platform-agnostic. They focus on integrating with a wide variety of tools so you can plug into the tech stack you’re already set up with and orchestrate effective GTM campaigns powered by AI.

Zach Howland, a sales tech stack expert with a ton of experience implementing CRM and sales tools, has a great point on this:

"Flexibility is enhanced utility. The market needs to be more nimble for the coming scramble to modernize sales technology as AI becomes more robust.”

Consistency

Take this example.

Based on data in the orchestration platform, the leadership team finds they're losing deals based on price to competitors, specifically to companies in B2B SaaS at the Series A stage.

So, the team tweaks the orchestration platform to show 20% discounts to in-market B2B SaaS accounts at the Series A stage. The AI also integrates this promotion into the company's messaging while keeping the price the same for all other prospects.

Normally, this type of change would take multiple training sessions with SDRs, as reps leave, are onboarded, or return from vacation. In the past, reps might have tested messaging and pricing on their own.

Now, everything is standardized. This change is implemented immediately and fed through the platform.

Personalization

The other problem with those stock standard sales conversations that lack context?

They’re exactly the opposite of what today’s buyers say they want.

86% say personalization plays a major role in their purchasing decision.

For many companies, especially SMBs, personalization is a great concept but can be difficult to achieve.

Most businesses add a dynamic name section to their email chains and call it a day. As if their name is what customers are talking about when they say they want personalized buying experiences.

A quality revenue orchestration platform provides companies access to the tools they need to deliver personalized experiences.

Again, it starts with quality data (you can’t personalize anything if you don’t know a thing about the person you’re speaking to), coordinated using a combination of AI and automation to identify opportunities to personalize aspects of the conversation.

It's not just about showing that you know their company's name or their role. Revenue orchestration can go as far as customizing the marketing messaging and even the sales assets that customers receive based entirely on the demographic and intent data you have on them.

Adaptive Systems and their Multiplier Effect

When the whole go-to-market functions of demand creation (marketing) and demand capture (sales) play together harmoniously and the experience is delivered correctly, buyers are happy because they feel like it's being done for them, not to them.

When data no longer lives in siloes and is combined to create derived insights that feed back into the platform, the system continuously delivers better experiences to each account.

Advancements in AI, like vector embeddings, can extend LLMs to have long-term memory for the surrounding historical context and experiences delivered to not just one account but every account being tracked in the CRM. This allows the system to create highly customized experiences that extend across the life cycle of the buyer's journey. Like Amazon and Netflix, millions of buyers don't receive templated emails; they receive carefully selected personalized experiences.

The Non-linear Nature of B2B Purchasing

B2B buying doesn’t play out in any kind of predictable, linear order. Instead, buyers engage in what one might call “looping” across a typical B2B purchase, revisiting (for example) six buying jobs at least once.

There's a multiplier effect when all the pieces work together and adapt in real time to the ever-evolving ecosystem of B2B buying.

‎(Image Source)

Redefining the Role of Human Interaction

Go-to-market teams have already been downsizing and learning to be just as effective with fewer headcounts.

It's gotten so difficult to get someone on the phone that when they finally pick up, after 100 dials, we end up word vomiting just to have them hang up again. It's a horrible experience for both the buyer and the seller.

In the very near future, sellers will move further away from these manual, repetitive tasks because of the increased sophistication, efficiency, and effectiveness of these new adaptive systems. SDRs and AEs can get back to focusing on solving complex customer problems and building long-term relationships. And marketers can spend more time building empathy for the people they are seeking to serve.

And because AI has become quite good at synthesizing data into something humans can understand, we can drill down into the system and reveal important answers to questions like: Who is our ICP? Where are the bottlenecks? Why did we deliver certain experiences? What's been working or not working? Why?

That's the magic of AI-supported revenue orchestration. It gives us the power to be more creative and strategic.

We do what we do best, and leave the rest to automation.

Read on for Part IV on Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform.

Interested to see Warmly in action? Book a demo.

The Future of Account Based Marketing
The Future of Account Based Marketing
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This article is Part II of a 4-part series on the shifting landscape in B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed next.

You can read Part I, in which talks about the evolution of sales and marketing pre and post-pandemic.

TL;DR:

  • The reduction in force in 2023 has accelerated the need for agile organizations in B2B buying and selling.
  • Account Based Marketing (ABM) has shifted the focus from individual leads to the account level, improving efficiency and relevance.
  • Understanding the buyer's journey and using automation and AI can increase sales velocity and conversions.
  • However, there are limitations to ABM, including the challenge of data silos and the need for speed, coverage, and consistency.
  • The next phase in demand capture and demand creation is Account Based Orchestration (ABO)

Headcount Reduction Accelerating the Agile Organization

As of August 2023, almost 300,000 workers in US-based tech companies have been laid off.

Just as COVID was a massive accelerant to the digital buying process, the 2023 reduction in force, because of uncertainty around the economy, was a massive accelerant to the new age of agile organizations.

Dynata conducted a 2023 study across 500 business leaders in the US, Germany, the UK, and France across all industries. Participants included heads of sales, revops, and marketing. A few findings:

  • 75% of organizations expected flat or reduced revenue growth this year
  • 58% expect to have less personnel to drive sales

So, there is less staff, potentially the same pipeline coverage needed to hit your quota.

As a result, sales and marketing organizations learned how to operate smaller, more agile, and more efficiently. Revenue teams began partnering with the most innovative technologies that used automation and AI to help them execute operational downstream activities, which allowed them to focus on key insights and personalization.

Shift Towards Customer Centricity and Account-Based Marketing

In the past, most go-to-market tooling was focused on helping the seller and marketer get more leads. The experience of tooling wasn't necessarily tailored toward the buyer (e.g. carpet bomb email and relentless cold calls).

There are two options to increase revenue:

  • Increase leads
  • Improve pipeline conversions, cycle times, ASPs

It seemed easier to get more leads, so many organizations chose that. But it wasn't. It was the more expensive option that had diminishing returns. More leads to sift through and follow up on meant sellers weren't allocating their time as effectively.

The problem was that 3% of your TAM was in-market to buy (Sticky Branding).

Spending time on non-target accounts that were not in-market to buy was a huge waste of time and money for both the sales and marketing teams.

The Importance of Efficient Growth and Timing

Companies like 6sense keyed in on the importance of efficient growth, relevance, and timing. They introduced the idea of account-based marketing (ABM), which took the focus off the individual lead contact and brought it up to the account level.

Understanding the Buyer's Journey

The vision was to break your target ICP accounts into four key stages of the buyer journey:

  • Target: Not ready to buy
  • Awareness: Waking up to the problem
  • Consideration: Learning how to solve the problem
  • Decision: Engaging with vendors
  • Purchase: Ready to buy

Then, align the sales and marketing team to work together towards delivering the right experience at the right stage in the buyer's journey. Sellers needed the marketers to figure out which leads were in-market. The marketers needed sellers to engage those leads. ABM teams typically align on the same ICPs and metrics to build qualified pipeline together.

There are thousands of potential leads that a seller could follow up on, but they should just prioritize the ones with the highest ROI, and leave the rest to AI and automation.

Here's an example 6sense workflow:

  • Awareness: Marketing identifies the best accounts via the buyer's digital footprint on the web, finds the buying committee, and then adds them to social ad campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Consideration: Marketing adds the buying committee members into nurture/education campaigns to provide value
  • Decision: Landing pages and chatbots are personalized to the buyer. Target accounts are routed to the right sales rep
  • Purchase: CRM, marketing automation systems and the website capture buying signals. This is when the account is in-market to buy, and sales should chase

Understanding where the buyer was in their journey made marketers and sellers more relevant and customer-centric in their outreach timing, targeting, and messaging.

Taking a multi-threaded approach where everyone on the buying committee was engaged increased sales velocity, conversions, and ASPs.

Sales and marketing were going to market together, which boosted overall ROI.

ABM started to work and cut through the noise:

  • The first person in the conversation is 70% more ready to buy (6sense)
  • 85% of marketers say ABM significantly benefited them in retaining and expanding their existing client relationships (Triblio)
  • An ABM strategy can increase B2B revenue by 208% (Warc)

According to Lars Nilson, VP of Business Development at Snowflake, who ran a 200+ sales development team, when account-based marketing and account-based sales orchestrate, script, and strategize together, they saw a 3x lift rate on their meetings booked.

Limitations of Today's Account-Based Marketing

In spite of the lift from running an ABM motion, companies are still finding difficulty capturing demand. Deals are becoming increasingly complex, with more steps involved and more people to convince. The status of deals is constantly changing and faster than humans can react.

There are also fewer humans to react, period, because of the headcount reduction. Sales reps are working double-time to engage quickly and effectively with more accounts on increasingly complex deals. People are fried.

Sometimes it could take weeks, months, quarters to fully implement an ABM solution. It could take a while before sales and marketing and in full alignment on their ICP and agreed upon processes. Takes time to find a dedicated owner of the ABM tool. People are constantly shifting, so the CMO that brought on the ABM solution may leave midway through implementation. And the sales team that was onboarded today may not be the sales team that uses it tomorrow.

A strong signal on an account that's in-market to buy is only useful if it's acted upon, and better yet, acted upon immediately. Speed kills sales. Drafting a personalized email to a hot account a day after may be too late.

Human systems do not scale well, especially as organizations and the number of leads to keep track of gets larger.

The Challenge of Data Silos and Integration

The market is starting to consolidate tooling; however, you still have 5 to 6 solutions that need to work in tandem to execute effective ABM. For example there's conversational intelligence, sequencing, email, LinkedIn, Slack, CRM, buyer intent, etc. Humans still need to toggle between three screens to conduct analysis and pinpoint key moments in a buyer's journey. Revops needs to manage multiple vendors, which oftentimes have duplicate features.

But the biggest issue is having multiple data siloes to manage. With systems needing to integrate back and forth, it can be difficult to have a single set of robust, accurate data to automate workflows or run AI models off of.

The problem compounds as the size of the organization and prospect base grows.

Pretty soon there are processes to maintain processes, and, depending on your time horizon, the upfront setup and maintenance cost may introduce more harm to the team rather than the ROI promised.

The Need for Speed, Coverage, and Consistency in ABM

For ABM to work well, you need speed, coverage, and consistency.

Most sales teams are not set up to react in real-time, which breaks them out of their workflow. It takes significant orchestration to complete the ABM motion successfully at every step.

If there is a big marketing campaign that drives traffic, there may not be enough rep coverage to engage all the buyers.

In both cases, there is a revenue leak in the funnel because speed, coverage, and consistency fall short.

It means you're not engaging or fast enough with your in-market target accounts (3% of your TAM) who are in the decision/purchase stage, which costs you deals today.

You're also missing out on the opportunity to build relationships with target accounts that are not in-market (97% of your TAM) in the awareness/consideration stage, which will potentially cost you even more deals tomorrow and beyond because those accounts may be building an early relationship with your competitors.

Up Next: The Era of Account-Based Orchestration

Read Part III, where we'll delve into the evolution from account-based marketing to account-based orchestration. We'll explore how this transition enhances the speed and precision of delivering a tailored buying experience to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

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How The B2B SaaS Sales Funnel Has Changed
How The B2B SaaS Sales Funnel Has Changed
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This article is Part I of a 4-part series on the shifting landscape of B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed.

TL;DR:

  • B2B SaaS experienced a golden era with an influx of capital and a focus on go-to-market strategies.
  • The traditional sales funnel and data-driven processes became the foundation of go-to-market understanding.
  • The market saw an explosion of SaaS solutions and an increase in email deluge, leading to declining conversion rates.
  • The pandemic brought about significant changes in buyer behavior, with a rise in digital communities and increased reliance on content consumption for decision-making.
  • The digital transformation paradox emerged as conventional funnel metrics struggled to capture evolving buying behavior, leading to the need for companies to adapt and evolve.

The Golden Era of B2B SaaS: 2018-2022

The years from 2018-2022 could be called the Golden era of pre-AI startups. B2B SaaS was living its best life. Startups were bathing in cash. They were getting their rounds pre-empted because deals were becoming that hot.

image

(Image Source)‎

I remember just two years back in 2021, there was a saying in the startup community that it was easier to raise money than it was to hire great talent.

The Capital Influx

Initially, we saw the influx of capital into SaaS businesses often channeled into go-to-market strategies. B2B SaaS companies hired like nobody’s business: sales reps, ad spend, sales reps, marketing tools, and more sales reps. Resource bloat accrued because of the mounting pressures to produce in order to meet valuation expectations.

This forced the hands of many B2B SaaS startups to hire too many employees to hit those targets. As the economy has continued to recede in 2023, shareholders, boards, and VC firms alike are asking nearly every startup to surrender to a RIF - aka layoffs - to reduce the bloated, unproductive staff.

GTM Strategies

The traditional construct of going to market was that of the sales funnel. Tools like ZoomInfo and Outreach would make one sales rep feel like the power of ten sales reps. But instead of cutting back, companies went all in, flooding the market with outbound — more dials and cold outbound calls, and more mass emails out the digital door.

With so many bodies, predictability and structure became the name of the game. I remember being curious about sales and asking Larson Stair, an expert sales founder in our Techstars batch.

"What makes a salesperson great?" — Alan

"Process." — Larson

Sales with a process is a science, which makes it more predictive. Without a process, it was emotion, which made it less predictive. VCs have historically pushed for predictability, which pushed for certainty in measurement. What is the best visualization of this predictability? The Marketing-to-Sales Funnels with conversion rates at every step.


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(Image Source)‎

At the same time, with the explosion of data, whatever could be measured was measured. Everything became seemingly quantifiable when the funnel was the foundation of go-to-market understanding, turning GTM into a science, and sales and marketing as “the scientist” executing the experiments.

The SaaS Startup Explosion: the 2020s

As venture capital continued to flow into the 2020s, the SaaS market saw an influx of tools, thanks also to the commoditization of API software development. Competitor apps could be spun up overnight with just a handful of developers. The availability and affordability of cloud service helped ensure that the entrepreneurial developers sitting inside a B2B SaaS company could develop revenue-producing applications to their heart's content.

Carina, Zack, and I built one such competitor tool during our time at Techstars without knowing anything about the space.

Everyone started building and buying everything. Then, the capital and the revenue started coming in - and it was good. However, when everyone starts making money, good decisions start going out the window. Lots of shelfware was created and sold to consumers who were sold something that didn’t deliver value.

The Email Deluge and Declining Conversions

Inboxes exploded from the deluge of emails. Eventually, Google started throwing certain domains into spam. Whole cottage industries emerged just to warm emails to improve deliverability so companies could send more.

Conversion rates started declining.

But the pressure mounted. What did people do? More hands on deck. 5% closed won conversion last year, 1% conversion this year? No problem. Pump up the top of the funnel to sustain revenue growth.

If your job was on the line, why fix something that wasn't broken? Plus, who had the bandwidth to innovate when the existing system was barely afloat? Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Lots of hungry reps to feed right now. Where are all the MQLs, form fills, white papers, and link clicks? Because of the short time horizon of CROs, the whole go-to-market team needed to operate on a similar timescale.

The Pandemic's Impact on Business

Then 2020 ...

The pandemic changes everything.

It completely disrupts B2B SaaS marketing, in ways that are still being felt today.

And it all started with B2B SaaS buyers.

The Buyer's Evolution

Let's talk about what happened to the buyer.

Forget B2B SaaS products for a second. For the first time, during the pandemic, buyers were building entire teams without ever meeting face-to-face with their new hires.

As a result, B2B SaaS providers had to learn how to connect with buyers that were increasingly connecting with peers, potential clients, and sales teams entirely online.

The Rise of Digital Communities

Demand for community skyrocketed. Reddit, Discord, and Zoom engagement shot up. And in the wake of all this, professional communities like Pavilion started sprouting up everywhere. LinkedIn evolved into a real professional social network.

Suddenly, buyers, who in the past, would meet each other maybe once or twice a year at conferences to exchange ideas about B2B SaaS solutions, can poll thousands at a time, globally, for advice on whether to use Outreach or SalesLoft, Hubspot or Marketo in a single post, and get curated answers back within minutes.

Content Consumption

With social media engagement at an all-time high, consumption of marketing content like e-books, blog posts, podcasts, influencer endorsements, and peer reviews soared.

In 2020 alone, media uploads increased by 80% YoY, driven by an influx of social media marketing in the SaaS space. How-to videos, explainers, pre-recorded sales pitches: B2B buyers were absorbing it all.

The increase in content consumption meant that demand generation became a key factor in the B2B SaaS business model.

B2B Decision-Making

As well as consuming more and more content during the buying process, the way organizations decided on when and why to purchase a SaaS product also changed.

In particular, partnership programs - for example, Hubspot and Salesforce's app ecosystem - started gaining traction as a go-to-market channel, with buyers increasingly making purchase decisions from trusted B2B software vendors.

The Digital Transformation Paradox

Consequently, B2B SaaS underwent a digital transformation overnight.

The change was swift. But, ironically, as the world digitized, conventional SaaS metrics struggled to capture the evolving buying behavior.

Private Slack chats, influencer endorsements, or old-school phone calls - the funnel couldn't track these. The same large quantity of SaaS vendors still existed. It's just now the buyers could see them all a bit more clearly.

The Dark Funnel and Its Impact on B2B Marketing

In the past, companies could track customer interactions through traditional marketing automation platforms. However, with the rise of third-party marketing channels like podcasts, events, influencer marketing, and organic social media, companies are unable to track these interactions effectively. This lack of tracking has led to a major shift in the distribution of content and communication between companies and their customers.


image

(Image Source)‎

The software vendor landscape was vast, but now, buyers had a clearer view. The competition between vendors became fierce, with countless "Top X tools for Y" lists and regular Gartner and G2 matrices to guide buyers.

Still, the traditional sales and marketing model that drove buyers down the funnel persisted, even as it was seeing diminishing returns. A decade of conditioning led ingrained these large processes of generating Leads to MQLS to SQLs, as well as the people who maintained them.

The Informed Buyer

But here's the twist: Buyers were leveling up. They were more informed and more savvy. At least that's what they thought:

  • 70% of the buyer’s journey is done digitally before talking to a salesperson (Sirius Decisions)
  • 80% of B2B purchasers said that they would not even speak to a salesperson until they had done their own research (The Corporate Executive Board)
  • 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information from a series of articles versus an advertisement. (B2B PRSense)
  • 84% of B2B decision-makers begin their buying process with a referral. (Sales Benchmark Index)
  • 86 percent of buyers use peer review sites when buying software (G2)

The number of people in the SaaS solution buying committee was also becoming much larger. Each member has their own needs that must be met before the purchase can go through, so that means different messaging and timing for different personas.

It was like wringing water from a rock and suddenly finding yourself in a desert. That's okay because the VC well always had more rocks to pull from.

Navigating the New Demand Landscape

Post-pandemic, B2B SaaS companies faced a fresh challenge: the funding bubble began to deflate. Buyers tightened their belts. Sales quotas were missed.

Traditional methods seemed outdated in this new reality.

While many clung to old strategies, successful B2B SaaS organizations recognized the need for efficiency and adaptability. They shifted focus from lead generation to efficient demand capture and demand creation, emphasizing trust and authenticity in an informed buyer's world.

"How can I sell you something," no longer works. The approach must be proactive: "What does my customer need from me." Companies like Aligned have built the digital sales room to create better buying experiences.

In this evolving landscape, it's not about who spends the most - on sales teams, marketing campaigns, or SaaS tools - but who adapts the best.

Now that you're keyed up on the changes in the B2B market pre- and post-pandemic, read on for Part II, the future of account based marketing.

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The 10 Best ZoomInfo Alternatives for 2024

The 10 Best ZoomInfo Alternatives for 2024

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Alan Zhao

While there’s no denying that ZoomInfo is a popular B2B data solution, it’s not for everyone.

Modern sales teams realize that engaging prospects is more than data—it’s about the right people and the most relevant message at the right time.

Expensive lock-in contracts, inaccurate data, and other ZoomInfo drawbacks aren’t helping, either.

Our team researched the top ZoomInfo alternatives and detailed their features, pricing, and advantages so you won't have to.

Before we dive into each, let’s break down why companies are looking for ZoomInfo alternatives. ⤵️

Why Look for a ZoomInfo Alternatives in the First Place?

Still think all you need to grow your pipeline is a list of leads and an email sequence?

Have fun staying in 2012. We don’t judge.

Today’s sales funnel is much more complex. Before getting on your sales radar, people take actions that aren't accessible to you.

They might:

  • See your LinkedIn post.
  • Watch a YouTube video demoing your product.
  • Read help documents on your website.
  • Read your blog.
  • Visit your pricing page.
  • Etc.

What should you care? Prospects are much more likely to respond when they’re taking those actions.

The "Dark Funnel" is where many sales engagement opportunities are, and ZoomInfo lacks the ability to surface leads across these touchpoints.

‎More precisely ⤵️

What Are ZoomInfo’s Most Common Drawbacks?

According to customer reviews, here are the three main reasons why people look for ZoomInfo alternatives:

ZoomInfo locks you into long, expensive contracts.

ZoomInfo’s sales growth has been stellar for years. We have to give them that.

This means high-priced contracts and long lock-in periods for customers. The typical contract starts in the low five figures and lasts at least 12 months.

This problem is shared across the space, as we’re seeing a consolidation of GTM SaaS tools. What does this mean for you? Platforms are more expensive, as you pay for bundled products you don’t need.

‎While their platform is a sure bet for large companies looking for predictability, most companies need better features and quality customer support for that price.

ZoomInfo's product suite isn't seamlessly integrated.

There's an ongoing race for the ultimate sales technology platform. Some companies, like Apollo, decide to build all components in-house, while others, like ZoomInfo, have gone the acquisition route.

The result is a suite of clunky products that don't work well, especially with third-party products like CRMs and engagement platforms.

A good example is ZoomInfo's acquisition of Insent.ai in 2021 to boost the platform’s website engagement capabilities. It hasn’t led to much added customer value.

ZoomInfo gives you fit data, while you should care about intent.

‎ZoomInfo lacks the ability to get intent signals from website visitors and social media. It’s a major issue for sales teams, causing ZoomInfo customers to switch to solutions that identify leads when they’re warm 🔥.

Data inaccuracies (especially email).

Nothing’s worse than crafting a personalized email and getting a bounce back…

ZoomInfo’s technology struggles to keep up with people’s rapid career changes.

Customers are complaining about it about its email verifier, especially for contact lists with European contacts.

What Are the Best ZoomInfo Alternatives and Competitors?

Our picks for the top 10 ZoomInfo alternatives include:

  1. Warmly - Reveal and convert your website visitors.
  2. Apollo.io - Complete B2B data and sales engagement platform.
  3. Lusha - Affordable and accurate B2B data.
  4. Seamless AI - Reliable B2B data with a handy Chrome extension.
  5. RocketReach - Large database favored by the Fortune 500.
  6. Hunter - B2B data, domain search, and email verification.
  7. Keyplay - Account database with extremely detailed and accurate filters.
  8. Clay - 50+ data providers combined with AI workflow automation.
  9. LeadIQ - Simple prospecting platform with no engagement capabilities.
  10. UpLead - High-quality B2B data without the “fluff.”

#1. Warmly

ZoomInfo is known and primarily used for B2B data and cold engagement. Filtering leads and accounts for “customer fit” (industry, size, revenue, technology, job title, seniority level, etc.) is something most GTM platforms have or can provide at this point.

The actual gold lies in intent data—the ability of your systems to tell you when people are interested in your company and why.‎

Warmly looks for people who are most likely to take a sales meeting with you TODAY.

The revenue orchestration platform lets go-to-market teams find who’s on their website, and engage them in real time.

It’s the best option for companies looking to combine Intent and Action data to drive sales.

Let’s take a look at some of Warmly’s key features ⤵️

Feature 1 - Account & Contact-Level Intent Data

Timing is everything.

Warmly lets you see which companies and leads are on your site and filters records based on firmographic data and intent data from providers like Clearbit, 6sense, Bombora, and more.

Buyer intent signals can include: 

  • Website activity: This includes things like time spent on specific website sections, and interactions with product, service, or pricing pages.
  • Email engagement: Engagement with email campaigns, including open rates, click-through rates, and responses to CTAs, provides insights into a prospect’s level of interest and receptiveness to offers.
  • CRM stage: Lead scoring, stage in the sales funnel, and previous interactions with sales representatives can also gauge readiness for a purchase.
  • Competitor analysis: Activities related to competitors, such as visiting competitor websites, comparing features and pricing, and researching alternatives, can indicate a comparative evaluation phase in a prospect’s decision-making process.
  • Chatbot interactions: The questions a user poses to a website chatbot, what topics they're interested in finding out more about.
  • Webpage interactions: Interactions with online advertisements through bidstream data provides insights into a prospect’s responsiveness to targeted ads, but general browsing can also show topical intent.
  • Research intent: When a prospect visits a website to discover specific information about the product they want to purchase. For example, they could visit a blog page or other publication.
  • Job posts: Company job postings can offer insight into what technology a company requires, projects they're working on, and their operational challenges.

💡 Note: with Warmly, you get intent signals in addition to regular account and contact data found in ZoomInfo.

Give it a try 👇

Read More About Warmly's Website Intent Tool

Why Should You Care About Signal Selling?

Unlike what LinkedIn influencers say, email is far from dead.

Cold email is, though.

Before Warmly, you couldn’t reach out right when people were browsing your site. The platform lets you engage visitors based on how "warm" they are and where they're most likely to respond.

‎Now, you can use browsing data to understand your prospects' interests and craft the perfect message or interact with them from your website.

‎Here’s an example:

Feature 2 - Live Calls with Website Visitors

There are plenty of chatbot products on the market.

The downside? Most people find them annoying and don’t like to engage with bots.

Warmly lets you see who’s visiting your site, and which page they're on, and lets you start a personalized conversation.

  • By text ✍️
  • Or video 🤳

Here's an example 👇 ‎

‎In the "Warm Calls" section of your Warmly dashboard, you can view which prospects visit your site in real-time.

If you click on a user, you have access to:

  • Their contact information and deal information (if they're in your CRM)
  • An activity timeline with all the recent pages they visited.
  • What they're looking at RIGHT NOW on your site.
  • A side panel that lets you send them a personalized message or start a live video chat.

This is what your prospect will notice on their screen. As you can ‎see, the SDR referenced the last page this visitor was on.

This kind of hyper-personalization gets way more replies than generic outreach.

Case Study: How Kandji Booked 2 Qualified Meetings in 8 Minutes With Warmly

Feature 3 - AI Prospector

The difficulty in getting responses from leads looking at your business is speed. It’s hard for humans to react fast enough to catch people’s attention, and artificial intelligence can help.

So many teams opt for Warmly because the AI Prospector can engage for you (via email or LinkedIn).

Moreover, those SDRs using ZoomInfo to send cold outbound are expensive, and likely generated little business value. Warmly's AI prospector becomes a much more financially viable option that leads to better outcomes.

Here’s an example of a workflow that automatically adds Sales Leaders visiting our site to Outreach campaigns ⤵️

You can do things like:

  • Filter AI engagements based on your ICP criteria and other advanced filters.
  • Limit the number of leads per account to be engaged by AI.
  • Automatically add prospects on LinkedIn or to outreach sequences.
  • Set the timing of Warmly’s AI prospector.

Read More About Warmly's AI Prospector Tool

Pricing

Unlike ZoomInfo, Warmly has a generous free plan that includes 500 website visitors revealed and enriched.

A major factor for GTM teams in Warmly is that with any Warmly plan, you get a bundle of sales products you would normally pay for (and are expensive), like 6Sense, Bombora, and Clearbit.

If you need more volume, access to AI tools, LinkedIn sequencing, or need to invite colleagues, choose from 2 paid plans:

  • Business: From $583 to $1,450 per month, based on your website’s volume (includes access to all of Warmly’s capabilities).
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing (Unlimited volume, custom AI, and integrations).

How Does Warmly Compare to ZoomInfo?

Warmly isn’t a static database like ZoomInfo. ZoomInfo is an excellent option if you want static (aka “Fit”) data and are comfortable with rigid and expensive contracts.

Warmly, on the other hand, shines in finding and engaging people who are looking to buy and are likely to respond to your outreach.

Warmly doesn't have a massive database like ZoomInfo, but capturing intent signals across all web activity and surfacing the hottest leads are much more likely to turn into revenue, which is what you care about.

Feature
Warmly
ZoomInfo
Website De-Anonymization
✅
❌
Live Video Chat
✅
❌
Account and Lead Scoring
✅
✅
Custom Lead Filtering
✅
✅
Data Enrichment
✅
✅
Auto-Prospecting
✅
❌
Job Change Tracking
✅
✅
Integrations with GTM tools
✅
✅
Contact and Account Database
❌
✅
Engagement Platform
❌
✅

‎It’s also worth noting that ZoomInfo has more features than Warmly. However, customers often pay for features they never use in ZoomInfo, while Warmly connects to existing GTM tools.

Pros and Cons

✅ Allows for better timing and personalization of sales outreach.

✅ Seamless integration with other GTM tools.

✅ Affordable for businesses of all sizes.

❌ Does not have a static B2B database.

Warmly's Integrations

Warmly’s enrichment and intent data come from the industry’s best providers bundled together with your purchase, like Clearbit, Bombora, OpenAI, People Data Labs, and 6Sense.

‎#2. Apollo.io

‎Apollo is gaining popularity for its ability to handle prospecting, outreach, and sales workflows under one platform.

It’s a strong choice for businesses looking for ZoomInfo’s features at a lower price and higher data accuracy. Notable features include ⤵️

Popular Features

  • Find prospects from a database of 275M contacts and 73M companies.
  • Score leads based on website visits, search intent, free product usage, and marketing engagements, assisted by AI.
  • Create outreach sequences directly from Apollo, and add qualified leads to those sequences as you prospect.
  • GSuite integration to keep track of emails and get insights before meetings.
  • It has a wide range of management capabilities, such as automating reps' tasks, conversation intelligence, coaching, and deal analytics.

Pricing

Apollo’s free plan gives you unlimited email credits but limits your exports and outreach volumes.

For higher volume limits and advanced features, choose from 3 paid options:

  • Basic: Starts at $49 per user per month (up to 12,000 exports and 10,000 records).
  • Professional: Starts at $79 per user per month (up to 24,000 export credits and no sequence limits).
  • Organization: Starts at $119 per user per month (up to 48,000 export credits and all advanced functionalities).

💡 Note that on paid plans, Apollo requires a minimum of 120,000 email credits used per year.

Pros and Cons

✅ Automatically syncs with your CRM and enriches contacts.

✅ Accurate contact information.

✅ Can handle prospecting and engagements in one interface.

❌ Exporting to other platforms is a mess.

❌ The free plan is very limiting. You will hit paywalls quickly.


#3. Lusha

‎Lusha’s a B2B database that’s easier and cheaper than ZoomInfo.

It doesn’t offer the ability to engage prospects from the platform, but it has a large and accurate company and contact information database.

Popular Features

  • Get up to 1,000 accurate contact information from one search. Pull email addresses, LinkedIn profiles, and direct dials.
  • You can filter companies based on demographics and firmographic data, such as company size, industry, revenue, employee headcount, etc.
  • Export lead lists to your CRM or CSV files.
  • It has built-in enrichment and analytics to help you find commonalities in your best prospects.

Pricing

Lusha’s free plan gives you 1 user, 50 emails, and 5 phone numbers. For more data, pick from:

  • Pro: From $36 to $180 per user per month (depending on the number of phone numbers revealed).
  • Premium: From $59 to $295 per user per month (depending on the number of phone numbers revealed).
  • Scale: Custom pricing for advanced features.

‎Pros and Cons

✅ Database has verified contacts only.

✅ Data quality is strong for international contact lists.

✅ Data is refreshed monthly.

✅ Simple interface.

❌ Does not offer engagement.

❌ Lacks key integrations and core features for larger enterprises.


#4. Seamless AI

‎Seamless AI is a reliable data provider with many database filtering options. It’s often referred to as on-par with ZoomInfo but with a cheaper price point and handy features like its Chrome Extension.

However, customer reviews indicate that ZoomInfo is easier to set up and manage.

Popular Features

  • For each record, Seamless provides insights like recent funding news and job changes, which help reps personalize their messages.
  • Filter records with 1,200 topics to choose from. Add topics to outreach sequences as personalization items.
  • The Chrome extension lets you build lists from LinkedIn, Gmail, Salesforce, and websites.

Pricing

Seamless AI’s basic plan will give you 50 credits. Credits give you a person’s full information, whereas tools like Apollo.io require a credit for email addresses and another credit for direct dials.

For more credits, Seamless AI offers 3 paid plans, which are rumored to start at $39 per user per month and go up to 5-figure contracts.

Contact their sales team or start your free trial for information.

Pros and Cons

✅ Updated and reliable data.

✅ The autopilot feature is handy for creating lists automatically.

✅ Lots of search filters.

❌ Hard to set up.

❌ Steep learning curve for sales reps.


#5. RocketReach

‎Rocket Reach is a straightforward B2B data company popular within the Fortune 500 for its scalability and integrations with legacy systems.

It has a larger database than ZoomInfo and more approachable pricing, but it doesn’t let you run your sales process from the platform.

Popular Features

  • Saved searches allow you to look up previous queries without entering their facets again.
  • 4.5B records with accurate information to help you create lead lists.
  • Chrome extension to save leads from websites and LinkedIn profiles.
  • Integrate with RocketReacy’s API to get their data directly into your applications and workflows, like embedding that data within your SaaS product.

Pricing

RocketReach’s subscription plans are split into 2 categories.

💡 Note that RocketReach recently removed their free plan.

Individual plans ⤵️

  • Essentials: Starts at $53 per month (Email addresses only, 1,200 exports, Browser extension).
  • Pro: Starts at $135 per month (Email addresses and phone, 3,600 exports, Premium integrations).
  • Ultimate: Starts at $340 per month (10,000 exports and Salesforce integration).

‎Team plans ⤵️

  • Team Pro: Starts at $113 per user per month (3,600 annual lookups per user).
  • Team Ultimate: Starts at $282 per user per month (10,000 annual lookups per user).
  • Custom: Contact sales for custom pricing (unlimited annual lookups per user).

Pros and Cons

✅ Large database.

✅ Scalable pricing and usability.

✅ Direct integrations with popular platforms like Salesforce.

❌ More narrow data coverage compared to ZoomInfo.


#6. Hunter

Hunter started as a simple email finder and turned into a complete prospecting and lead engagement platform.

Some companies prefer Hunter to ZoomInfo because of its simple, sleek interface and its ability to verify email addresses with certainty.

Popular Features

  • Domain search lets you find email addresses from a web domain or a person’s name.
  • Verify email addresses and their domain’s sender reputation to avoid high bounce rates and spam.
  • Simple cold outreach tool that natively integrates with Gmail and Outlook to help you run and track campaigns from your inbox.

Pricing

Hunter’s basic plan will give you 25 monthly searches and 50 verifications, but no domain search.

💡Note that all of Hunter’s plans include unlimited seats.

If you need more, choose from the following:

  • Starter: Starts at $34 per month (500 searches, 1,000 verifications).
  • Growth: Starts at $104 per month (5,000 searches, 10,000 verifications).
  • Business: Starts at $349 per month (50,000 searches, 100,000 verifications).
  • Enterprise: Unlimited everything, contact sales for a quote.

Pros and Cons

✅ Unlimited seats will all plans.

✅ Email verification reduces bounce rates.

✅ Generous search limits on all plans.

❌ No campaign tracking in beginner plans.

❌ No deal management abilities.


#7. Keyplay

Keyplay brings a fresh approach to sales prospecting with its platform.

ZoomInfo customers switch to Keyplay because the platform lets you filter accounts more precisely with data points like recent hires and product features.

Popular Features

  • Find accounts based on precise criteria like the number of hires in a department, technologies used, product specifications,
  • Keyplay has the ability to find lookalike companies from your existing lists. With as few as 3 accounts, Keyplay’s AI can build lists for you.
  • Because it has deeper filtering capabilities, Keyplay introduces more precise market categories, helping improve list quality for sales.
  • Surface companies’ social presence and tech stack signals to reach out contextually.
  • Sync lists and lead scoring models directly to Salesforce or Hubspot.

Pricing

Keyplay’s pricing is similar to ZoomInfo and falls in the “pricey” category. However, the level of granularity available in search makes it worth it for many ZoomInfo customers looking for better solutions.

The free plan lets you preview (not save or export) 25 accounts and test lookalikes and ICP scoring.

As for paid plans:

  • Startup: $3k per year (5,000 accounts + Hubspot integration).
  • Growth: $12k per year (50,000 accounts + Salesforce integration).
  • Custom: Talk to sales (Unlimited volumes + Enrichment API).

Pros and Cons

✅ The most precise search tool on the market.

✅ Only platform with custom signals.

✅ Easy to use.

❌ Not a lot of integrations.

❌ Can't do bulk lookups. 


#8. Clay

Clay’s another company with a new angle in the sales prospecting space.

The platform pulls from 75 enrichment tools to have the highest data accuracy rate in the available alternatives and uses AI to help you automate outreach at scale.

Although powerful, the platform can be intimidating for sales teams, and hard to use if you don’t have a revenue operations team with experience in Clay.

Popular Features

  • Excel-like lead builder to help you easily craft your dream lists and workflows.
  • Clay Templates help you get started and build proven sales workflows without much effort.
  • Waterfall enrichment lets you cross-reference multiple providers to ensure accurate data. No API needed.
  • Ask Claygent’s AI web scrapper to find specific data points for you, based on text prompts.
  • Use company and contact information to personalize outreach or marketing efforts.

Pricing

Clay’s platform works in simple “credits.” The free plan is quite generous, with 100 credits per month and unlimited users.

If you need more volume, Clay has 4 plans to choose from:

  • Starter: Starts for $134 per month per user (24k credits/year).
  • Explorer: Starts for $314 per month per user (120k credits/year).
  • Pro: Starts for $720 per month per user (600k credits/year).
  • Enterprise: Contact sales for a quote (unlimited credits).

Pros and Cons

✅ Waterfall email verification makes Clay's data very reliable.

✅ Clay’s AI web scrapper saves a lot of time.

✅ Can be valuable to Marketing teams also.

✅ Hyper-personalize cold outreach.

✅ Large community of active Clay users.

❌ Costs can ramp up fast.


#9. LeadIQ

Yet another B2B data provider…

Although LeadIQ and ZoomInfo have similar datasets, LeadIQ is easier to use, can perform real-time verification, and does not offer an engagement platform.

Popular Features

  • Search for accounts and contacts in a massive database with millions of accurate contact records.
  • Track sales signals so you know when to engage contacts in your contact lists.
  • Enrich your CRM with LeadIQ’s data without needing reps to enter manual information.
  • Use Scribe to generate personalized emails in seconds. Enter your product’s value position, customer insights, and information. Scribe will write your sequence for you.

Pricing

LeadIQ’s plans range based on the volume of emails, direct dials, personal emails, and accounts tracked.

Their free plan includes:

  • 20 verified email addresses
  • 10 phone numbers
  • 40 email generations
  • 10 accounts tracked

If you need more, here's the pricing breakdown 👇

  • Essential: $39 per user per month (500 emails, 30 phones, 100 email generators, 50 accounts tracked).
  • Pro: $79 per user per month (1,000 emails, 70 phones, 500 email generators, 100 accounts tracked).
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing (Unlimited emails, 120 phones, 2,000 email generators, 300 accounts tracked).

Pros and Cons

✅ Intuitive user experience.

✅ Lots of native integrations.

❌ Struggles with international contacts.

❌ Users report technical issues.


#10. UpLead

Uplead focuses solely on B2B contact data and claims to remove all of the “fluff” that slows you down.

This strategy is reflected in their pricing.

A massive database at a lower cost, even for enterprise plans, attracts startups and potential customers to UpLead as their ZoomInfo alternative.

Popular Features

  • An easy “drag-and-drop” interface to build lead lists.
  • Export contact data to sales tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, Salesloft, Outreach, and more.
  • With the Uplead API, you can enrich companies for your software product. It includes company, person enrichment, and the prospector API.

Pricing

UpLead’s basic plan is more of a preview than anything else. It lets you use 5 credits for 7 days.

Paid plans include:

  • Essentials: $99 per month for 170 credits.
  • Plus: $199 per month for 400 credits.
  • Professional: Custom pricing for unlimited credits, full API access, and advanced integrations.

Pros and Cons

✅ No one-year lock-in contracts.

✅ Simple interface.

❌ No engagement platform.

❌ No task management and analytics.

Ready to replace ZoomInfo? What should you do?

There aren’t many differences between traditional B2B contact data platforms. They mostly vary in credit volumes, accurate data enrichment, and platform usability.

The tools we've listed above are all popular alternatives to ZoomInfo. Modern solutions like Warmly, Keyplay, and Clay should be top of mind if you need more precision and personalization.

Why?

Sales are expensive, and prospects no longer react well to generic cold outreach. If you're a B2B company, you likely care about intent data in your sales process. 

Tools like Warmly help you focus on warm prospects, while Keyplay and Clay give you more granular information on your prospects.

Want to get started right away? Try Warmly for free.

Or, to see our features in action, book a demo.

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How to Align Sales, Marketing & SEO Through Revenue Operations

How to Align Sales, Marketing & SEO Through Revenue Operations

Time to read

Valeria Lytovchenko

The end goal of any business is to make revenue faster and more efficiently than its competitors. One of the most important assets you can use to achieve that goal is the data your company gathers. It can provide valuable insights into your processes, customers, and practices and increase overall revenue.

Revenue Operations deals with making data more visible across your organization and aligning all teams that produce revenue to maximize it.

From the data collected through your marketing operations (including website visitors and social followers) to sales stats (how many of your prospects are actually within your ICP? How quickly can you get from prospect to CW?), Revenue Operations is about building and end-to-end operation to increase your sales quotas and revenue.

This article will explain Revenue Operations and how to use the strategy alongside sales, marketing, and SEO to grow revenue.

What is Revenue Operations?

Revenue Operations is an approach to business strategy and planning that tries to align sales, marketing, and customer care into a bigger structure aimed at increasing revenue. The main idea behind it is that since teams that work on different areas of a business are united by a single goal—making the business profitable—they should cooperate more efficiently to achieve that goal.

RevOps strategists achieve this goal by ensuring better data centralization and sharing, building communication between sales ops, marketing, and customer success teams, and automating workflows wherever possible. 

Importance of Revenue Operations for Revenue Growth

Implementing Revenue Operations is a long process that usually requires organizations to rethink major parts of their strategy. So, you might have to adapt workflows, implement new tools, and improve communication.

With all the effort that goes into implementing a RevOps strategy, it's important to understand why it's relevant.

The major benefits of Revenue Operations include the fact that sharing goals and insights creates better business processes and more revenue as a result. It's really as simple as that.

Companies with a siloed team structure often might have separate tools, databases, and work processes. This results in an uneven strategy that might be held back by a disconnect between your marketing and sales efforts.

Once you align your demand generation (educating and engaging your target audience) and demand capture (qualifying prospects in the high-intent phase) processes, it's easier to focus your sales reps' time and efforts on the accounts that will bring you guaranteed revenue.

So, to start with, you might focus on SEO to generate leads, by signposting your ICP to your solution. After that comes additional marketing efforts including brand building on social media, blogs, or ads. Then, your sales team kicks in with demand capture efforts—qualifying leads based on intent and choosing the right time to engage with them.

In an ideal world, your demand generation and demand capture efforts aren't independent of each other. Consequently, Revenue Operations is a framework that facilitates the sharing of data and revenue goals between marketing and sales teams. This results in better team effectiveness and an increase in revenue.

Ultimately, both marketing and sales teams have insights that can benefit each other’s operations, and Revenue Operations tries to optimize the sharing of those insights.


A typical siloed structure of marketing, sales, and customer success teams.

‎Source: BCG

The results speak for themselves. A BCG report has found that B2B companies that implement Revenue Operations spend 30% less on go-to-market operations and increase their digital marketing ROI by up to 200% thanks to this practice.


Companies that use the Revenue Operations model see faster growth and more profitability.

‎Source: Adobe

Processes for Implementing an Effective RevOps Strategy

Before implementing RevOps at your company, you need to analyze these three key areas that a Revenue Operations team will deal with.

Technical workflow components

The first thing you have to review is the tech stack that your company uses. Consider all the tools used in different departments and how the information that these tools provide can influence the work of other departments.

For instance, if your SEO team uses SE Ranking's traffic checker, you can uncover useful data to direct your SEO strategy. Understanding what keywords draw in more traffic that turns into qualified leads can help the sales team focus on optimizing specific pages for conversion and improve sales prospecting.

SEO software can also provide a lot of information about competitor websites to the sales team. Specifically, it can show new competitors via SERP tracking because their sites will start competing with yours for core keywords.

The sales team, CRM tools, and specifically lead scoring systems can provide insight into what type of SEO actions influence revenue the most and help the marketing team turn their attention to areas that can produce a more tangible effect on the bottom line.

You want to find the useful parts of your teams' tools. Remember, one great tool is better than many fiddly, underwhelming tools.

Data coverage

The next thing you should analyze is how data is gathered and distributed across your company. Even a smaller company may have hundreds of data points recorded and stored away daily. The issue is that you may not be using your data efficiently as sometimes it gets stuck in a single department, and other teams don’t have access to it.

Apart from understanding what tools are used to record and store data, you need to find:

  • What data is recorded
  • Where it is stored
  • How long is it stored
  • Which people are responsible at each stage of gathering and storing data
  • Who has access to which data
  • How that data is used
  • Who is using the data, and for which purpose

For example, if you're tracking buyer intent as part of your marketing strategy. (more here on why you should be), who has access to the intent data? If you're gatekeeping it within your marketing team and just using it to inform your social ads or blog page strategy, you're missing out. Once you've got an MQL, your sales reps need that intent data as well so they can choose the right time to reach out to the prospect (high-intent and ready to buy).

Answering these questions will give you a full picture of how data is used at your organization and will serve as a basis for transforming this system into one where both the marketing and sales teams can access meaningful insights from the data the other team records.

Customer feedback collection and analysis

Customer feedback is one of the most important types of data you can process at your organization. Sales and marketing employees can use this data to understand their customers better and increase revenue.

You’ll need to track what types of customer feedback are gathered, how it is done, how it is used to gain insight, and who is responsible for planning, executing, and analyzing customer feedback campaigns.

Your company should also more broadly track what people say about your product or solution. A recent study estimated that 95% of your web traffic could be coming from 'dark social' sources; that is, private messaging channels like WhatsApp, SMS, DMs, and word-of-mouth. This activity might be considered 'direct' traffic, but there's no way to tell in what context your site is being shared.

So, practice social listening. Find out what's actually being said about you on spaces like Reddit, YouTube, and influencer pages. No, you can't read people's private messages, but you can glean lots of relevant data through other dark social sources.

How to Align Sales, SEO, and Marketing Through a RevOps Framework

With all of that information on how your SEO, marketing, and sales interact, you can start building a strategic alignment between them. Here are the steps you need to take to do that.

Structured communication and cooperation

The first step is to build consistent communication and cooperation opportunities. The exact way you implement this depends on your organization’s structure and resources.

For instance, you could create a new position for a VP of Revenue Operations or the Director of Revenue Operations and have the heads of the SEO and sales teams report to them. That’s the common path, as so many companies look for a RevOps leader, and the job was the fastest-growing one in 2023.

Since the RevOps model gravitates toward marketing and sales enablement, rather than planning operations, your entire revenue team might consist of just a Chief Revenue Officer and a data analyst.

Alternatively, you could have sales operations and marketing operations leadership collaborate without a dedicated growth leader, but that could be harder to manage.

Whatever way you choose to promote communication between these departments, the main idea is to make sure they have the right tools for cooperation and a consistent plan for using them.

Mutual business goals persuasion

The next step is aligning the goals of marketing and salespeople at your company. The key factor here is that both teams should optimize their actions towards a single goal—revenue growth—instead of chasing only the KPIs specific to their line of work.

When your teams don't think about their roles as separate but instead understand they’re pursuing a single goal, they’ll be more willing to cooperate and share data and responsibilities.

Better data sharing

Data is one of the pillars of the Revenue Operations model, and it should be your priority to find more effective ways of sharing it. You’ll need to rework both technical and operational data structures at your organization.

The first thing you should do is centralize data storage. The key issue that Revenue Operations tries to improve is that data tends to become isolated within different departments. Creating centralized storage for all of the company data prevents that and opens more opportunities for data analytics and finding actionable insights.

Data centralization leads to more opportunities for analytics.

Source: Improvado

Another step is to create easy ways for teams to access this centralized data storage. This could be made in the form of Excel documents or Looker Studio files that can show the core sales and marketing metrics without having to work with complex databases.

While individual access to data is important, your Revenue Operations team might also need a data scientist who could do high-level data mining to discover insights.

Ideally, a successful RevOps strategy should mean every element of your tech stack is fully integrated with others. Whether or not you're using automated software, the tools you use should share the right data with each other (and your team) and run with minimal interference from you.

Here's an example of an integrated RevOps tech stack using Warmly, our signal-based revenue orchestration platform.

Fixing existing marketing funnels

Creating collaboration between different teams and sharing data lets you find what your sales funnel currently looks like and find ways to improve it. After that, you can experiment with new ways to use that data to engage more MQLs and SQLs.

In particular, your inbound marketing tools will offer plenty of useful information on the success of your content strategy and where to invest more time.

Additionally, visitor identification software can significantly optimize your marketing funnel, particularly if you're focusing on Account Based Marketing (ABM). Without knowing who the accounts are that are visiting your blog pages, pricing page, or just your homepage, it's difficult to tailor your marketing content to fit their needs and concerns.

Crafting and mapping more effective customer/buyer journeys

Another aspect of using data to understand your customers better is to enhance the ability to map customer journeys. Since marketing, SEO in particular, and sales have detailed information on both ends of the customer journey, combining them creates a more detailed picture of it.

Customer-centric approach

One of the main paths to increasing revenue at any for-profit organization is keeping the customers happy. The more satisfied your customers are at any stage of the customer journey, the more likely they are to convert, refer your business to friends and family and ultimately generate revenue.

Revenue Operations help with that due to an improved understanding of customer needs through data syndication.

A successful, integrated sales and marketing approach can also involve your customers. Social selling is increasingly becoming an important channel for B2B SaaS companies because it helps build that implicit trust and connection that dark social thrives on.

RevOps framework

To ensure the efficiency of Revenue Operations, you need to formalize the framework. This means planning out the workflows that you will be using, and either instituting RevOps roles at your company or finding ways to outsource them.

Work out what approach would suit your company best and document the Revenue Operations metrics you want to track to see whether the approach is successful.

Training and skills development

Introducing Revenue Operations to any company involves new tools and new processes. Apart from instituting new roles, you’ll have to train your employees on adjusting to the tools and workflows that RevOps entails.

Pay attention specifically to working with data and workflow automation systems, as these are the cornerstones of Revenue Operations success.

Regular review

Once you have a documented Revenue Operations strategy and a set of KPIs to use to measure its success, record those, and do at least a quarterly review of how the new systems work and whether they have a decent ROI.

Also, consider gathering feedback from your team to find inefficiencies in the new workflows.

Improving tracking and forecasting processes

Finally, you’ll have to improve how you track data and use it for forecasting. To that end, consider automating the data workflows at your company and involve both the marketing and sales teams to review more factors that can influence revenue forecasts.

Challenges in RevOps Implementation

Since introducing Revenue Operations is a big undertaking, it’s likely to run into problems at most companies. The most common challenges are:

  • Unwillingness to change. Many managers and employees might believe that the effort it takes to create, test, and refine new workflows isn’t worth the marginal improvement. You will have to show how effective Revenue Operations can be and how that can benefit the teams involved.
  • Data integration issues. As the software SEO and sales teams use might not have native connectors, bringing that data to a single place can be challenging. You will have to work with the IT department to create a custom solution.
  • Market volatility influences forecasting. Even with good data quality practices, revenue forecasting isn’t flawless as market volatility can change the predicted course of events. You will have to learn to consider external factors and adapt to changes fast.

Measuring the Success of Revenue Operations

As with any sound business investment, you have to measure the effectiveness of Revenue Operations to prove its necessity. Here are the metrics you want to track:

  • Revenue growth
  • Average revenue per user
  • Cost per acquisition
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Win rate
  • Revenue cycle length
  • Customer churn
  • Customer satisfaction rate

You can also try to track the ROI of RevOps, but that might prove to be tricky. The reason why is that it’s hard to tie specific increases in revenue specifically to Revenue Operations.

The most optimal way to do that is to calculate the cost of tools, the salaries of Revenue Operations personnel, and the work hours of marketing and sales teams allocated to RevOps and juxtapose it with the revenue increase that exceeds the projected value.

If you’re set on investing in Revenue Operations, give it three to six months to start seeing ROI—that's how long it may take to test and improve it.

You might also want to adapt your social listening strategy to start tracking your brand's overall share of voice within your market. If you're using influencer campaigns, you should be able to tell if these are working as more people talk about your brand on spaces like LinkedIn and YouTube.

Revenue Forecasting

Since Revenue Operations deals with large amounts of marketing and sales data, it’s useful for a crucial business process heavily dependent on quality data—revenue forecasting. It doesn’t just give you an outline of your team’s effectiveness. Predictable business growth can help with budget allocation and risk management.

While you can and should do time-series and qualitative forecasting as a part of the Revenue Operations framework, it lends itself more to regressive analysis. This way of analyzing data helps you make connections between outcomes and variables, letting you know what actions can lead to an increase in revenue.

Implementing a RevOps Strategy with Warmly

Introducing Revenue Operations to your organization can be a long process that requires major changes in workflows, data collection practices, and communication between sales and marketing teams.

However, the multiple benefits it can bring all lead to the most important business goal: increasing revenue.

Warmly helps bring together all of that sales and marketing data into one place, giving you the best chance of implementing a strategic RevOps process at your organization. Starting with just a script tag, Warmly can deanonymize visitors to your website and help you build a revenue-focused sales and marketing strategy.

‎Qualify visitors more quickly with Bombora buyer intent data, then use AI Chat to engage with those high-intent accounts, moving them along the sales funnel with as much interaction from your sales reps as you wish.

And thanks to integrations with Salesflow and Outreach or Salesloft, you can align all of your demand generation efforts with effective email and LinkedIn prospecting, bridging the gap between sales and marketing.

If you’re still undecided whether your organization needs to implement Revenue Operations, start by doing a quick audit of your current tech stack and sales/marketing integration.

Are you seeing delays in getting MQLs to CW deals? Or an increase in unqualified leads making it onto your sales reps' calendars? Then a RevOps platform like Warmly could be the solution you need to optimize your marketing strategy and qualify warm leads more quickly.

Interested in seeing exactly how Warmly integrates into your existing tech stack? Book a demo.

Cover image by Freepik.

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Google Search March 2024 Algorithm Update: What You Need to Know

Google Search March 2024 Algorithm Update: What You Need to Know

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Search engine optimization (SEO) has always been an arms race between search engines and people seeking to game them for better traffic. Google is by far the biggest search engine in the world—with 82% market share as of January 2024. Any updates to their algorithms will cause a ripple effect across the SEO community, and the Google March 2024 algorithm update was ground-shaking.

Google claims their latest algorithm updates (a core update and a spam update) reduce "low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%." However, by taking a giant step to block AI content, it seems Google may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater by locking out a ton of websites with genuinely useful, human-made content. Meanwhile, some obviously AI-generated websites have surged in traffic with the update, which has led to confusion and frustration among site owners and SEO experts.

Background on Google March Algorithm Updates

The March 2024 update is actually two: a Google core update that was implemented over a few weeks in March and a spam update that is being slow-rolled until May. That means we won't know the net effect of both for at least several months.

Google has been using an AI spam-prevention system SpamBrain since 2018, in addition to manual reviews. According to Google, "If your site is affected by a manual action, we will notify you in the Manual Actions report and in the Search Console message center."

‎‎There's no way to know if you have been affected by an algorithm shift other than seeing your traffic change. The company doesn't share what metrics they're tracking, so it's difficult to know what you're doing wrong.

In recent years, Google's algorithms have also made thousands of small changes to their algorithm every year in a race to keep up with changing behavior (and dodge SEO manipulation.) Other updates are big enough to be named (Florida, Penguin.) The last major update to the Google search algorithm was four months ago, in November 2023.

The company's stated policy is that Google Search's core updates are not personal, and content creators and web owners will be fine as long as they abide by their updated spam policies. Yet some users have reported that the Google algorithm changes have disproportionately affected their web pages, with only some pages getting de-indexed. This suggests the algorithm looks at page-level signals, since many features (like ad placement) are site-wide.

Detailed Analysis of the Latest Google Algorithm Changes

Core Algorithm Update

Google claims that the March 2024 update resulted from changes to their ranking system they began implementing as far back as 2022 "to reduce unhelpful, unoriginal content on Search." Their goal is to push up content that is:

  • Helpful
  • Human-made
  • On pages that are friendly to human eyes (vs. web crawlers)

As a result, hundreds of websites with AI content have been removed from Google indices. Some SEO experts initially guessed that the algorithm is penalizing high-volume publishing (which assumes the use of generative AI) but users have reported de-listed sites with just a handful of posts overall.

De-Emphasis on Links

In a February 2023 keynote at PubCon Austin, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes hinted that links are (no longer) a significant factor in ranking. This was confirmed in the new spam policy update. The language seems to target private-blog networks and other ways of manipulating backlinks both in and out of a website. Lowering the importance of links also nerfs the mainstay "black hat" SEO tactic of buying backlinks.

Spam Updates

While ranking system changes can kick spam content off the first page of Google Search, their spam policy allows them to "take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale." Punitive actions include de-indexing, which tracks with what some website owners are seeing with their websites since the March 2024 update.

Google is allowing site owners until May 5, 2024 to update their content to fit the new spam policies. The updated version now prohibits scaled content, expired domains, and site reputation abuse.

Scaled Content

Google has made it known that they're not fans of AI-generated content. 827 sites out of 49,345 sites tracked by Ian Nuttall's Niche Site Metrics were removed from the Google Search index following the update. All of them used AI-generated content. However, Google says their policy does not differentiate whether you use AI or low-cost human labor. They simply want to cut down on pages that present well to web crawlers but "fail to deliver helpful content."

The company is aware that their system is imperfect, admitting that "scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn't always as clear."

Google Scaled Abuse Description
Google offers clarification about what counts as scaled content abuse.

Expired Domains

Google frowns on people who buy high-ranking domains or take over expired ones and piggyback on the established domain authority to push low-quality content. They're especially wary if the new content is unrelated to its original purpose (e.g., Google gives the example of an expired government agency website being used to sell affiliate content.) Doing this increases the chance your site will be flagged as spam.

Site Reputation

Google is trying to crack down on players who use a back door to get low-quality content onto sites with authority. It is a common practice for people to buy posts on well-known websites or blogs.

Some websites like Huffington Post used to offer established authors a direct pipeline to publishing blog posts. People figured out they could pay authors with that access to publish articles to get backlinks from a site with high Domain Authority. Some financial magazines offer paid memberships, like Forbes Business Council, that allow members to contribute to their high-authority websites with minimal editorial oversight. Google's policy appears to carve out exceptions for these programs.

The update affecting this will not go live until May 2024, so it will be interesting to see how these platforms are affected.

How to Adapt to the Latest Google Algorithm Changes

User Interface

Google has stated many times that its core ranking systems take into account whether websites have a poor user interface. That could mean pages bogged down by ads or that appear designed for search engines rather than people. This is not new to the current update, but Google's language suggests it is becoming more important.

While invisible factors like meta titles are essential, making sure on-page elements are optimized for viewing experience and accessibility will go a long way.

Follow the Loopholes

AI sites that have survived (or are thriving from) the updates show a few remaining loopholes to gaming traffic:

  • Local search (e.g. when people are looking for a "deli near me")
  • Long-tail keywords with low traffic (and therefore, low competition)
  • The initial boost that Google gives brand-new sites (This is a feature of most ranking algorithms, including social media networks like LinkedIn. The system does not initially have information about your content. Pushing the content to readers generates signals that will feed back into the algorithm.)

Develop a Helpful Content System

If you are looking to increase your funnel through organic web traffic, the tried-and-true "white hat" SEO strategy is simply generating the kind of content Google likes: original and relevant analysis, not unhelpful, surface-level articles of regurgitated information.

Yet the latest algorithm change proves that being a source of quality, original content may not insulate you from misdirected algorithm changes.

It's also crucial for brands to keep track of changes to search engine algorithms and any potholes you might step into accidentally (for example, you are using an old NGO domain to build a legitimate commercial business and end up penalized because Google categorized that as site authority abuse.)

What The Google Algorithm Update 2024 Means for B2B Sellers

Any web publisher should be looking to follow the guidelines above so as not to fall foul of Google's new update. But what does this mean specifically for B2B sellers who may have invested heavily in an SEO strategy to draw visitors to their page?

Well, the rules of demand creation still apply. On your website and social media pages, you must create content that is genuinely helpful to your target accounts. You do this by analyzing search intent, demographics, and buyer behavior.

Your demand creation strategy will probably be supplemented with other elements like ads, webinars, podcasts, and video content uploaded to third-party sites (like YouTube or TikTok).

But demand creation is never the end goal. The whole point of search engines and SEO in the first place is to drive people to your website and get them to buy.

So, understanding Google's algorithm and implementing an SEO and content strategy that complements the algorithm is the first part of the puzzle.

The second part is capturing that traffic.

Demand Capture with a Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform

Your content and SEO strategies are all in service to your revenue. Thinking in terms of revenue orchestration - and not simply 'website traffic' or 'increased sales' - means you take a more holistic view of the entire demand creation and demand capture process. And Warmly, the signal-based revenue orchestration platform, can help you do that.

The B2B buyer journey

‎Identifying traffic

There's no point spending hours learning the ins and outs of the new Google algorithm update, and updating your SEO strategy accordingly - if you don't have a system in place for analyzing all that new traffic to your site.

Warmly's de-anonymization technology can reveal up to 15% of individuals and 65% of companies who visit your website, so you can track who is visiting, how often, and what they're interested in.


Reveal contacts and companies

‎

Optimize Account-Based Marketing

By gathering de-anonymized traffic data, you can start to categorize leads depending on how ready they are to buy. And knowing which companies your site users belong to makes it easier to accomplish your goals for account-based marketing.

Have you got users arriving from a keyword that doesn't really match the solution you're offering? Ignore it. On the other hand, if there are prospects landing on your page from high-intent keywords, who perhaps have browsed competitor pages too, you know it's time to nudge them along the sales funnel.

Automate Lead Prospecting

Once you've identified the right traffic coming to your site (or, rather, once Warmly's clever AI-powered tech has identified the right traffic), you can let our AI prospectors take over and handle outreach.

Alternatively, choose to get Slack notifications whenever a prospect is online and loop in a human SDR to get the conversation flowing.

Our AI Prospectors can also handle email marketing and LinkedIn outreach, so your sales reps can concentrate on supporting those high-value accounts towards purchasing.


Route intent signals to outreach channels, automatically

‎

Conclusion

We're still in the process of seeing how the helpful content update and other algorithm changes are affecting website traffic and site owner behavior. However, the best way to inoculate your website traffic is to build a brand with broad authority to weather future algorithm changes.

That means establishing a long-term, helpful content strategy based on expertise. Then, you can use an autonomous revenue orchestration platform such as Warmly to help you capture those views and turn them into customers.

Interested in finding out how Warmly works? Check out our guide to Warmly implementation to get an overview of how easy it can be. Or, if you want to hear from us directly, book a call with one of our sales reps.

Cover image by Freepik.

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How to Identify and Capitalize on Buyer Intent in Your Marketing Strategy

How to Identify and Capitalize on Buyer Intent in Your Marketing Strategy

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Did you know that, on average, only 3% of website visitors fill out contact forms? So, how do you follow up with the remaining 97% if they're not leaving their information with your marketing team?

Understanding and capitalizing on buyer intent is crucial in today's marketing landscape. Identifying when a potential customer is actively researching or showing interest in your product or service can significantly impact your marketing strategy's effectiveness. 

By leveraging buyer intent data, businesses can tailor their outreach efforts, engage with prospects at the right moment, and ultimately increase conversion rates. 

In this guide, we'll delve into the importance of buyer intent in shaping marketing strategies and explore actionable steps to harness this valuable information effectively. We’re covering:

  • Understanding buyer intent
  • Identifying and capturing buyer intent
  • Turning buyer intent into revenue
  • Intent data in action

Understanding Buyer Intent

When someone is thinking about making a purchase, they typically do some research first, leaving behind a trail of digital breadcrumbs when they do so. The further they get along in this process, the more pointed their searches become. For example, maybe they sign up for a free version of a product, request a demo, or search up pricing information. Or maybe they’ve repeatedly visited a product page over a certain time frame or clicked on a social media ad multiple times. 

These are all indications of “buyer intent” and they might as well be bright red, flashing signs pointing the observing sales professional towards a primed and ready prospect. 

Buyer intent versus buyer interest

Buyer intent is different from buyer interest. An interested buyer has the potential to turn into an intentional buyer but they’re not quite there yet. For example, an interested buyer might download a whitepaper, hit “follow” on a social media account, or subscribe to a newsletter. 

While the difference might not seem that significant, how you respond to buyer intent vs buyer interest can be the difference between closing a sale or totally turning a prospect off to your brand by overwhelming them. 

Think of it like buying a car. If you’re in the market, you might be thrilled to hear about the many available CR-V options that your local Honda dealer has. But if you were doing some casual research and now feel the need to change your number because of the insistent sales calls you keep getting, you’ll probably feel more animosity than gratitude. And when the time to upgrade does come, you’re gonna take your business elsewhere. 

Breadcrumbs, cookies, and buyer intent data

No, that’s not the name of a trendy new bakery.

Remember those digital breadcrumbs we mentioned? Well, the technical term is “buyer intent data”. When someone hits “accept cookies”, their behavior is tracked across the website that they’re on. The cookies can record actions such as pages visited, products viewed, items added to the cart, and form submissions. This record, in turn, lets that company gauge where in the buyer intent journey a particular user falls. 

In other words, buyer intent data is the secret weapon behind marketing and selling in the right place at the right time. 

By identifying buyer intent, businesses can personalize their marketing messages and offers to align with the needs and preferences of potential customers. Plus, it saves resources — understanding buyer intent allows businesses to allocate resources more efficiently by focusing on prospects who are more likely to convert into paying customers.

Identifying and Capturing Buyer Intent Data

Let’s back up a bit and dive into some of the more technical details of categorizing and capturing buyer intent data, including the differences between first- and third-party data and where you can source this kind of data.

First vs third party data

First-party data

First-party data comes directly from your company’s interaction with your current customers or known prospects. When they surf your website, use your mobile app, check out your social media, or subscribe to your email list-serve, the data you collect is totally owned and controlled by you. This is great for accuracy and reliability purposes.

However, first-party data can be narrow in scope and doesn’t tell you much about the buying intent of new prospects who are shopping around within your industry but haven’t discovered your product or website yet. 

Third-party data

Third-party intent data, on the other hand, is collected by external intent data sources, such as data brokers, publishers, and social media platforms. Because of this, its reach is much broader than that of first-party data. It can tell you a lot more about general market trends or buyer search patterns that exist outside of your immediate customer base.

But to access it, you have to purchase it from an intent data source. Third-party data is normally purchased by companies looking to supplement their first-party data, not in lieu of first-party data tracking. 

The types of buyer intent data

Buyer intent signals can include: 

  • Website activity: This includes things like time spent on specific website sections, and interactions with product, service, or pricing pages.
  • Email engagement: Engagement with email campaigns, including open rates, click-through rates, and responses to calls-to-action, provide insights into a prospect’s level of interest and receptiveness to offers.
  • CRM stage: Lead scoring, stage in the sales funnel, and previous interactions with sales representatives can also gauge readiness for a purchase.
  • Competitor analysis: Activities related to competitors, such as visiting competitor websites, comparing features and pricing, and researching alternatives, can indicate a comparative evaluation phase in a prospect’s decision-making process.
  • Chatbot interactions: The questions a user poses to a website chatbot, what topics they're interested in finding out more about.
  • Webpage interactions: Interactions with online advertisements through bidstream data provides insights into a prospect’s responsiveness to targeted ads, but general browsing can also show topical intent.
  • Research intent: When a prospect visits a website to discover specific information about the product they want to purchase. For example, they could visit a blog page or other publication.
  • Job posts: Company job postings can offer insight into what technology a company requires, projects they're working on, and their operational challenges.

Capturing buyer intent data

At this point, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed about the amount of data that you need to be tracking. So, how do you actually go about it? 

Luckily, there are tools you can use, such as Bombora and 6sense. These can be really valuable for uncovering intent signals at companies you've identified as target accounts.

With tools like Bombora and 6sense, it’s not an either/or—for a truly comprehensive buyer intent data collection strategy, many companies use both.  

Bombora 

Bombora focuses on aggregating and analyzing third-party data from diverse online sources—many of them publishers that are exclusive to Bombora's dataset, like the WSJ, Bloomberg, Business Insider, and Forbes—to uncover research topical intent. Publications included in Bombora's exclusive dataset includeBombora's research intent data tells you whether your prospect is reading around the product they want to buy. Perhaps they're watching YouTube videos that compare products, reading reviews on publications, or just generally learning more about the problem that you solve.

Consequently, Bombora's approach revolves around broader market trends, industry topics, and areas of interest. By using data from sources such as blogs, social networks, and industry solution providers, Bombora gives users a holistic understanding of the overarching themes driving buyer intent within their target markets. 

They do this by using script tags on sites included in Bombora's Data Cooperative group. These script tags deanonymize the traffic coming to that web page, and enable Bombora to link traffic to a particular company.

The level intent the prospect is demonstrating can be gleaned from the type of webpage they're viewing and how long they spent on the page. When you know whether a prospect is in active research mode or low-intent, early-research mode, you know whether they'll engage with your marketing efforts.

Let's say you've identified topic clusters that are relevant for accounts interested in products like yours. This might include research into competitors, similar topics, or use cases. If your product is an AI chatbot, you might be interested in finding out if target accounts have visited sites comparing chatbot solutions, or if they've been reading about AI chat technology more generally.

By analyzing the sites they've visited and how far along their research journey they are, you can tell if they're a high-intent or low-intent prospect‎, and adjust your sales prospecting accordingly.

6sense

6sense combines both first and third-party data sources, including CRM systems and bidstream data, to provide businesses with personalized insights into individual prospect behavior and purchasing intent. They specialize in personalization and account-based marketing (ABM).

It's worth delving into what bidstream data is and how it differs from Bombora's Data Cooperative approach. Bidstream data is data sourced from an analysis of the ads shown to each user as they browse the web. Based on the ads shown to your prospect, 6sense can pull out the topical keywords they've been searching for, and consequently uncover research intent.

So, rather than analyze the content of the page they're viewing, 6sense understands the ads being shown (which are targeted via keywords) and the keywords on each page.

Turning Buyer Intent Data Into Action

Collecting buyer intent data is the set-up, not the end result that you’re looking for. 

Actioning intent data means connecting it with your outbound workflows in a way that informs your prospecting. Add to this the need for hyper-personalization and efficiency (remember, timing is everything) and you have quite the task in front of you. 

Example workflow for actioning buyer intent

So, you've got your buyer intent data from platforms like 6sense and/or Bombora. How can you use that to develop a sales process that targets the right prospects at the right time?

This right prospect-right time is a critical element of your sales strategy. You might have prospects who are looking into what you're selling but aren't ready to buy—you don't want your sales reps wasting time on them. So it comes down to knowing who is interested in your product, and who is ready to buy.

You can start figuring out those buy-ready prospects by importing all that intent data from 6sense and Bombora into your CRM. Then, with tools like Apollo, you can start to collate contact details for those prospects that you've identified as high-intent.

After that, you'll want to create personalized outreach campaigns based on other demographic data such as job title, stage in the stage funnel (ToFu, MoFu, etc.) or seniority level.

To do that, you're going to need to import the accounts showing high-intent into something like Outreach to create email sequences. At the same time, maybe you're putting together a unique LinkedIn sequence to target prospects on a more personal platform.

And by the time your reps have accomplished all this? That prospect might have been and gone. In that time, they've landed on a competitor's website and booked a demo. Or, they've been told by a senior decision maker to give up the search.

This process is more than a bit annoying. Losing prospects every month because you can't quite find the right time to contact them is costing your business money.

Capturing Buyer Intent with a Revenue Orchestration Platform

When we were developing Warmly, we didn’t see an option to capitalize on buyer intent without adding a whole bunch of tools to an existing tech stack, like in the example above. This is expensive, laborious, and opens the door for human error.

We knew there had to be a better way, so we created Warmly, the first signal-based revenue orchestration platform. 

The power of Warmly 

Warmly integrates with your website to capture visitor data, such as pages visited, time spent on each page, and interactions with specific elements (e.g., downloads, form submissions). 

For instance, if a visitor spends significant time on the pricing page or repeatedly visits a particular product feature page, Warmly interprets this behavior as high purchase intent.

Warmly then triggers automated actions, such as sending personalized email follow-ups or displaying targeted chatbot messages offering assistance related to the products or features the visitor showed interest in.

This way, you can target the right accounts (those that match your ICP and are showing high-intent) at the exact moment that they're ready to buy, minimizing any wasted time for your sales reps and improving your chances of a sale.


One platform, multiple integrations

Let’s get a little more into the details on how we actually do this. Remember those tools we mentioned, 6sense and Bombora? Well, we leverage their capabilities as first- and third-party intent data sources to fuel our automated inbound workflows.

Warmly + 6sense

The power of 6sense and Warmly gives users real-time insights about website visitors. This includes total deanonymization, allowing for the identification of key prospects and customer accounts.

Additionally, Warmly utilizes the intent data source to hyper-personalize interactions based on visitor intent signals, enabling tailored engagement that aligns with each prospect's stage in the buyer journey.

Warmly + Bombora 

We leverage third-party intent data from platforms like Bombora to gain insights into broader market trends and specific industry topics.

For example, if Bombora indicates a surge in intent for a particular industry solution or topic, we tailor marketing content or outreach efforts to align with the identified trends.

Warmly can also prioritize outreach to companies showing increased intent within Bombora's data, ensuring timely engagement with prospects actively researching relevant products or services.



Then, Bombora insights can be combined with 6sense, website, and demographic data to pinpoint target accounts that are looking to make an immediate purchase. 

‎Warmly + Slack/Teams

We’ve said it once, we’ll say it again. Timing is everything. Real-time notifications directly to your Slack or Teams app on your phone or computer make sure you’re taking action as soon as a high intent buyer is making moves. 

What action could you take? Well, with Warmly's AI Chatbot, you can loop in one of your (human!) sales reps at any time. Our chatbot can notify a specific sales rep when the prospect taking high-intent actions (like spending time on multiple pages or visiting your pricing page), and then your sales rep can hop immediately on a video call with the prospect, without them leaving your website.

‎ Warmly + CRM

Finally, we make sure all of your CRM data is up-to-date. Warmly syncs website activity, enrichment, and intent data on all identified visitors and companies back to your CRM.

Warmly's outbound workflows

Post-lead generation is where it gets really cool. Warmly takes your intent data and supercharges it with AI to execute automated, timely outbound sales workflows that put you in contact with strong intent prospective buyers. This removes opportunity for human error, saves you time, and ultimately drives higher conversion rates.


Personalized marketing campaigns

First, we segment leads based on their intent signals and tailors marketing campaigns accordingly.

For instance, leads displaying interest in a specific product feature receive targeted email campaigns highlighting the benefits of that feature.

Real-time engagement

Then, we create automated triggered campaigns that respond in real time to buyer intent signals.

Warmly triggers a personalized email or LinkedIn chat message offering assistance or a special discount to encourage higher conversion rates.

Warmly + Connect The Dots

Plus, Warmly integrates with Connect The Dots to identify your team member with the closest connection to your prospect. This makes it easy for your sales team to stand out to prospects via warm intros.

‎Conclusion

With increasingly competitive buying landscapes, sales reps and marketing teams need all the help they can get. Buyer intent data and online behavior is key for perfect timing and intervention during the customer journey.

Buyer intent magnifies marketing efforts, gets relevant content in front of qualified leads, and primes them for the buying stage. Then, it signals to a sales rep exactly when they should intervene—when those intent signals are at their highest.

If you want more insights on how Warmly can help automate sales outreach at your organization, book a demo (or, chat with one of our sales reps directly using our handy chatbot.)

Cover image by Freepik.

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How to Navigate the 2024 LinkedIn Algorithm Changes

How to Navigate the 2024 LinkedIn Algorithm Changes

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Everyone's heard the “white hat SEO” tactic of being yourself. Just put out quality content, and views will come. Yet there’s no denying that algorithms matter. They have the power to sway our decisions, exacerbate our biases, alter our subconscious, and affect our lives in unpredictable ways.

Reach, engagement, and follower growth have dropped by 50% for almost all LinkedIn creators in the last year, according to the highly anticipated LinkedIn Algorithm Insights 2024 report by Just Connecting HUB.

When changes are happening for 95% of creators, the issue isn't random. It's algorithmic.

Understanding even the basics of how the LinkedIn algorithm changes work can mean the difference between being seen by hundreds, and seen by millions.

Background On LinkedIn's Algorithm

LinkedIn has over a billion users worldwide, including more than 238 million in North America. 65 million people use LinkedIn to look for work every week, and 6 are hired every minute from the platform. The potential benefits of extending your reach are enormous—if you understand how the LinkedIn algorithm works.

Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is built for professional networking. The LinkedIn algorithm is unique because it isn't designed for content to "go viral." It's more interested in showing people content that is relevant to them—in order to stoke more meaningful comments and relationships.

LinkedIn is upfront that the metric that matters is engagement. It's even built into the way they detect and handle spam. The more positive engagement you get, the more LinkedIn feels good about showing it to others. It also shows you what it thinks will be most relevant based on what it knows from your LinkedIn profile, connections, interests, and how you've interacted with content.

If you send someone a direct message, the chance you'll see their post again shoots up 70%, according to the Just Connecting report. If you save someone's post, there's a 90% chance you'll see their next one. How long viewers spend on your post is also factored in, which suggests long-form posts may have an advantage.

The Biggest Algorithm Changes

Should your LinkedIn poll have two answers or three? The difference can be a 25% drop in reach. LinkedIn algorithm updates can have a big influence on how people engage with your post. Among other things, the latest algorithm change has flattened much of the differences in algorithm for mobile and desktop LinkedIn users, so these differences are felt more or less across the board.

Comments Matter Even More

‎The latest LinkedIn algorithm update gives comments slightly more weight in boosting reach. Longer comments (>15 words) are twice as effective as shorter ones. "As an author, adding another 2-4 comments after the initial first hour can effectively reintroduce your post into the feeds of all participants, typically resulting in an additional 25% growth," according to the Van der Blom report.

Posting helpful, quality comments on other people's posts also helps your profile by increasing profile views, followers, connections, and, therefore, people seeing/interacting with your own content. However, stay away from letting AI do the work for you, which nets a much lower response.

Collaborative Articles

LinkedIn is leaning hard into some of the new features they've unveiled, like Collaborative Articles. Just commenting on one has a significantly higher chance of showing up on people's LinkedIn feeds than dropping a note on a regular post. Users who contribute enough to earn the Top Public Speaking Voice badge are also promoted more. Any badge you earn will give your profile a boost, but recent platform updates have raised the bar for qualifying.

Creator Mode

While not strictly an algorithm update, LinkedIn is not setting all profiles to Creator Mode by default. The biggest impact is that how your followers engage will have more impact than contacts. It also opens the option for everyone to use LinkedIn Audio Events (think one-off podcasts) and LinkedIn Live—which get 12x more engagement than ordinary video posts.

Hashtags

Previously a social media golden child, hashtags—especially custom ones — no longer have a material positive impact on reach. However, the first 2-3 hashtags are included in your post URL, which is helpful for SEO.

Broadly used hashtags are also useful for helping people search for and find content related to a topic. (For example, if you're interested in #socialselling, LinkedIn may suggest content from #sales.)

Outbound Links

It may surprise you to learn that including a link to an external site leads to a 25-35% drop in reach. The Van der Blom report attributes this to LinkedIn users preferring to stay on the platform—behavior that feeds into the algorithm de-prioritizing those links.

The report recommends circumventing this penalty by publishing the post without outbound links and then editing the post to include them. Since the latest algorithm update, comments made by the author that include a link are now given less visibility.

Format of your LinkedIn Posts

One notable addition to the LinkedIn formula is formatting. "For the first time, we've observed that factors such as the ideal length of text, subject matter, and posting frequency may differ depending on the format you choose," according to the Van der Blom report.

Some formats have fallen in and out of favor over the years. For example, PDF posts used to get more than twice the reach of ordinary posts, but it appears the algorithm is starting to de-prioritize them.

‎Optimal Post for Storytelling: Text and Photo

The most common post format is a combination of text and images, which make up 48% of LinkedIn content.

The ideal text and photo post has:

  • 900-1,200 words focused on a single timely topic with relevant keywords (which improves searchability)
  • Starts with a compelling hook, has an authentic voice, and ends with a strong and clear call to action.
  • Short sentences (<12 words) and generous use of line breaks to avoid blocks of text.
  • 1-5 relevant, personalized (not stock) images in a vertical format, with brand colors, that include people, and aren't screenshots or promotional images. GIFs are especially relatable, and therefore effective.

While high-quality visuals are crucial for LinkedIn posts, making them might be challenging. Editing each image manually is time-consuming and demands specific skills, whereas working with a designer might be costly. Instead, you can use AI tools such as an AI art generator or photo editor to create visuals by writing text prompts.

Optimal Post for External Calls-to-Action and Building Thought Leadership: Text-Only

Want people to download a report from your website, or take another action off the platform? According to Van der Blom's report, text-only posts with a strong hook (e.g. a bold statement) and ending with a question are especially effective. For an even smoother user experience, consider including a phrase like "Scan the QR code in our profile bio to access the full report instantly" at the end of your post.

Text-only posts are also great for sharing advice, strategies, or war stories about being in your field. This is especially useful for executives who want to establish themselves as thought leaders and build a following of people who trust their insight and advice.

Optimal Post for Engagement: Videos

Videos are a great example of how reach momentum is controlled by the algorithm. They lost favor for a while, but have been growing in reach again since September 2023, according to the Van der Blom report.

If your goal is to get people engaged with your content, leveraging the best AI video generator can significantly enhance your strategy. The Van der Blom report suggests keeping videos between 1-2 minutes unless your video is very engaging (then you can go up to five.) High-quality visuals, clear audio, subtitles, and anything to make the experience accessible to a broad audience will increase viewership and positive perception. Utilizing AI video generators can help meet these quality criteria efficiently, broadening your content's appeal.

Optimal Post for SEO: Articles

Articles are the bottom rung in terms of reach but are invaluable for SEO. They also help build out the Newsletter function, which is available exclusively to LinkedIn users who have "Creator Mode" switched on. Since the middle of last year, the platform has allowed creators to create multiple newsletters—helpful for subject matter experts with more than one core subject area.

The most impactful articles are original content (not regurgitated from a corporate blog) between 800-1,200 SEO-optimized words and posted on weekdays, when people are in the "office" and may be more willing to engage with long-form, work-related content.

The best-performing articles feature a single high-impact video, hyperlinks to credible sources, and a compelling cover image—and are posted bimonthly rather than once a week. You can further extend your reach by promoting the article in a post and sharing it with LinkedIn groups that will find it relevant.

Key Takeaways for LinkedIn Users

There is no one perfect format, time, or action that can guarantee views. Rigidly following the "optimal" post structure won't do much if your content isn't compelling enough to get people to engage. On the other hand, consistently putting out great new content that resonates with your social network will trump any advantage from timing or algorithm hacking.

The algorithm is trying to adapt to human behavior in order to continue providing more relevant content and user engagement. It also doesn't just work on a post-by-post basis. It has a running "memory." If the last 10-15 things you've posted do poorly, it's a good measure that you may not be posting content people want to read. That being said, there are some changes that can give content creators a boost.

Tips for Maximizing Engagement on LinkedIn

Skip the Engagement Pod

LinkedIn's Editor-in-Chief, Dan Roth, has said that the platform will penalize manufactured engagement (e.g. engagement pods where a group agrees to like everything for each other).

Directly asking for engagement in the post still seems to offer a modest boost, according to research by Just Connecting. If you're going to ask your readers for a favor, an instant repost (without any additional text) now leads to an even higher boost in reach (40% vs. 30% last year).

However, the most effective LinkedIn content strategy is to go with the algorithm, not against it. Authentic content and connection with other LinkedIn members will always trump manufactured likes and generic comments.

Tag Your Posts

When it makes sense, tag 1-4 people who are likely to respond to your post. Their engagement is worth 1.5x more than someone not tagged—but be careful. If your response rate is less than 60%, your reach could slow. When in doubt, tag them in the comments, which doesn't come with the same penalty. Don't tag more than 15 people, which could get your post tagged as spam.

Time your Posts

There's a lot of different advice about the best time to post on LinkedIn, but the answer will depend on your target audience. If you are targeting a global audience, The Algorithm Insights 2024 Report suggests you'll get the most traction if you post between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. in your local time. In other words, if you're posting from New York, that will be about early morning in California and evening in Singapore.

Post Consistently

While posting blog posts daily works well for SEO, posting too often on LinkedIn may dilute your reach. According to the Algorithm Insights 2024 Report, your posting rhythm "conditions the algorithm to serve your content reliably to your audience."

While the report offers specific rules (like one video per week, or two if it's a company page), it seems more important to loosely plan to post a few times a week and then be open to letting conversation flow. For example, if a post is still getting significant traction, it makes more sense to let it ride than break momentum with a new post.

Stick Around After Posting

Conventional advice says that the first hour after posting is crucial. The algorithm evaluates how people react to your post to gauge its quality (or flag it for spam).

Now it seems the algorithm is also looking at how your post is also reviewing engagement at the 6-hour and 24-hour marks. The result is that some posts are "seeing substantially more reach on the 2nd and 3rd day compared to 1 year ago." It also helps to circle back around these time milestones to add comments to your own post.

You can start the conversation off by adding comments in the form of questions or further insight. If you tag people, make sure they will be interested in what you have to say—a lack of response is a negative sign for the algorithm. Then stick around to respond to comments, especially in the first hour after posting.

LinkedIn engagement is a game of momentum. You should ideally try to extend the momentum of anything you post, share, or do. For example, keep the conversation going after a LinkedIn Live session by sharing resources, or a highlights-only breakdown of what happened.

Use Polls

The Richard Van der Blom report found that LinkedIn polls are heavily underutilized tools. They achieve twice the medium reach and are often featured in LinkedIn's Trending Content. They're especially effective on company rather than individual pages.

The key is to pick a question that will appeal to a broad base, explain what you're trying to achieve with the poll, and avoid topics that are too promotional or political. Van der Blom's report recommends sticking to three answers and considering allowing an option to expound (e.g., "Other, see comments.") Continuing the conversation in the comments and sending invitations to connect with voters are all great ways to piggyback on the poll to grow reach.

Potential Implications Of The Algorithm Changes

Businesses with company pages have seen their initial reach drop by 25% in the last year since the latest update. Comments, likes, instant reposts, and "See More" clicks all help (in that order), but the effect is dampened if they're performed by employees. LinkedIn has also removed featured hashtags, which means companies should be incorporating them into their posts.

While all the rules can be overwhelming, it helps to remember that LinkedIn's goal is to foster a community that offers real value to people who use it. Offering free and helpful content—not locked behind paywalls or in return for contact information—goes a long way. It also won't hurt as LinkedIn continues to tweak its algorithms.

All LinkedIn posts benefit from a strong hook, a conversational tone, and compelling images—especially GIFs. The algorithm has long favored "dwell time," or how long people spend on your post, so anything that keeps them on the page longer (e.g., an in-depth analysis) will help.

Research by Just Connecting also suggests that the LinkedIn algorithm can only be affected by up to 16.6%. The base level of reach is determined by your network, follower-to-connection ratio, past content engagement, and whether influencers are engaging with it.

That means algorithm changes, while important, are just a small part of the puzzle for businesses and marketers going forward.

Optimizing Social Selling on LinkedIn with Warmly

If you're going to make LinkedIn social selling a core part of your growth strategy (and considering the rewards, every B2B company should be investing in it), then you have to remember the part it plays in your overall sales strategy.

Because LinkedIn doesn't exist on its own. It works in tandem with your website. With multiple options for adding CTAs across your posts and profile (as you can see in the screenshot below), LinkedIn can become an extension of a B2B website.

‎With the right strategy, you can align your LinkedIn demand generation (optimized to work with the algorithm) and your website demand capture - and that's where Warmly comes in.

There's no point generating lots of interest in your product with posts, directing people to your website to (hopefully) convert, and then losing them once they're there. That's a waste of your demand generation efforts.

With Warmly, you can:

  • De-anonymize visitors to your site.
  • Use automated chat to engage and nurture prospects.
  • Get notifications when the warmest leads perform high-intent actions (like visiting your pricing page, or reaching out to a salesperson), so you can get your top-level SDRs and AEs involved.

And, with AI Prospector, you can create personalized outreach campaigns for those hot-ticket leads for email and LinkedIn.

The end result? A cyclical, signal-based revenue orchestration system, fueled by AI and human interaction.

Book a demo of Warmly today to see our clever workflows in action.

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The Full Guide to Warmly Implementation

The Full Guide to Warmly Implementation

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Warmly is revolutionizing the sales experience by providing a more efficient approach to connecting with potential customers. 

We know that’s a big statement to make. And we stand by it. 

We are the first signal-based revenue orchestration platform that automatically de-anonymizes and converts qualified website visitors. It goes like this: Drop in a code snippet to unveil visitors, and sync your CRM with tools like Outreach and Salesflow to auto-sequence target accounts' buying committees. Let AI chat handle hot leads and seamlessly transition to a live video call with your SDR, all on your website.

In most cases, good things take time. This isn’t one of those cases. We do this all at a fraction of the cost of our competitors, and we can get you started in just one day. 

Why Warmly Is Different (The Short Answer)

Many of our competitors (like Drift) are built for enterprise companies. That’s not what we’re about. Instead, we’re built for small to medium businesses (SMBs) — We’re 6sense plus Drift but focused on automation that empowers smaller teams at a price point that doesn't break the bank.


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Why Warmly Is Different (The Long-ish Answer)

We combine automation, AI, and A/B testing to optimize engagement strategies across various channels. By unifying disparate tech stacks and automating processes, the Warmly platform enables businesses to efficiently orchestrate their sales efforts and drive meaningful interactions with potential prospects.

Our platform offers users access to two primary signals: website visits and research intent. Leveraging these signals, businesses can proactively reach out to prospects via email, LinkedIn, and chat messages, ensuring timely engagement and maximizing the likelihood of conversion.

This strategy, which we call "warmbound," merges inbound and outbound motions to create a cohesive approach to lead generation. By utilizing inbound signals to drive intent and automating outbound outreach through channels like LinkedIn and email, Warmly enables businesses to maintain a continuous flow of engagement with prospects.

Plus, Warmly focuses on lead prioritization and segmentation based on factors such as Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), historical intent, and engagement intent. This enables businesses to tailor their outreach strategies and allocate resources more effectively, ensuring that the most promising leads receive timely and personalized attention.

But how do you go from anonymous website visitors and no lead gen strategy to a fully-optimized revenue orchestration strategy?

Let's show you how, with Warmly.

Part 1: Integrate your Tech Stack

Benefits:

  • Data accessibility and insights: Seamlessly access and leverage CRM data within Warmly's platform, enriching insights into CRM activities, visitor behavior, and more.
  • Streamlined workflows: Bidirectional data flow enables informed decision-making and action-taking directly within Warmly, eliminating the need to switch between platforms and enhancing productivity.
  • Real-time updates: Receive instant notifications and updates on CRM activities, improving responsiveness and agility in managing leads and opportunities.
  • Increased efficiency: Swift setup and centralized access to CRM data save time, eliminate manual data entry, and boost overall productivity.
  • Simplified integration: Quick and hassle-free setup ensures you can effortlessly add prospects to email sequences, enhancing Warmly's platform's ease of use and efficiency.
  • Data security: Warmly's limited access to your email sequencing tool ensures data security, while sender designation prioritizes mailbox availability for enhanced security.
  • Insights enhancement: Enrichment of Warmly's platform with sequence data provides better insights for decision-making, extending its capabilities and empowering users to leverage email sequencing seamlessly.

Add Warmly Script Tag to Your Website

The Warmly script tag allows Warmly to monitor interactions on your site. Leads are tracked, and visitor behavior is analyzed to the T. This data can then be used to optimize marketing strategies, personalize user experiences, and improve conversion rates. And it’s super simple to set up—you can literally copy and paste the script code. 

Connect your CRM

Warmly offers integrations with CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot, providing users quick and efficient access to their CRM data within the Warmly platform. Here’s the rundown:

Integration Process

  • Implementation Speed: Warmly's integration with Salesforce and HubSpot takes only a few minutes to implement fully.
  • Authorization: Warmly uses OAuth to authenticate with the CRM systems. Before integrating, Warmly requests a set of basic permissions.
  • Access Control: Users can enable Warmly access to only read their CRM data or read and write data, which can be controlled through a toggle switch.

Salesforce Integration Overview

Warmly reads Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity-level data from Salesforce. Data flows into Warmly's platform, populating additional fields such as Warm Accounts/Warm Visitors tabs and Slack notifications with relevant CRM information.

HubSpot Integration Overview

Warmly reads Company, Contact, and Deal-level data from HubSpot. Like Salesforce integration, this data populates Warmly's platform, enriching features like Warm Accounts/Warm Visitors tabs and Slack notifications.

Connect your Email Sequencing Tool (Hubspot, Outreach, or SalesLoft)

Warmly's integrations with popular email sequencing tools like Outreach, Apollo, and SalesLoft are designed for efficiency and ease of use. The integrations enable your team to seamlessly add prospects to your email sequences directly from the Warmly platform.

Outreach Integration

Setting up Outreach integration takes just a few seconds. Access it through your Warmly dashboard's Settings tab, navigate to Integrations, select Outreach, and follow the prompts.

Apollo Integration (for Sequencing)

Similarly, you can set up Apollo integration for sequencing in seconds. Simply follow the precise steps outlined in the documentation for seamless integration.

Salesloft Integration

Guess how long it takes to integrate Salesloft with Warmly? If you said just a few seconds, you would be correct. Head to your Warmly dashboard's Settings tab, find the Integrations section, select Salesloft, and follow the prompts to complete the setup.

Part 2: Set up Segments

Benefits:

  • Enhanced lead prioritization: Segments enable prioritization of high-engagement prospects and companies, allowing users to focus their efforts on leads with the most potential.
  • Improved workflow efficiency: By filtering traffic based on predefined criteria such as historical intent, engagement, and session duration, users can streamline their workflows and allocate resources more effectively.
  • Personalized marketing and outreach: Segments facilitate targeted marketing campaigns by allowing users to tailor their messaging and outreach efforts to specific audience segments, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of communication.
  • Enhanced data visibility: Segments provide comprehensive insights into visitor behavior and lead characteristics, empowering users to make data-driven decisions and optimize their strategies for better results.
  • Streamlined lead tracking: With segments, users can easily track leads' interactions and behaviors across their website, enabling better lead management and follow-up strategies.

Segment by Intent Level and Target Account Fit

Setting up high-intent segments with Warmly is streamlined and intuitive. Segments act as filters, allowing you to create targeted workflows based on visitor engagement levels and specific criteria.

You can easily configure segments by accessing the Settings tab and navigating to the Segments section. Using filters such as hot, medium, cold, and bad, you can define segments based on factors like perfect ICP fit, historical intent, and engagement activities on your website.

Whether you're on the free or paid plan, you'll find pre-configured segments and ample customization options. You can combine filters using 'or' logic, creating diverse segments tailored to your needs.

For instance, you can filter out company traffic, competitors, customers, universities, and governments. Additionally, you can filter by intent level, session time, referral source, and demographic information.

Take a look:


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Part 3: Set up Personas

Benefits:

  • Targeted outreach: Personas enable users to focus their outreach efforts on individuals who hold influential roles within their target companies, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of their communication.
  • Streamlined prospecting: With predefined personas, users can quickly identify and add relevant contacts to their outreach sequences, saving time and effort in the prospecting process.
  • Enhanced lead nurturing: By aligning outreach efforts with specific personas, users can tailor their messaging to resonate with the needs and interests of their target audience, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
  • Simplified workflow automation: Warmly's AI Prospector tool allows users to automate prospecting tasks, such as adding contacts to outreach sequences based on predefined personas, further streamlining the prospecting workflow.
  • Improved sales efficiency: By engaging with individuals who match their target personas, sales teams can prioritize their efforts and allocate resources more effectively, leading to higher productivity and better outcomes.

ICP Personas by Title/Job Function

Firstly, navigate to the settings and personas section within Warmly. Here, you can create personas based on job titles or functions that align with your target audience. For example, if you're a sales and marketing tool, you might create personas for sales leaders, heads of sales, or vice presidents of sales. You can specify criteria, such as whether an email or LinkedIn profile is available for each persona.

Once you've established your personas, you can leverage them effectively while prospecting. For instance, if a visitor from a particular company hits your website, you can quickly identify the relevant persona associated with their job title or function.

Using Warmly's AI Prospector tool, you can then add them to an outreach sequence with just a few clicks. This streamlined process allows you to target the rest of the buying committee efficiently, ensuring that your outreach efforts focus on the organisation's most relevant decision-makers.


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Part 4: Set up Slack Notifications

Benefits:

  • Improved responsiveness: Be alerted to prospect activities, leading to quicker follow-ups and increased conversion rates.
  • Enhanced team collaboration: Get everyone on the same page and step up your communication with centralized Slack notifications.
  • Real-time insights: Alerts about your segments empower timely actions, strengthening customer relationships and driving business growth.

Slack Notifications Based on Segments

Integrating a Slack channel with Warmly allows you to receive real-time notifications whenever significant events occur on your website, such as a prospect starting a session, landing on a specific page, filling out a form, or engaging with an AI chat message. This integration lets you stay informed about visitor activities and promptly respond to potential leads or customer inquiries.

The setup involves creating a dedicated Slack channel for receiving notifications and granting Warmly the necessary permissions to interact with it. You can customize the types of events that trigger notifications based on your segments, ensuring that you only receive alerts relevant to your business objectives.


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Part 5: Set up ‎AI Chat (AI Chat‎) 

Benefits:

  • Scalability of AI: Leveraging ChatGPT, the Warmly AI Chat delivers personalized and customized messages to prospects at scale, surpassing the capabilities of sales reps.
  • Efficiency and focus: AI Chat automates prospect engagement, freeing sales reps from the manual task of initiating conversations. It ensures all relevant prospects are messaged based on segment filters, notifying reps only when a prospect responds, thus optimizing their time and focus.

First, a Prompt, Then An Alert

Warmly's AI Chat feature integrates ChatGPT prompts and Slack alerts to streamline prospect engagement. This enhances traditional Warm Calling and Inbound Chat capabilities.

With AI Chat, customized messages are sent to prospects automatically and personalized using ChatGPT. Then, notifications are sent to sales teams via Slack only when prospects respond. This approach aims to boost engagement by delivering tailored messages at scale while alleviating the manual burden on sales reps. Additionally, it offers increased flexibility and efficiency in prospect communication, ultimately optimizing sales processes and maximizing productivity.

Part 6: Set up Inbound Chat Workflows

Benefits:

  • Personalized engagement: Create tailored conversational journeys for website visitors, delivering a customized experience.
  • Efficient automation: Automate prospect engagement with AI-powered chat, saving time for sales reps.
  • Qualification focus: Notify sales reps only when prospects respond, ensuring efforts are directed towards qualified leads.
  • Proactive approach: Identify high-intent leads and initiate conversations, driving meaningful interactions.
  • Cost-effective solution: Access affordable conversational chat workflows, providing SMBs with a competitive advantage.
  • Easy setup: Implement Inbound Chatbot Workflows quickly and efficiently, without the need for extensive training or resources.

Relevant Customer Conversations Only

Warmly's Inbound Chatbot Workflows revolutionize customer engagement by offering an affordable alternative to Drift's conversational chat function. Through customizable workflows, Warmly enables businesses to interact with prospects in a personalized manner, driving meaningful conversations and ultimately boosting sales.

Setting up Inbound Chatbot Workflows with Warmly involves creating tailored conversational journeys for website visitors. Using ChatGPT prompts, prospects navigate through a logic tree of potential answers, ensuring relevant and engaging interactions. These workflows can be personalized based on various criteria, such as demographic data, intent level, CRM criteria, and traffic source, ensuring that each prospect receives a customized experience.

Additionally, Warmly offers a complementary AI-powered chat solution for high-intent leads, leveraging integrations with third-party buying intent data and CRM tools. This proactive approach to website chat allows businesses to convert warm leads into sales conversations effectively. 

Part 7: Set Up Auto Prospecting via Email Sequencing

Benefits:

  • Improved targeting: Personalized email sequences and automated workflows allow you to better target your audience based on specific persona types and segments, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of your outreach efforts.
  • Deeper insights: Integration with Apollo API or Warmly's credits enables you to track individuals who visit your site from outbound emails and analyze engagement metrics more comprehensively, providing valuable insights for refining your strategy.
  • Higher conversion rates: With a cohesive and tailored approach to engagement, you can expect to see higher conversion rates as you engage with your target audience more effectively.

Personalized Email Prospecting 

Integrating your Apollo API key enhances your prospecting activities. The integration lets you monitor individuals who arrive on your site from outbound emails through the setup of query parameters, providing deeper insights into engagement metrics.

Once integrated, you can craft personalized email sequences within leading outreach platforms like Outreach or SalesLoft. These sequences can be finely tuned to match your target audience and messaging strategy, ensuring a cohesive and practical approach to engagement. Moreover, Warmly offers automation for prospect workflows, automatically assigning visitors that align with specific persona types and segments to predefined email sequences.

By embracing automation and harnessing Warmly's capabilities, you can refine your prospecting workflow and optimize outreach endeavors. This approach facilitates more meaningful engagement with your audience, increasing conversion rates and amplifying the impact of your outreach initiatives.

Part 8: Set up Auto-Prospecting via LinkedIn Sequencing (with Salesflow)

Benefits:

  • Targeted outreach: By defining criteria like industry and job title, you ensure that outreach efforts are directed towards relevant prospects.
  • Accuracy: Features like visitor location search enhance the accuracy of prospect targeting.
  • Scalability: With automated workflows, you can scale your prospecting efforts without increasing manual workload.

Adding LinkedIn to Your Prospecting

First, get started with Salesflow by visiting salesflow.io and logging in to your Salesflow account. If you haven't already, purchase your Salesflow seat, with Warmly users eligible for a 20% discount if purchased through Warmly.


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Within Salesflow, you can identify targeted accounts and personas using Warmly's prospecting tools. Filter and segment leads based on specific persona types within the target companies. Utilize Warmly's prospector tool or integrate with Apollo using your Apollo API key to identify and enrich key stakeholders within the targeted accounts. 

‎Then, set up LinkedIn sequences in Salesflow by creating a new campaign for LinkedIn sequencing. Choose the "Connection Request" option, allowing you to automatically connect with targeted individuals who visit your website. Set connection limits, personal notes, and follow-up messages to optimize your outreach strategy.

You can customize connection requests and follow-up templates by crafting personalized messages addressing recipients by their first name and mentioning their Company's interest in Warmly's services. You can also set up follow-up messages to be sent if there's no response to the initial connection request.

Configure sequence activation and scheduling by defining the schedule for your LinkedIn sequencing campaign, specifying the days and times for sequence activation. Activate the campaign once contacts have been enrolled to initiate the outreach process.

Finally, monitor and respond to responses by tracking your LinkedIn sequences' progress within Salesflow. Respond promptly to any replies received directly from your inbox. This integration allows you to streamline your LinkedIn sequencing process, ensuring timely and personalized outreach to potential prospects visiting your website.

Warmly: The All-in-One Revenue Orchestration Platform

So there you have it—Warmly is revolutionizing the sales game by providing an efficient, cost-effective solution for connecting with potential customers.

With our platform, you can seamlessly integrate your tech stack, unveil and convert qualified website visitors, and engage with prospects in real-time, all without breaking a sweat.

So why wait? Experience the Warmly difference today and supercharge your sales efforts like never before. Book a demo now.

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Mastering LinkedIn Prospecting with Warmly’s New Salesflow Integration

Mastering LinkedIn Prospecting with Warmly’s New Salesflow Integration

Time to read

Alan Zhao

There are lots of tools out there today purporting to be the future of revenue orchestration. However, not that many can actually accomplish enterprise-level end-to-end sales prospecting for the price of an SMB platform.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new addition to Warmly’s sales orchestration platform: Salesflow integration. 

Following our new Inbound Chat Workflows, you can now use Warmly and Salesflow to create automated LinkedIn outreach campaigns for your ICPs. 

Outreach Strategy: Challenges and Current Trends

Sure, you’re not cold calling anymore. Sales prospecting has come a long way since the days of ringing hundreds of random phone numbers and hoping the person will pick up.

Today, sales reps and B2B marketers are much more focused on optimizing leads before reaching out. Why waste time with people who aren’t going to pick up or who aren’t interested in buying at all?

However, this outreach strategy requires you to get a few things right in the first place.

  • Identifying the right ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas.
  • Understanding intent signals from your prospects.
  • Website visitor data you can rely on.

With sales and marketing teams becoming increasingly integrated and the number of B2B tools skyrocketing, the process of conducting outreach to prospective leads can quickly become unworkable.

Today, it’s also not enough to just go after potential prospects via email (and it's increasingly challenging to catch someone on the phone). 75% of B2B buyers today use social media to make buying decisions, so you need to bring the selling to where they are.

The Value of LinkedIn Sales Prospecting

Approximately 141 million LinkedIn members are daily users, while almost 50% of LinkedIn’s entire user base are monthly users. You get the picture: there’s a huge opportunity for B2B sellers on the platform.

With more and more B2B buyers turning to the LinkedIn search engine to find opportunities, companies, and new prospects, you're missing out if you’re not already there. 

But it’s not just about the scale of social selling on the platform. Engagement is a huge factor in LinkedIn prospecting. 

InMails—LinkedIn’s cold outreach solution—have a reply rate of 10-25%, while email campaigns in the software industry on average see an open rate of not much more (28%). 

And email marketing reply rates? They lag behind at around 5-10%, depending on how effective your campaign and messaging are.

The truth is, if you want to see results from sales prospecting, it’s better to use multiple channels than focus all of your efforts on one. And that means spending time conducting LinkedIn and traditional cold email outreach.

More channels = a wider net in the sea of B2B buyers. And a greater chance that those fish will bite.   

Salesflow + Warmly = A New Way to Do Outreach Campaigns 


         

LinkedIn automation tools are nothing new—the platform has always been a place to conduct business, and being able to automate messaging and connection requests is a massive time-saver for founders. 

Recently, the Warmly team had the opportunity to hear sales prospecting tips from Brian Gerrard, Outreach's outbound guru. Our takeaway? Effective prospecting is all about combining quality data with the right amount of outreach. 

Prospect not a match for your business? They’re not going to answer your message. Don’t message enough? Then you’re not doing your best to nurture them. 

This is why the combination of AI-driven LinkedIn automation and a sales orchestration platform (like Warmly) can really take your outreach campaigns to the next level.

Sure, your current workflow for sales outreach might already include LinkedIn automation.

But what if you could ensure that LinkedIn connection requests and messages were really going to the people who want to buy?…

…At the exact moment they’re ready to buy? 

Combining intent signal data from Warmly and the powerful LinkedIn prospecting tools from Salesflow, you can now automate the entire cold outreach process, adding another channel to your sales process. 

Plus, on average, Warmly’s internal Salesflow campaigns see a response rate of 14%. 

The Power of a Salesflow Outreach Campaign

  • Automatically send connection requests to LinkedIn prospects. 
  • Send personalized LinkedIn messages to new connections based on demographic, role, or other segment. 
  • Set up follow-up sequences personalized to each segment. 
  • Auto-like the most recent post on your prospect’s LinkedIn profile. 
  • Automatically send 200-500 connection requests a week.
daily statistics salesflow

         


The Power of Warmly

  • De-anonymize 15% of contacts and 65% of companies that visit your website.
  • Track buying intent with Bombora integration. 
  • Automatically notify sales reps when high-intent accounts are browsing your website. 
  • AI Prospector personalizes and sends emails to key stakeholders. 
  • Enhance lead nurturing with the combined power of human and AI web chat.
Warmly intent data

         

Warmly + Salesflow = An Automated Sales Pipeline

  • De-anonymize website visitors and filter by target audience and intent to find the leads ready to buy.
  • Auto-enroll potential leads in email and LinkedIn sequences using Warmly’s AI Prospector and Salesflow integration. 
  • Personalize outreach by bringing in human sales reps at any moment to capitalize on high-value accounts or optimum intent moments. 
  • Optimize your LinkedIn marketing by targeting the right accounts at the right time, improving conversion rates. 

From Cold Prospecting to… Warmly

How Warmly works

         

Now you know why we think Warmly and Salesflow integration is so powerful.

Next, let’s run through how to get set up in Warmly so all your outreach sequencing is ready to go, hands-free.

Warmly is designed so that our AI tools can run the software autonomously, freeing up your SDRs and AEs to focus on closing high-ticket deals. But we never want you to feel out of control, so you can seamlessly bring a human into the sequence at any time. 

To get the most out of LinkedIn prospecting with Salesflow and Warmly, you’ll first need to set up some things in your Warmly account. 

Step 1: Add the Warmly script tag

To ensure Warmly can track your website visitor data, you first need to add the Warmly script tag to your website. This can go in the main code for your entire website, or you can add it just to a few pages. 

We have follow-on tutorials for adding the Warmly script tag to Webflow and Google Tag Manager. If you don’t use either of us, just reach out to Warmly, and we can help you set it up! 

Adding Warmly script tag to Webflow 

To add Warmly tracking to your entire website, head to your Webflow dashboard, find your entire website, and click Settings. 

In Settings, click ‘Custom Code’ and add the script tag straight into the Head code box. 

Add Warmly script tag to website

         

If you only want to add the script tag to specific pages, you can do this through Webflow Designer. 

Find the specific page to which you want to add the tag, click Settings, and scroll down to where it specifies ‘Inside <head> tag.’ 

Script tag on Webflow Page

         

Adding Warmly script tag to Google Tag Manager 

On Google Tag Manager, you’ll want to add a New Tag in your main dashboard. Then, add a Custom HTML to the Tag Configuration.

Add Warmly Script to Tag Manager

         

Afterward, you’ll need to set up Triggering to confirm whether the tag appears on your entire website or just specified pages.

So, add a new Trigger and select Page View. If you want to add the tag to your entire website, keep ‘All Page Views’ selected. If you want to specify pages, click Some Page Views and add each Page URL to the list. 

Add Trigger to Google Tag Manager

         

Step 2: Set up Slack integration

Now, you can set up your Slack integration to ensure your sales team receives instant notifications when ideal prospects show up on your website or complete certain actions, such as starting a session or visiting a page. 

In Warmly, you’ll find Slack integration in your Settings. Click Get Started, log in to your correct Workspace, and select the Slack channel in which you want to receive updates. 

Once this is set up, you can add specific filters within Warmly that specify when notifications should be triggered.

Warmly Slack Notifications

         

For example, if you set up notifications for prospects visiting your website (you can segment to filter only those visitors that you really care about—more on this in the next step), once the action has been triggered, you’ll receive a Slack notification in the channel you specified. 

Warmly Slack Notification

         

Step 3: Build out segments and personas

Now it’s time for arguably the most important part—setting up your segments and personas. You’ll find these by going to settings on your Warmly dashboard. 

Segments

Segments dictate the kind of visitor data you want to be notified of. There are many different ways you can specialize personas to the needs of your sales teams and your potential customers. For example, you can filter by company size, estimated revenue, time spent on your site, or even the trigger for that visitor arriving on your site (for example, they came through email).  

Once your segments are set up, you can apply these to your Slack notification settings and only get notified when someone from your target company arrives on your website or spends time on your pricing page, for example. 

Warmly segments

         

Personas

Personas help you get down to account-level specifics—like buying committees within the companies you want to target. This will help you customize your email outreach strategy (and LinkedIn outreach) by targeting specific people who work at your target companies.

For example, if you want to set up an outreach campaign targeting sales leaders, use the persona options to add specific job titles. However, you can filter by more categories, including role, state or region, and seniority level, to target the exact people you want to nurture.  

Warmly Personas

         

Step 4: Set up email sequencing

Outbound workflows are only available to users with a Business or Startup-tier Warmly account.

Once your segments and personas are set up, you can use them to create targeted outreach sequences in email through Outreach integration.

So, you might want to target a specific company you know is looking at your website and then craft an outreach campaign to target specific people. On the company page, head to the Prospects tab to filter accounts with valid email addresses.

Then, add them to an Outreach email sequence with just one click.

Prospecting with Warmly

         

Bringing Salesflow Into the Mix 

Once you’ve got Warmly set up and personalized with segments and personas for your lead generation strategy, you can also harness the power of LinkedIn outreach. 

Salesflow integration means that you can now add prospects to a LinkedIn sequence directly from your Warmly dashboard. With AI Prospector, you can build email and LinkedIn sequences that work in tandem to target your ideal customers.  

This integration allows you to optimize your social selling strategy and ensure that the right people see your brand—at the right time. 

LinkedIn Prospecting with Salesflow and Warmly

To take advantage of all-in-one prospecting and cold outreach within Warmly, you’ll need an account with Salesflow—however, customers purchasing through Warmly get a 20% discount on a Salesflow subscription. 

The first step is to add your Account API token from Salesflow to the Warmly integration page. Once this is complete, campaigns created in Salesflow will be automatically integrated into Warmly, allowing you to add accounts to your LinkedIn sequences with just one click. 

Here’s how it all works. 

Step 1: Add campaign

Firstly, you’ll need to set up a campaign within Salesflow. Once prompted for which campaign type you want, choose new connections. This means all new visitors to your website (after being filtered by segments and personas) will be automatically sent a connection request on LinkedIn, along with follow-up messages if applicable. 

Salesflow Campaign Type

         

Afterward, you can specify the number of connection requests you want to send out daily and include an option to like your new connection’s latest LinkedIn post. 

Step 1 Salesflow Campaign

         

Step 2: Personalized outreach message  

Next, add a personalized note that will appear alongside your connection request. Despite the usability of LinkedIn automation tools, you always want to personalize as much as possible. In one study on cold email outreach, personalization increased open rates by 29% and response rates by up to 50%. 

Keep your LinkedIn message snappy and personal - nobody wants to see another generic connection request that says, “Hey! Want to connect?” 

Connection Message Salesflow

         

At this point, you can also add follow-up messages that will trigger a specific number of days after your connection request has been accepted. These don’t need to be long or complex—you want to nurture your prospects through cold messaging as if they’re already warm. After all, these LinkedIn profiles might have already visited your website, read your emails, or spent time on your pricing page.  

After setting up your sales outreach messages, you’ll be able to choose the days and hours that your campaign is active. 

Salesflow Follow Up Template

         

Step 3: Integrating Salesflow campaigns in Warmly

Now that your campaigns are all set up, you can start adding prospects to them from Warmly. There are multiple ways to do this. In the example below, we’ve chosen a company associated with accounts that have spent more than 10 seconds on the Warmly website.

Head to your chosen company’s page in Warmly and filter by a persona, such as sales leaders who have LinkedIn.

Now, you can use Salesflow integration to add these contacts to your Salesflow sequence with just one click. Once they’re added, Salesflow will initiate the campaign and begin sending out connection requests and personalized messages you already created.  

Salesflow Warmly Integration

         

Automating Email and LinkedIn Outreach with AI Prospector

If you want to remove even more of the research and outreach time associated with LinkedIn prospecting, there’s another option. With Warmly’s AI Prospector, you can automate the entire email and LinkedIn outreach process with just a few clicks. 

All you have to do is add persona and segment filters to the AI Prospector tool and see how Warmly handles all your personalized outreach. 

Below, we’ve created a workflow that will auto-email anyone who has:

  • Visited the Warmly website.
  • AND applies to the specified segments and personas. 

Once you’ve specified the number of personas you want to reach out to and added them to a relevant Outreach sequence, you can let Warmly handle the repetitive process of sending emails to anyone who visits your website that you want to nurture. 

Warmly Ai Prospector emails

         

The same process applies to LinkedIn outreach with our Salesflow integration. Add a workflow in AI Prospector, include the segments you want to target (core ICP, for example), and add your personas. 

Then, you can add your workflow to the Salesflow sequence you already set up (as in the step-by-step guide above.) Toggle enable on, and you’re set: Warmly’s AI Prospector will automatically find LinkedIn profiles that match your personas and handle the entire outreach process (including sending connection requests, messages, and follow-ups) to your prospects with Salesflow. 

Warmly AI prospector linkedin

         

Practical Use Case: How Warmly + Salesflow Enhances Your Outreach Process

With Warmly's solutions, you can adjust your outreach strategy depending on the type of leads arriving at your website. Let's look at a few possible situations, as this is where you'll witness the full power of Warmly and Salesflow integration.

Warmly uses data from your:

  • ICP filters
  • CRM (historical intent)
  • Website and email engagement  

To give each lead that arrives at your website a warm lead score. Anything we deem to be a cold lead (they're not in your CRM; maybe they only visited your website for a few seconds) gets a cold outreach process: AI chatbot on the website, an auto cold email sequence.

However, when those leads get warmer, you start to see how Warmly can automatically filter opportunities to ensure you can nurture the warmest prospects - saving your sales reps valuable time.  

Bad Leads

Let's face it: only a very small proportion of your website visitors are going to be in the market to buy, or even genuinely interested in your product. There's no point dedicating any time to leads that don't qualify for your ICP, are from a competitor, or we can't tell which company they work for at all.

If Warmly detects a bad lead on your site, Inbound Chat will be automatically turned off. Your sales reps are too good to be engaging with useless leads.

Cold Leads

Warmly can immediately distinguish which of your visitors are cold; for example, if they aren't in your CRM, we can't identify their role, or they only spend minimal time on your site.

So, say someone arrives on your homepage. They're from a company that largely matches your ICP, but it's not ideal. We're also not sure of their role at said company.

These leads will see Warmly's Inbound Chat. Differing from the more specialized AI Chat, Inbound Chat will send you a Slack notification if a cold website visitor take a high-intent action through the chatbot, like asking to speak to your sales team. Otherwise, they're not actively approached by sales reps.

Cold leads will also be auto-added to a marketing email sequence. These might prompt a visitor to check out more of your solutions, if they viewed your services page, or directed to your blog if they landed on a blog page.

Medium-Warmth Leads

Say someone arrives at your website who has been regularly researching solutions like yours across the web. As long as the visitor matches your ICP (in terms of company size, industry, and role), Warmly's AI Prospector can auto-enroll them in a warm email sequence. Our AI Chatbot will also reach out to them when they're on your website and prompt them to engage.  

With Warmly's Bombora integration, we can also   they've been researching in the past, giving us a sense of how close they are to buying what you're selling.

Warmly wouldn't necessarily add in LinkedIn outreach at this stage in the sales cycle, especially considering the limits on connection requests on the platform. But if you know that your customers are highly engaged on LinkedIn, you can use Salesflow integration to craft an outreach sequence that targets specific medium-warmth accounts that arrive on your website, where you can nurture them with AI and human collaboration.

Hot Leads

Hot leads are another story. If someone is spending 30 seconds or more on your pricing page, or we can see that multiple people from the same organization are landing on your site - now is the time to throw everything at converting them. They're hot.

In this case, AI Prospector would enroll them in a combination of LinkedIn and email sequences, prompting them to engage and/or book a demo. If you get a Slack notification that a hot lead is on your site right now, maybe a sales rep hops onto a video call with the prospect on the Chatbot to engage with them in real time.

Thanks to Warmly's advanced intent signals, you can be sure that only the most attractive leads (based on your ICP, CRM, and intent data) are being added to those more personalized outreach processes: LinkedIn, personalized chat, warm email sequences.

Warmly's Integration Process

Whatever your ICP or specific segments/filters, Warmly implements the same workflow each time - so you can be sure that you're only being looped in when a really juicy lead lands on your site.

For every prospect, the process is this:

  1. Lead lands on site and Warmly categorizes according to intent data.
  2. If cold, AI Chat is disabled; Warmly's Inbound Chat is enabled.
  3. If warm, lead is engaged through AI Chat and entered into relevant email sequence.
  4. Warm leads are nurtured in a cyclical process, moving through outbound and inbound channels (from LinkedIn back to your website, and vice versa) until they're hot.  
  5. If hot, lead engaged through AI Chat, email sequence, and LinkedIn sequence. There's the possibility for your human sales reps/AEs to get involved at any moment thanks to real-time Slack notifications.

The result? More efficient outreach, and higher conversion rates.

End-to-End Outreach Campaigns with Warmly and Salesflow

Social selling is an integral part of the B2B marketing and sales today. But it's not just about building an engaged following or driving word-of-mouth recommendations about your product: social platforms like LinkedIn are there to drive leads to your website, where they can increase knowledge and even book meetings with your team.

If your LinkedIn and website goals aren't aligned, you're not going to see the benefits of an omnichannel B2B sales cycle. And that's why Warmly's new Salesflow integration is so impressive.

Thanks to the combined power of buyer intent and warm lead scoring (Warmly) and personalized LinkedIn outreach (Salesflow), you can manage your entire lead classification and nurturing process across one platform. Our high-level data guarantees that you’re prospecting accounts who are ready to buy from you right now, optimizing your sales process.

Interested in how you can do accomplish better outreach with Warmly’s AI Prospector? 

Book a demo today—or sign up for free to try our deanonymization tools right now.

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Warmly’s B2B Sales Strategy for Mid-Funnel Deal Advancement

Warmly’s B2B Sales Strategy for Mid-Funnel Deal Advancement

Time to read

Maximus Greenwald

‎So, you SQO’d a deal? Sick. Now, you think you can actually close it? Let's see.

Naturally, your close deals rate depends on dozens of factors: the accuracy of your ICP, the quality of your lead generation, the strength of your SDRs, and more.

But identifying an SQO doesn't automatically mean you're going to close. The average close rate sits at around 20% for all B2B companies, though high-performing sales teams can inch that up to 30%. Even the best B2B salespeople can fall at the final hurdle.

At Warmly, we've optimised the sales process by bringing in inbound sales representatives to our sales teams, which has a significant effect on the quality of new leads and speeds up the process of identifying SQOs. After that, it's all down to our AEs.

Specifically, AEs at Warmly are expected to do a minimum of 3 out of 16 of the following B2B sales techniques if they've got a good deal on the line. With the following B2B sales strategies, the KPI for all AEs is to improve close rates by 15%.

A Rundown of Our B2B Sales Strategies

The Must Dos:

  1. Pre-amble: The basics
  2. Mid-amble: Do you even have a deal?

The Options:

  1. SQO Follow Up Sequence
  2. Multi-thread
  3. 3Ws Recap
  4. Good Word Referrals
  5. Charm the Prospect’s Reps
  6. Gift-giving
  7. Get Personal
  8. Gap-selling
  9. Targeting Customer Success
  10. Business Case
  11. Sales Leadership Over-the-top
  12. Loop in Decision Maker/Stakeholder
  13. Create Urgency with Carrot and Stick
  14. Sign the Deal on Conditions
  15. Customer Referral
  16. Get Wacky

Strategy Details: The Must Dos

1. Pre-amble: The basics

Post SQO, it's a good idea to first get your house in order before getting involved with potential buyers.

  • Add a Buying committee.
  • Add everyone on LinkedIn and follow their company for company news.
  • Ensure the next meeting is on the books.
  • Ensure you have the full list of steps and timeline from now until the finish line. A recommended line of questioning:

"Working our way backwards, what needs to happen to be able to sign?”

“What is the process you used to sign with your last vendor?”

“Why can’t we sign today?”

“Will you be the signer? If not, when can I get them on a call?”

“Do you need a security/privacy/compliance review?”

“Who else on the team needs to see this? Do you want ground level reps to see it? What are their names/emails?”

“Do you need to do a data trial?”

“Do you need a business case?”

“Will there be a meeting with the CFO? Can I get them on a call? What are their names/emails?”

“By what date do you want to start seeing impact? Assuming a two-week onboarding we will want to sign one month before.”

2. Mid-amble: Do you even have a deal?

So many supposed 'qualified' sales leads are not SQOs. You will improve your barometer over time but it’s highly encouraged to review C/L deals and decide what you missed so you can look for it in the future, and refine your B2B sales strategy.

Key Questions: Understand

  • Has your champion purchased a tool before?
  • Are you talking to the decision maker who will be signing?
  • Has the prospect articulated which key annual/quarterly business level priorities this project aligns to?
  • Did your prospect explain what budget this is going to come from and if they’re authorized for budget?
  • Do you really have the 3 Whys?

For “Why Do Anything?” (Problem), could they articulate the cost of their business of making no changes?

For “Why Warmly?” (Solution), could they articulate why they can’t manually do this? Why they can’t use another tool? Which other solutions they’ve already tried that have failed?

For “Why Now?” (Urgency, is there truly real urgency? Have they articulated the day by which they have to deliver results? Have they said what happens if that day passes and problem is not solved?

  • Can your champion articulate the 3 Whys you wrote for them internally? They need to verbally say the 3 Whys out loud back to you to know they can do it internally.
  • Can the prospect articulate how it will be added into their existing processes & tech stack?

Key Questions: Learn

  • Surface objections:

“Why wouldn’t you move forward with Warmly?”

“What do you think X other stakeholders biggest objection with Warmly is? If you don’t know, can I ask them directly?"

  • Arming the champion:

“What are you going to say when the decision maker says we shouldn’t move forward with Warmly?”

“Which of these 10 pieces of collateral do you think will have the most impact when viewed internally? How do we get them viewed?”

Our B2B Sales Strategy: Details

Once an AE has run through the pre-amble and mid-amble, it's time to get to the meat of closing deals. At this part in the B2B sales process, as mentioned above, we expect Warmly AEs to complete at least 3 of the following 16 sales tactics, and it's up to them how they do that.

The very best sales reps are flexible and adaptable. That's why we don't prescribe a 3-step process for closing deals: it's a case of personalizing for each and every prospect company and their unique needs.

Our ultimate list of techniques for effective sales closing is a go-to road map for a successful sales cycle.

B2B Sales Techniques Part 1: First Step Options

1. SQO Follow Up Sequence

Adding sales leads to sequences is an easy way to stay top of mind, with little to no work on your end.

  • Drop the champion/decision makers and each new person you meet into a SQO follow up sequence.
  • Drop the finance decision makers in a CFO Sequence/Financial Decision Maker Sequence.

2. Multi-thread

A successful B2B sales strategy involves more than one person. Really, you need to be in conversations with 3+ people in the organization, and ideally have strong relationships with each of these people.

Start the process of looping in people early by:

  • Asking the champion for coffee chats or 15 min intros.
  • Find warm intros into the buying committee or anyone in the company and get them to pass you along to a GTM team.
  • Try to loop every person on their end in every email (no sparing inbox!)
  • Inform the buying committee on new developments/updates as the deal progresses.
  • Offer/ask to join a team meeting.
  • Offer value to the buying committee (see other strategies.)
  • Don’t let your champion box you out by trying to be the liaison.

You can also reduce the burden for the champion and speed things up by:

  • Getting on a Slack channel with the champion then direct add the buying committee with invites.
  • Sending good forwardable warm intros to the champion to intro you in a new clean email thread with a compelling subject line.
  • Direct emailing the additional person (assuming they're not the boss of the champion - ask permission for that) and ask for forgiveness not permission.

3. 3Ws Recap

Because the cornerstone of a real deal is if the champion/decision maker can articulate the 3 Whys, an easy recap slide to kick start a post-SQO meeting is always helpful - for both yourself and potential buyers.

It helps you realign the deal and surface any issues. Plus, when a new person is joining the call you need to catch them up on the Problem/Solution/Urgency and figure out what new pain points they would add.

Key questions while screen sharing:

  • Has anything changed since we last spoke?
  • Before we start, let me review the 3Ws for you, is this right? X New Person, do you have anything to add here?
  • Let's review our timeline - we accomplished X/Y, have any new steps popped up? Is our decision date still the same?

Remember that a 3Ws recap is sneakily co-building the business case together with the prospect.

Part 2: Cementing Strong Relationships

4. Good Word Referrals

Very often, a successful B2B sales strategy really can be about who you know. Warmly’s leadership team should have an in at many of your prospects, and this can make a huge difference in your warm sales pitch. Ask for a connection of ours to put in a good word for your deal via a warm intro from ConnectTheDots.

5. Charm the Prospect’s Reps

If the prospect's reps (who will inevitably have to use Warmly) love you and the tool then you’re in good shape already. In this case, you can turn the charm-meter up a little more - here are some suggestions:

  • Join one of their team meetings to say 'Hi' for 5 minutes.
  • Show their reps the platform to see if they will like it.
  • Host a fun upbeat lunch-n-learn for their sales reps to learn about the latest in sales tech.

Remember: the motivations of reps are super different from managers. To get them on your side, make sure your demo touches on:

  • How much time they’ll save not doing manual work.
  • How Warmly will empower them to make more money.
  • How you and our SDRs use Warmly ourselves (maybe bring an SDR to show their workflow) to make it more human.
  • Show that we at Warmly are real GTM experts by offering them a tip or two maybe they haven’t thought of that you you use.
  • Be friendly by offering them your cell phone number and connecting on LinkedIn. Tell them about our free SDR community SDReady they can join for tips/content.

6. Gift-giving

Please check with leadership for our current limits on gift-giving. However, if you think it'll help strengthen customer relationships and contribute to the buying process, we can work something out. For example:

  • Offer them an AI-generated personalized spirit animal photo ($4).
  • If you or another team member is in the same city as them we can buy them lunch or coffee for an in-person meetup.
image

         

7. Get Personal

Deals always close faster when you make an effort with your customer relationships. No, B2B buyers don't need to become your best friend, but you'll build strong relationships if you get a little personal with people.

Some suggestions:

  • Get their cell phone number and send them a selfie or a fun thing that you did that weekend.
  • Learn about their pets, kids, plants, hobbies etc - and recall that info in calls as fun conversation starters.
  • Send them recommendations for restaurants in their city or for travel locations they want to go to.
  • Before you join a call with them, change your Warmly Nametag to add a fun fact in your bio that you share with them or make up that you share it with them “Oh wow I see you ski, I love skiing."
  • Ask them when their birthday is: “This might be premature but what is your birthday? We love to send our customers a little birthday present.” Then just add a reminder to send them one on the day.

Part 3: Dialing Down on the Value Proposition with Solution Selling

8. Gap Selling

Gap selling is like ice cream. Too often, we go in first with neapolitan instead of chocolate.

To clarify: Warmly is not special in the mind of the B2B buyer. Warmly is a tool that helps them solve a problem and they have a lot of tools to solve different problems. To sell our platform is to understand how to focus on selling a small piece of the platform to the right person to solve that person’s problem. The right tools + the right people = closed deals. This is solution selling.

This strategy involves AEs making a map of the prospect company's current techstack and sharing how and where we fit in. And there's an easy three-step process for doing that.

Step 1

Listen to your prospect to find the key pain points, and the problem they want to solve. Then, match that problem to a subset of the Warmly platform.

For example, "I want better inbound without doing any work." = Focus on AI chat.

"I want better inbound with a human touch." = focus on warm calling.

Step 2

Find out all the tools they use. For each tool, understand where we could plug into their techstack (as seamlessly as Lego clicks together) to make it better and save them money for just that one problem.

Step 3

Figure out who in their organization is responsible for which tools. Start by sharing with the champion but then ask to share with other stakeholders.

We want to explain:

  • Where do we Integrate* with what they already have.
  • Where can we Replace* what they already have (because it’s better, e.g. saves time or is cheaper.)
  • Where can we Add* to what they already have by offering them a discounted partner tool or our own.

But don't get distracted. Be clear that we have a great core value proposition for the one pain point of the champion and the one solution (subset of Warmly). This is how we get our foot in the door.

Then with the prospects you can paint a picture for how over time we can save them time and money by Integrating, Replacing or Adding in other places across the organization. For example, maybe you get the marketing team excited about how to optimize their marketing strategy by replacing Drift at renewal with our Chatbot, but for now we’re going to get started with sales to save time by automated outbound emails to warm leads.

Don’t forget that we have partner companies via the Warm Bundle that can step in as part of this tech stack adjustment. So when the prospect asks if they can replace Drift Fast Lane with us (Drift’s scheduler and form builder), we can say yes, that we partner with Default and Warmly to do just that for half the price.

image

         

9. Targeting Customer Success

Equal in importance to our software is the strong belief that we can offer value to potential customers through our other services. The B2B sales process doesn't have to be all about our products, but what other knowledge and expertise we can offer.

Warm Bundle Intros

Ask them if they are planning to make any GTM software purchases this year. As experts in the GTM space and because we’re a layer across all GTM software - you can ask them if they’d like any intros to our top chosen players/innovators from the bundle. Explain how as a Warmly customer they get 10-25% of all of these, however you’re happy to intro them before they commit to Warmly too. We're helping them out, not just pushing a sale.

Content

Do they need help with any pain points? Recommended long-form blogposts or videos we’ve made intending to teach & train GTM leaders on GTM strategy from our 100s of customers. Ideally tie something you know about their business to why you’re offering the relevant information.

To elicit a response, be sure to ask them a question about the content. E.g. “What did you think about X in the context of your business? Is there someone else on your team I should send this content to?”

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Customer Referral

Can you find anyone in your network that might like what they do? Even if you can’t, you can say, "My CEO offered to try to find a lead or two for you manually from his network before we get started - would you want that?"

If they're interested, ask the prospect to share:

  • Their ICP/ideal B2B buyer persona or target account list.
  • A preferred two-liner on what they do.
  • Which person our CEO should loop in for the leads he sources.

Strategy Session

Tell prospects that because we’re recognized as revenue operations gurus for our work the past five years in sales and marketing automation, and because we integrate with all the important tools under the sun, we could do a GTM strategy session with them. You can offer this pre-sign for an hour for any Mid Market deal+ and post-sign for 30 minutes for any other smaller deal.

The session would be a deep dive on their techstack and recommendations for them to maximize success from what we’re seeing work in 2024. Specifically, we’ll look at how to orchestrate humans and the right tools together in harmony to maximize pipeline. Notably, it won’t necessarily include Warmly - we can talk about things like conferences, lead magnet ideas, CRM setup, sales rep quota setting and inbound optimization. Let them know we typically charge $1000/hr for this as advisors to a dozen startups for this strategy.

Pull in someone in sales leadership for the call (lean on your founder for big deals and for founders of small startups early in their journey). You can then make the point that we’ll try to offer more over the course of the year in consulting value than the cost of the software alone.

10. Business Case

With tight budgets, everyone needs to make a clear economic argument on how we make them more money over the status quo. So, make ROI business cases that are flexible and matched to your sales process needs depending on the prospect.

Select a business case that fits! However, it's important that if they have a specific problem they want to solve, give them the business case for the specific solution, not for the whole platform.

Part 4: Bringing Authority to Sales Pitches

11. Sales Leadership Over-the-top

Sometimes, it's a good idea to get leadership involved to help close deals or just speed things up.

Your first option is to ghost write an encouraging email from us to your prospect and we’ll send it off. Wording options could be:

  • "Hey, I am excited about this deal, X Rep told me a lot about you!"
  • "Hey, I’m CEO, I’m looking forward to our next call, X Rep tells me we’re meeting on Thursday - can I meet you then?"
  • "Hey, I heard you have concerns about X, can I give you my founder perspective on it in our next live call?"

It might even be preferable to add leadership to a late-stage call to encourage the prospect to show up. Consider using it as a carrot to get their decision makers in on a call as well.

12. Loop in a Decision Maker/Stakeholder

Whenever you need to loop in a decision maker, it’s a good strategy for you to do it - not the champion. Primarily because the champion is lazy and could take awhile to do it and not set you up well to meet with the DM.

Let’s say you had a great demo call with Stakeholder 1 and got permission to loop in Stakeholder 2 in a direct outreach (CC’ing the first stakeholder). Why this is a good situation: you save time from Stakeholder 1 having to do the follow up so you can get to second meeting faster.

But beware of common pitfalls. If your follow up email is not eye-catching or too lengthy, Stakeholder 2 may ignore it or take forever to reply. Additionally, Stakeholder 2 might be annoyed that Stakeholder 1 didn't ask them first.

Some crisp email suggestions:

  • We address Stakeholder 2 and CC Stakeholder 1, not the other way around (nor address them both). Otherwise Stakeholder 2 will skim the email and not reply (since they don'y think its for them).
  • The subject line should make it feel like a warm intro.
  • It should be super short and all about scheduling. If it's an intro, we don't need to spend 10 sentences convincing Stakeholder 2 to book with us.
  • Put almost everything in a PS to make the email short - ain't nobody got time to read long emails but everyone reads a PS.
  • Use Stakeholder 1's words as weapons to convince Stakeholder 2 to take a meeting. Stakeholder 1 has way more internal understanding than we do so their words matter more than ours. You can also share a snippet from the first meeting where the junior champion was really excited.

Part 5: The Final Dash to the Finish

13. Create Urgency with Carrot and Stick

It's a tried and tested B2B sales strategy, but carrot-and-stick sales pitches do work.

Carrot methods include:

  • We have an end of month special - X creative discount if you sign by end of month.
  • I’m one deal away from hitting my quota! It would be such a gift to me to be willing to sign this month?
  • We have 2 slots left this month for GTM Strategy Sessions with our CEO. They're totally free, custom, tailored 1:1s to maximize your success on tools and people efficiency. Do you want to take one and add it on after our next meeting?
  • Take a meeting to offer temporary increase on their lead limits.

Stick methods:

  • Shoot - our board meeting is coming up next week and my CEO told us that the board is going to make him raise prices by 10-20% since growth has been so consistent. I’m sorry, but I can only honor my original quote if you’d be able to commit to signing by X date.
  • Our sales VP is making me close/lost the deal and focus on higher priority deals, should I push back and ask him to hang in there another week?
  • Sounds like our founder is going to meet with your founder soon via their investor connection. He’s asked me to share an update on our deal progress to communicate over - what do you think I should say?

14. Sign the Deal on Conditions

Every objection is not a deal breaker, its actually just a potential condition. In a deal cycle, you need to surface as many objections as possible and don’t be afraid to ask and suggest objections to see what is real. You should never be surprised if the prospect turns you down and an objection came out of left field.

Once you get all the objections you can handle them in two ways.

  • Overcome it through assuaging them with collateral, discussion, testing - whatever.
  • Sign the deal on the condition that we overcome those objections. If we know we can overcome it then it's no problem to sign on it!

For example, in a deal where their primary remaining objection was Hubspot compatibility, we offered to move forward on the condition that Hubspot was to their liking.

In the contract, we said, “Customer may terminate this agreement and entitled to a refund within 2 months if they are not satisfied with the depth of the read/write functionality of the Hubspot Integration."

We need to be careful with vague contract terms like “They can opt out any time if they aren’t happy with Hubspot” to avoid issues. 

Good objections to be willing to sign on:

  • I’m worried implementation will take a long time.
  • I’m worried this integration won’t work the way I need it to.
  • My security team needs you to pass this special security questionnaire.
  • My manager is worried your business will go under in the next year and we’ll have wasted time with you.

We know we can crush all these things!

Bad objections to be willing to sign on:

  • I want to do a monthly contract.
  • I want 1000/leads/month.

The best way to illuminate objections (under which some can be included in the signing of the contract) is to ask for them and mirror back what you heard while asking for more objections.

  • “Tell me some reasons you are skeptical about signing?”
  • “Ok, I hear that you are worried implementation will take a long time. Are there any other reasons you are skeptical about signing?”
  • “Prospect, what I heard you say is that you’re ready to move forward and sign this contract today on the condition that we have an easy implementation, 1000/warm leads/month and you close your fundraise to be able to afford this next month. Is that right?”
  • “Ok, well, I can’t promise you 1000/warm leads/week since that's dependent on how much you use us and how much marketing automation you set up and your industry reply rates but hopefully X, Y, Z make you feel better. But how about I add in the contract that it’s only binding if the implementation is easy and you close your fundraise?"

15. Customer Referral

Prospects will feel comfortable if they know that others have gone in their footsteps. Think of their ICP and try to match as best you can. Namely their title (e.g. Deman Gen) and company’s GTM motion (e.g. PLG) and find a similar industry (e.g. DevTools).

Then, follow our referral process so as to not bombard our agreed-upon advisors and current customers to serve as referrals. Bonus points if you can find an example of social proof on the Wall of Love to share with the prospect.

Try to save this for really the last step - and only if they insist on it.

Part 6: Free Reign

16. Get Wacky!

Here's space for you to add in your own suggestions on unexpected/wacky/innovative B2B sales techniques. Feel free to try your own where you think it'll work - but the below often work, seriously!

  • Add a calendar invite on their calendar for 5 mins without their permission. Usually, they show up or you get a reply. Both are ideal outcomes.
  • Ask to join one of their internal team meetings for 5 mins to say hi. Explain that you’ll cover 1 min on Warmly then share 3 trends you’re seeing in GTM that will help give knowledge to their reps.
  • Make a ChatGPT rhyming poem about them or about the deal going cold and email it to them or post it on LinkedIn.
  • Use emojis to start your subject lines of emails to maximize visibility in their crowded inbox.
  • Take a selfie video when you’re on the move to show them you’re human and ask where they are at in their deal cycle.
  • Send a gift card that is specific to something that aligns with their interests.

Building a More Effective B2B Sales Cycle

Want to learn more about how Warmly trains our sales reps in B2B selling? Warmly founder Max Greenwald shares even more secrets on LinkedIn (Warmly's going 100% clear in 2024, if you didn't know already.)

All that's left to say is, if you want to crush your sales quotas in 2024 - maybe give Warmly a try?

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Announcing Warmly’s Inbound Chatbot Workflows

Announcing Warmly’s Inbound Chatbot Workflows

Time to read

Alan Zhao

At Warmly, we believe that enterprise-grade revenue orchestration doesn’t have to come with an enterprise price tag.

Our goal has always been to bring AI-powered revenue orchestration to the SMB market, and our latest feature release is helping do just that.

Introducing Warmly’s inbound chat workflows, the new Drift sales chatbot.

Following the recent acquisition of Drift by Salesloft — which is just one episode in an ongoing series of acquisitions and consolidation in this space — many small and medium-sized businesses are looking for a more affordable way to orchestrate conversational chat workflows.

The State of Conversational Chat 

Alright, a bit of background.

The revenue space (sales and marketing software tools) has been undergoing massive changes in recent months.

Some of these changes are technological (owing to the increased adoption of AI), but a lot of it is strategic and takes the form of mergers, acquisitions, and a general move away from standalone best-in-class tools to tech stack consolidation and all-in-one suites.

The acquisition of Drift by Salesloft is the perfect example of this.

Both tools, by themselves, are struggling to meet projected valuation and revenue outcomes. 

The acquisition speaks to a challenging market environment not only for software companies but also for their customers, who are looking for ways to cut down on costs, reduce the number of vendors they are working with, and consolidate their software stacks.

This might make sense at the enterprise level, but for SMBs, it opens up a huge rift that was already cracking when Drift got bought by Vista Equity back in 2021 and shifted its focus towards large companies abandoning the small business.

SMBs simply can’t afford enterprise-facing tech like a Salesloft-centric stack.

Small businesses were already looking to Drift alternatives, but for many, this is the final nail in the coffin.

That’s due to the concern that the acquisition represents a lack of future development and the ability to innovate (bigger companies move more slowly).

So, small and medium-sized companies with aggressive growth goals who need to stay competitive are looking for a more agile alternative to conversational chat.

Well, here it is…  

Warmly’s Inbound Chat Workflows 

Warmly’s latest solution, inbound chat workflows, is a direct alternative to Drift’s conversational marketing function.

The difference?

It’s actually affordable for SMBs.

Sure, Drift has a couple more features that focus on the enterprise use case, but for what small and medium-sized businesses need, we’re basically at feature parity.

Here’s how it works:

A sample workflow with Warmly’s new sales chatbot

On the front end, customers interact with a chatbot that pops up in the bottom corner of their screen.

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It’s completely customer-led, meaning they get a signal to engage, but it's up to them to initiate the conversation. 

Then, depending on how they engage with the chatbot, they move down a logic tree of potential answers. Think of it like a “choose your own story” book. The answers they choose as they engage with the chatbot determine what content they see.

For example, here’s what the initial option set looks like on our own site:

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What comes next depends entirely on which option the visitor clicks. For instance, choosing “Looking to learn more about Warmly” delivers this:

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On the back end, you create what those conversational journeys look like. 

Let me show you what I mean. Here’s what that same workflow looks like as you build it in Warmly.

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At each level, you can craft the exact text that the chatbot displays, the potential answers a prospect can choose, and the various branches/scenarios that can come thereafter.

Zooming out, you can see how the whole workflow looks:

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Every workflow you build should lead to a desired outcome, which will be relevant to the customer's needs as well as your business goals and processes. For instance, you might have the chatbot suggest that the customer speak with a sales rep.

The appropriate rep can then receive a notification via Slack, take over the chat, and even engage the prospect in a live video call right on the website using our warm chat feature.

In the workflow builder, you can choose which CRM owners to mention in Slack and even select a rule for whom notifications should go to if there are no CRM owners assigned.

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Personalized workflows for relevant customer conversations

Here’s where things get really interesting:

Not every prospect needs to be presented with the same chat workflow. 

Using Warmly’s website visitor deanonymization feature, you can identify who is visiting your website (at the company or individual level, depending on the prospect), integrate best-in-class firmographic and intent data, and then automatically activate a given workflow based on filters such as:

  • Demographic data (for example, the industry that the company is in)
  • Intent data (e.g., the number of people from that company who have visited your site)
  • CRM criteria (such as deal stage or account owners)
  • Traffic source (whether they came from paid ads, referral traffic, outbound email campaigns, etc.)
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But that’s not the only conversational chat solution.

Warmly’s Approach to Website Chat 

Our new conversational chatbot workflow tool is just one feature we’ve added to our expansion revenue orchestration solution.

For high-intent leads, though, we’ve actually got something even better:

Warm AI chat.

Our AI-powered chat solution gathers all of the intel you have on the prospect — thanks to integrations with third-party buying intent data from Bombora, best-in-class company and contact data from 6sense and Clearbit, as well as your CRM and sales engagement tools.

Then, it custom crafts messaging to convert website visitors into real sales conversations.

PS. Learn how the team at D2D Experts uses AI chat and sales emails that convert at 10x the rate of their human-written outreach.

The big win here is that prospects can interact with the chatbot in plain English, and it appears as if they’re speaking to a real person who not only understands what they’re after but responds in context.

It's a more proactive approach to website chat. That said, it's generally better reserved for identified site visitors who have demonstrated at least some level of intent.

Here’s how Max Greenwald, our CEO, recommends building rule-based automation to make proper use of both our warm AI and inbound chat features.

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With this broad framework for website visitor interaction, you can strike the right balance between proactive chat for high-intent prospects and reactive chat for low-intent visitors.

That last category is important, too.

You don’t want to be wasting resources engaging with people who are never going to be your customers (such as a non-ICP fit), so why bother funneling them through to a sales rep through an AI-driven or inbound chat workflow?

Warmly: The SMB’s Revenue Orchestration Platform 

The acquisition of Drift by Salesloft highlights one of the key problems with Drift originally:

It was too focused on the passive inbound chat use case.

Warmly’s introduction of sales chatbot workflows is an SMB-focused replacement for Drift, but rather than being a standalone tool; it sits within a wider architecture of AI and automation-powered revenue orchestration.

Here are just a few of the other features Warmly offers to help small and medium-sized businesses compete with enterprise-grade behemoths:

To sweeten the deal, you can get started for free right now without having to speak to a sales rep or go through a painful qualification process.

While our AI chat and inbound chat workflows are only available on our paid tier, you can start de-anonymizing your site visitors for free.

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The Sales Paradox: Why Quality Beats Quantity in Sales Prospecting

The Sales Paradox: Why Quality Beats Quantity in Sales Prospecting

Time to read

Keegan Otter

In the world of sales, the age-old question persists: “How many sales discovery calls are too many discovery calls?”

 When you’ve got KPIs to hit, that limit can seem very far away. And with the advent of sales prospecting automation tools, it’s easy to think that a full calendar means better chances at closing. 

There’s no doubt that adding automation tools to your sales tech stack can increase leads. In one study, 80% of marketers saw their leads increase when using marketing automation tools. 

But are more leads always better? 

Here, we come to the biggest paradox in sales: that quality always beats quantity when it comes to new leads. 

And when you’re targeting those juicy, high-ACV leads, you might want to put down the snazzy marketing automation tools and go old-school. 

The History of Outbound Prospecting

Sales prospecting has come a long way since the early days of large-scale campaigns. It was only in the 1950s that marketers realized that consumer behavior could significantly impact sales; thus, demographic segmenting was born. 

Since then, the sales process has become more aligned with marketing goals. Sellers learnt that inbound prospecting was as valuable as outbound, and could vastly increase the number of qualified leads. 

Throughout all of this, one thing was key: it’s quantity over quality. Hit as many people as you can (even if they don’t exactly match your ideal customer profile), and see what sticks. 

Cold outreach reigns supreme

Until the turn of the millennium, B2B lead generation was a case of outbound prospecting. Whether this was conducted via direct mail, cold calling, or email (the first email marketing campaign was conducted way back in 1978), selling was simply a case of finding your prospect’s phone number, reaching out, and persuading them to buy. 

Unfortunately, frozen-cold outreach doesn’t come with fantastic odds. The average cold-calling success rate is just 2%. Every salesperson intrinsically understands there’s a fine line between being persistent and becoming a nuisance.

And so, sales prospecting gets a bad rep. Why bother cold emailing hundreds of people when you could focus on marketing to bring in those qualified leads naturally? 

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Image Source 

It all goes digital 

Salesforce was founded in 1999. By then, it was clear that sales and marketing were going digital and that companies had to make a concerted effort to align their sales prospecting methods with the marketing team. 

Online advertising exploded. Email marketing took off. In 2005, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan coined the term ‘inbound marketing.’ 

In the age of rapidly increasing internet adoption, B2B companies realized that it wasn’t all about aggressive cold selling: it was equally valuable to educate those potential customers who weren't buying from you yet. 

The Rise of Sales Automation

Between the early 90s and the late 2010s, the B2B SaaS market flooded with sales and marketing automation tools. Now, you didn’t even have to write those emails to prospects—software could create an email sequence for you. 

In 2020, McKinsey reported that one-third of all sales tasks could be fully automated. It was no longer necessary for your AEs to be filling up their time with things like regular check-ins with prospects. In fact, 44% of sales reps are too busy to even attempt follow-up. 

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Image Source

The value of the marketing automation market is estimated to reach $13.71 billion by 2030. But where does this leave sales prospecting? Is it increasingly a case of leaving lead generation to the bots while sales professionals focus on strengthening relationships? 

Or do we need a more flexible approach?

Do More Leads Equal Quality Leads?

So, now we get to the main question: is the quantity of leads better than the quality of leads? We’ll be honest, at Warmly, we’ve had our fair share of experiences with quantity over quality. 

We once had 80 meetings, but most of the companies we talked to weren’t a good fit. There was no urgency or priority for them to solve the problem. You can imagine where that got us: it was like throwing a party and realizing that most of the guests were only there for the free food and didn't care about celebrating your cat’s birthday. 

Spending ages talking to people who aren’t serious is wasted time. Not only does a higher quantity of leads reduce the time you can spend on each lead (you’ve got KPIs to hit! Not time to burn!), but it also reduces the chance of sufficient personalization for each lead. 

Of course, this is where automation can be a help, not a hindrance—initiating conversations at the top and early middle of the sales funnel. However, according to HubSpot research, 75% of marketers believe that personalized experiences drive sales and repeat businesses. 

As much as chatbots and other AI marketing automation tools are helpful for this stage of sales prospecting, they fail the personalization test. So, while they can be handy for getting those little fish onto your hook initially, automation isn’t something you want to use on a whale. 

Nurturing Ideal Prospects, Not Every Prospect

Having 1,000+ qualified leads sounds like a great prospect until you realize you don’t have the manpower to reach out to every single person, let alone follow up. 

We knew Warmly was guilty of prioritizing sales KPIs over nurturing specific prospects at times. So, we spoke to Brian Gerrard, sales director at Outreach, about his take on the quality vs. quantity debate. 

His response? “Disqualify fast.” 

There’s more to it than that, of course. His approach to outbound sales is a multi-step process of identifying ideal prospects. 

  1. Identify the whale companies. Discard any others. 
  2. Filter those prospects by those that fit your ICP.
  3. Research. 
  4. Engage with low-level accounts at that company. 
  5. Engage, engage, engage. Do research. Learn what they need. 
  6. Then, target the executive decision-makers. Tell them how your solution fits their problem.
  7. Follow up. 

Unfortunately, given the level of individual research required and the flexibility needed to engage effectively, this kind of sales prospecting isn’t something that you want to entirely rely on automation for. 

So, your sales teams need to be more proactive. And to do that, they need the right data.

Harnessing the Power of Intent in Sales

This is where intent comes into play. Intent allows you to generate smarter leads, not more leads. 

It’s like having a secret weapon that lets you know who’s genuinely interested in your cat's birthday and who’s just there for the free food (you want the people who care—not the gatecrashers.) 

Intent data can be split into explicit and implicit. Explicit signals could be something like search queries, while implicit signals demonstrate intent less obviously, like a user spending time on your pricing page. 

Using revenue orchestration tools (like Warmly,) gives you the power to classify leads based on how ready and willing they are to buy at that moment. 

This adds an additional dimension to your sales prospecting, where you can filter for your ICP and by how likely they are to buy, resulting in higher-quality leads. Then, refocus your AE’s efforts onto these qualifying leads.

Effective Sales Prospecting: Back to Manual

We know that there’s a place for automation in the sales pipeline, but when it comes to whale accounts that have shown intent, there’s no substitute for manual personalization. 

In fact, when your AEs and SDRs aren’t tied to automation KPIs, you’ll give them much more freedom to innovate their sales strategy. In the end, sales is about instinct, not prescriptive tasks. 

But what’s the secret behind implementing an efficient manual sales strategy? 

Manual = more?

Brian Gerrard doesn’t disguise the fact that manual is his preferred way of selling. “Call me old,” he told us. 

But it’s not just about a preference for legitimate interactions—there’s proof that manual prospecting works. 

In one test, a personalized communication sales team was pitted against a 100% automated team. Naturally, the automated team contacted far more prospects, but that’s not the end of the story. 

In fact, the team that conducted personalized sales outreach booked 60% more meetings than the automated team. Bespoke communication also resulted in a higher percentage of booked meetings.

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Image Source: Outreach

The takeaway? Manual might take longer, but as long as you’re targeting the right prospects, the ROI is higher. 

Take an example from Warmly. One of our AEs got a prospect’s attention on the 8th email of a 12-step sequence. But what if those eight emails were actually three manually-written emails? Would it have taken so long to get their attention?

Probably not.

“Warm prospecting never ends.”

Ultimately, the mantra is, ‘Warm prospecting never ends.’ With manual sales prospecting, you have to be in nurture mode for every lead, all the time. 

The process starts with research, and that’s accomplished before you even get to stage one of the eight-stage refinement process outlined above. After that, you’re continually nurturing your prospect with every touchpoint. 

Although ringing someone up or pinging them a DM on LinkedIn might sound like cold outreach, as long as you’ve done intent research beforehand, that customer is already warm—even if they’ve never spoken to you before. 

Consequently, you can categorize every prospect as one of two things: either active or an opportunity. 

An active lead is one where you’ve agreed on the next step with them. An opportunity lead, meanwhile, may not be ready to buy just yet, but you want to keep them within the sales cycle. 

With opportunity leads, the hardest part isn’t converting them—they’ll do that in your own time, as your intent will tell you. The hardest part is making each and every interaction with them unique. 

Step-by-Step Manual Sales Prospecting

Sure, manual prospecting takes time. But there’s no reason why your manual sales prospecting techniques can’t be as streamlined as your automation tools. 

To do that, you need to identify the most effective sales prospecting tools and get more confident with turning off that auto-sequencing. 

The Before Stage

Research, research, research 

Everything starts with your target accounts—but identifying those can be one of the biggest challenges of sales and marketing today. 

To evaluate accounts, refer to your ideal customer profile, competitor research, and those current customers with 100% net revenue retention (which we call retainable addressable market.) 

Then, cross-reference these segments with potential leads to find those companies, decision-makers, and organizations that are really the best fit. 

Create an account plan

If you’re letting an automated tool manage your outreach, then it might never have come to mind to create an account plan. However, your most valuable accounts deserve it. 

Your plan doesn’t have to be long. Pick out the most vital information that you and your sales team need to know to prove that your solution is best. PR releases, LinkedIn posts, and recent webinars are some of the best places to find this information. 

Match every piece of info you find with your target’s business objectives. If you’ve done your research right, you can usually identify one or two areas they’re evidently struggling with.

Find alignment in your sales deck

Now it’s time to bring all that information together in a powerful sales deck. 

Naturally, your value proposition is crucial to your deck. But if you can’t explain where your solution fits into your prospect’s existing workflow, you may as well give up now.

As part of your sales deck, particularly for mid-funnel prospects, build a flow chart that explicitly outlines how you'll make their work easier. 

Sometimes, you might not be able to build this kind of flow chart right away with the information that you have. Maybe it takes 1-2 calls with lower-end accounts to gather the information. But when you do have it, it makes your pitch significantly stronger. 

Initiating Outreach with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

One of the most valuable tools for B2B salespeople is undoubtedly LinkedIn Sales Navigator. According to Brian Gerrard, this is the missing piece for many sales professionals.

LinkedIn reports that sellers using Sales Navigator create 15% more sales pipeline and 42% larger deal sizes. 

It’s also a great tool when implementing manual sales processes into your prospecting. 

Building account lists

Your first step with Sales Navigator is building the right account lists. To do this, identify a target company in Sales Navigator and pull out which functions you want to target at that company.

Ideally, you want to target decision-makers at the company in question, though perhaps you’ve identified managers as relevant B2B buyers for your market. 

Once you’ve got a list of target accounts, you can create a custom list.

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Image Source: Brian Gerrard 

Effective nurturing 

If you’ve done your research right—into buyer intent signals, product fit, and the correct target accounts—then it should be enough to get you in the door. This is exactly what we mean by ‘warm prospecting never ends’: with enough research, your cold prospect becomes a warm lead in the middle of the sales process. 

And now that you’ve got your Sales Navigator list, it’s time to start the outreach.

Identifying outreach opportunities 

There are 875 million members on LinkedIn, but just 16% of US members are daily active users (DAU). To streamline your outreach, you want to target just those accounts in your customer leads list that have recently posted on LinkedIn. 

Within Sales Navigator, you’ll now have the option to open a recently posted update by any of your leads and interact with it. Or, go straight for a message. 

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Image Source: Brian Gerrard

To manage this manual outreach, create custom tasks for your SDRs or AEs in your CRM based on each prospect. The aim of this is to make each interaction with the lead personalized according to their recent updates—not an auto-sequence that might just be personalized to a set of accounts at each organization. 

Long-term prospecting

When you’re aiming for high quality over high quantity, you’re naturally going to spend more time with each prospect. This allows you to really craft each touchpoint to be entirely personalized. 

But say you know you need to follow up with a lead. How do you know which channel to use? Ultimately, in a personalized sales prospecting process, you’re going to have to tailor every single interaction based on what you know about that prospect and your relationship with them. 

So, if someone hasn’t reached out in a while, don’t waste time with another unanswered email—go straight for a phone call. 

If they’ve been pretty responsive in the past, maybe you go for another LinkedIn DM.

Or—remember that one-page flow chart we made? Now could be the time to reach out over email and remind your prospect that you exist and you’re here to solve their problem. 

As Brian Gerrard notes, if that prospect is an MQL—they have the budget, and they have the intent—then hit them as much as you can, respectfully. 

And when you hit them, do it with personalization. A multi-step email sequence generator isn’t clever enough (yet) to gather information during the sequence—for example, if your target company has started a new project. Only you can reach out with a “Hope it’s going well with [X]!” 

High-Quality Leads + Effective Manual Outreach = Long-Term Success

In this era of changing B2B buyer behavior and the influx in social selling, you can’t expect a fully-automated sales prospecting plan to get results. Today, buyers want more independence in the decision-making process. Bluntly, they’re fed up with cold calls.

At the same time, there is a place for automation in your sales process. When you want to A/B test at the top of the funnel, hitting 100 people rather than 10 people in the same amount of time is preferable. 

But when it comes to those bigger accounts—the ones you really want to be closing deals with—personalized interactions can easily make a difference. 

Combine high-quality visitor and intent data with a targeted and personalized sales strategy, and you’ve got yourself a strategy that will optimize your entire sales prospecting process.

How Warmly Can Help You Identify The Right Sales Prospects

While quantity has its place in sales, it’s the quality that truly matters. So, a successful sales prospecting process depends on finding the right balance—knowing when to focus on quantity and when to shift the focus to quality.

Unfortunately, high-quality leads are only as good as the data you’re collecting. If you can’t get accurate data, the chance of converting leads is slim. 

Using a signal-based revenue orchestration platform like Warmly can help consolidate your sales process. Find the right accounts (with intent) more quickly, and get notifications when a human AE needs to be looped into the sales process for personalization.

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Demand Creation vs. Demand Capture: What’s The Difference

Demand Creation vs. Demand Capture: What’s The Difference

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Figuring out what kind of marketing motion you’re going to invest in can be tricky.

There are a ton of different terms, strategies, and approaches, many of which share overlapping boundaries.

Some even sound the same. Demand generation, demand creation, and demand capture all sound pretty similar, right?

While they do share a lot in common — they are intimately connected — they aren’t synonyms.

In this article, we’re going to shed light on the differences. We’ll explain exactly how demand creation differs from demand capture and what the two have to do with the overarching idea of demand gen.

Demand Creation vs. Demand Capture: A quick overview 

Demand creation and demand capture are the two components of demand generation, a marketing approach that focuses on educating out-of-market buyers and capturing in-market buyers.

Demand Creation is the first part of the puzzle.

It focuses on raising awareness for a given problem and creating demand for a solution to that problem.

Demand Capture is the second half.

It focuses on capitalizing on the 5% or so of your target market who have demonstrated a need and interest in your product category and converting them into customers.

As such, the question of “demand creation vs. demand capture” is kind of a moot point.

You can’t capture demand if it isn’t first created, and creating demand without a mechanism for turning it into revenue is pretty pointless.

What is Demand Creation? 

Demand creation is a marketing strategy that seeks to connect with and educate out-of-market buyers.

Here’s the idea:

95% of your total addressable market isn’t ready to buy. Many of them not only don’t know about your product, they probably aren’t even aware of the problems that your product solves.

That’s the big problem that demand creation seeks to solve.

It's about getting in front of potential buyers and raising awareness about the problem, how serious it is, and the consequences they’re facing as a result.

That conversion naturally leads to one about solutions:

Okay, so here’s this problem. Here’s how you solve it.

This means that the second part of demand creation is about getting your target audience passionate enough about solving the problem (that you’ve educated them about) to build demand for a solution.

That’s where demand creation ends, and demand capture takes over.

What value does Demand Creation provide? 

The big win that comes from demand creation activities is that you are literally creating your own market.

Rather than waiting for the 95% of your market to (maybe) identify the problem on their own and then hopefully hear about your solution, you’re bringing both to them.

And since you’re the one helping them learn about the problem and the available solutions, you’re already top of mind once that demand is built and ready to be captured.

Great demand creation efforts also help paint your organization as a trusted brand and industry expert.

For example, in creating content related to the challenge in question, you may also provide some helpful advice and even resources for solving it, such as a free template.

Of course, your actual product does a much better job of solving the issue, which is something that your demand capture efforts will demonstrate.

How do you Create Demand? 

For most companies, content creation and distribution make up the bulk of demand creation strategies.

This can include content types as diverse as SEO-focused blog posts, webinars, ebooks, guides, podcasts, and social media marketing campaigns.

What matters is the context of the content.

You’re not pushing out a sales pitch and explaining why your tool is the best in its category (I mean, you are, but you do that outside of your demand creation activities).

Instead, you’re helping prospective customers understand a given issue they didn’t realize they were facing.

This post on LinkedIn from our founder Max Greenwald, is the perfect example of a purely educational piece of demand creation content:

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What is Demand Capture? 

The demand capture process is all about attracting people in the 5% of the market that are ready to buy and converting them into sales prospects.

This can be considered an alternative to the traditional lead generation approach, though there is a huge amount of similarity here, and the two could easily be considered synonyms.

Demand capture is ambivalent to who created the demand.

Yes, your demand creation campaigns ideally flow into demand capture tactics, as the portion of the market that you’ve educated moves down the marketing funnel and gets closer to buying.

But you’re not exactly going to say no to an opportunity who learned about the problem and solution at hand from a competitor, are you?

In fact, some demand capture campaigns even go as far as poaching the demand that competitors have created, such as “X vs Y” comparison-type blog posts.

What value does Demand Capture provide? 

Demand capture isn’t really a “should we or shouldn’t we” situation.

If you’re not capturing demand, you’re not capitalizing on the interest and trust you’ve built through demand gen activities, and you’re not bringing in fresh warm leads to your sales team.

But beyond that simple answer, focusing on demand creation as a practice (vs. a traditional lead generation approach or just patiently and passively waiting for some inbound leads to arrive) is beneficial because:

  • It allows you to specifically target audience segments 
  • You’re capitalizing on the brand affinity and recognition you specifically and purposefully built with demand creation efforts
  • It’s highly measurable, which means you can continuously optimize your campaigns 

How do you Capture Demand?

Demand capture is all about attracting potential customers and bringing them into a marketing and sales funnel.

There are plenty of ways to do this.

Lead generation content like ebooks and guides that prospects have to exchange an email for are common methods.

Often, however, these aren’t particularly intent-focused. You don’t necessarily know, for example, how close to buying someone who signed up for your webinar is.

There are a few other options, however.

One such method is to use conversational chatbot tools, like Warmly’s AI-powered warm chat feature.


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Using Warmly, you can deanonymize website visitors, pull in firmographic and intent data from best-in-class providers, and have our AI chat engage with website visitors you’ve attracted using educational content or email marketing campaigns.

Some other channels and tactics for capturing demand include:

  • Free trials or freemium product tiers
  • Warm referrals from your partner network
  • Customer referral programs
  • Paid search (PPC)
  • Social media and display advertising 
  • Review sites like Capterra and G2

Demand creation and Demand Capture: How they work together 

Now that we’ve established that it isn’t really a question of demand creation or demand capture but rather that the two are both important components of demand generation, the question remains:

How do the two work together?

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Demand Creation and Demand Capture Tools

Here’s a brief overview of what that process might look like:

  • Top-of-funnel marketing efforts, such as blog posts and webinars, educate not-in-market customers about the perils and consequences of a specific problem they’re facing.
  • As buyers become problem-aware (they now know about the problem at hand and what it means to them), they start thinking about solutions.
  • Middle-of-funnel marketing efforts, such as retargeting ads and email marketing campaigns, guide customers through the process of weeding out potential solutions.
  • As solution-aware customers (they know what kind of solution could solve their problem) work through this journey, they learn more about your product and become product-aware.
  • Demand creation is complete. You’ve educated the person about the problem and raised demand for a solution. Now, demand capture can take over.
  • Bottom-of-funnel marketing efforts (those aimed at attracting and converting purchase-ready buyers) help potential customers understand why your product is the best fit for their needs. 
  • A demand capture device closes the deal, and the sales process proper can begin.

That demand capture device might be a free trial activation, a personalized demo sign-up, or a customer interaction with an AI-led chat tool that engages the buyer, pre-qualifies them, integrates buying intent data, and ultimately ropes in a sales rep to close the deal via a live video call.

That’s exactly what Warmly, our signal-based revenue orchestration platform, is designed to do, by the way.

Getting started with demand generation

So, where to from here?

A successful demand generation campaign rests on a solid foundation of both software tools and processes.

Let’s start with the prior:

Check out our guide: Our Top 13 Demand Generation Tools For 2024.

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How to Nail Your Next Lead Generation Campaign

How to Nail Your Next Lead Generation Campaign

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Sales teams run on leads.

But just like a performance vehicle, a high-performing sales team needs quality gas (leads) to do their best.

This means that as you set up to run your next lead generation campaign, the focus shouldn’t be on the quantity of leads as much as the quality of leads.

Quality, in the context of sales, being a proxy for how well they match your ICP (ideal company profile).

In this article, we’re going to guide you through the process of generating qualified warm leads that allow your sales team to perform at their optimum.

We’ll discuss how to best set yourself up for success in a lead gen campaign before diving into six powerful tactics for generating better leads. Finally, we’ll sign off with a discussion on how to get the most out of your leads once you’ve got them in your CRM.

What is a Lead Generation Campaign? 

A lead generation campaign is a marketing endeavor designed with the express goal of generating leads.

A lead in this context is any person who has expressed interest in your company, product, or brand and has handed over their context details (generally an email address but sometimes a phone number) in exchange for value such as:

  • An ebook
  • A free trial
  • A webinar
  • A free interactive tool

Is Lead Generation a Variable Strategy?

Lead generation gets a lot of bad press in marketing circles.

That’s because lead gen campaigns are often measured exclusively on the number of leads they generate. More leads equals a more successful lead generation campaign.

This sets up some bad incentives, mainly that marketing ends up being too focused on pushing more leads through to sales, regardless of how much of a fit they are for the product in question or the degree of purchase intent shown.

Take, for example, this ebook about lead gen from HubSpot.

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If I download this guide as part of my research for writing this blog post, I could be considered a lead.

But in reality, HubSpot knows nothing about my potential fit for their product, and I haven’t shown an iota of purchase intent.

For this reason, lead gen is often thought of as an example of bad marketing focused on vanity metrics.

And it can be. But it doesn’t have to be.

If, instead, you:

  1. Set out clear expectations as to what defines a qualified lead and when they’re fit for sales interactions
  2. Focus on building lead generation devices that actually demonstrate purchase intent
  3. Use lead generation as a device for capturing demand built as part of a demand generation campaign

Then lead gen can actually be a super viable strategy for fueling sales teams with high-quality, high-intent leads that they truly have a chance of closing.

To achieve that, you’ve got to do a bit of pre-work.

Let me explain.

How to Get Set up For a Lead Generation Campaign 

Before you start running ads, producing a content plan, or marketing a free trial in order to attract more leads, there are a couple of things you’ll want to have nailed down.

Taking your time to clarify expectations, build an efficient software stack, and align sales and marketing on what a lead even is, will help ensure you see a solid ROI.

Make sure you’re clear on your audience 

First step is to get super clear on who it is you are targeting.

Frameworks like ICP and customer personas are a good move here, but you need to do more than just create static documents.


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Work to create alignment between all GTM (go to market) teams on who your target audience really is.

Then, only prospects that truly fit your key ICP criteria can go through to sales as a “lead.”

Determine how you’re going to categorize leads 

Not all leads are equal, even if they fit your targeting criteria.

Some leads will be in the early stages of the customer journey. Others will be poised to buy. Some will barely scrape past the minimum company size outlined in your ICP, while others will far exceed it.

To distinguish between different lead types — allowing your sales team to prioritize outreach and your tech stack to accurately route leads to the right sales rep — you’ll need to set up some lead categorization guidelines.

Cold/warm/hot is a reasonable framework where you can set up lead scoring rules based on engagement criteria to determine how hot a lead is.

Others use the “qualification” framework to categorize leads:

  • IQL (information qualified lead): The lead is just trying to find an answer to a question.
  • MQL (marketing qualified lead): These are warm leads that are more familiar with your brand and product.
  • PQL (product qualified lead): You’ve established that the prospective customer is a good fit for your product and perhaps vice versa,
  • SQL (sales qualified lead): The lead has expressed an active interest in your product or service and is fit for a salesperson interaction.

By the way, we’ll cover lead routing and scoring a bit later on in our discussion on what to do post-lead gen.

Decide on your marketing channels 

Next step is to decide on the marketing channels you’re going to rely upon to get in front of new eyeballs, drum up interest, and ultimately convert people into leads.

Here are your main options:

  • Social media platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, etc.)
  • Email
  • SMS
  • SEO content (your blog and other search-optimized website pages)
  • Content marketing efforts (webinars, ebooks, guides, podcasts, etc.)
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Influencers
  • UGC (user-generated content), reviews, and referrals 

Pretty much all of these are going to be used to drive traffic back to your website, where you’ll use a dedicated landing page and some form of lead capture device — a downloadable ebook, entrance to a webinar, a free trial, etc. — to convert that visitor into a lead.

As such, your website and the landing pages you host within it aren’t really channels per se. They’re kind of a non-negotiable as part of your lead gen campaign.

Get your tech stack set up 

Finally, you’ll want to make sure you’re set up on the tech level.

To a certain degree, you won’t be able to nail this all in one go. 

You’ll learn as your lead gen campaign progresses about what specific features and functions you need, and you will be constantly updating and reintegrating your SaaS stack.

However, a good starting point would be to have something in each of these categories ticked off:

  • A CRM to act as the hub for your lead gen campaign and to store customer contact details
  • Advertising solutions to drive traffic to your site
  • A landing page builder to design campaign-specific landing pages on our site 
  • Lead capture tools like forms
  • A chatbot tool to engage visitors on your site and convert them into sales leads
  • Webinar hosting solutions 
  • A lead routing solution to ensure the right prospects reach the right sales reps in a timely manner
  • Email and maybe SMS marketing software 
  • A meeting scheduler tool so prospects can book time on a sales rep’s calendar 

6 Powerful Lead Generation Tactics 

Okay, now we get to the good stuff:

How to actually bring in all those hot prospects.

A quick note first. This is not the be-all and end-all list of lead gen tactics. There are dozens of options available to you, and any one of them might work well for you.

What these are, however, are some of the most commonly used and highly effective strategies for pulling in warm leads.

1. Build a media brand 

Content is very often the backbone of lead generation campaigns.

Typically, this takes the form of gated content like ebooks, reports containing original research, or webinars — all of which require potential customers to fork over their email addresses in order to access. 

In our opinion, you’re much better off thinking of content as something your company produces as a media brand rather than a lead generation device per se.

Let’s take a look at HockeyStack, a GTM analytics tool, as an example.

They’ve gone as far as creating an entirely different brand, naming their media empire The Flow.

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The Flow is kind of like a B2B Netflix. 

One of many series available on The Flow is “Can You Dashboard It?” where their GTM team member Nate Branscome shows how real marketers use the product to track key metrics.

And the lead gen?

To access the content available on The Flow, you’ve got to subscribe, using, of course, an email address.

2. Tap into your partner network 

One of the best ways to generate leads is to get warm referrals from brands you’re working closely with.

These brands should be in your general vertical but not direct competitors.

For us, those are companies like Salesflow, Sendspark, and Letterdrop. They’re all broadly in the GTM space, but aren’t an overlapping tool competitor for the same share of wallet.

We collaborate with these brands mainly on content, like this webinar with Bethany Stachenfeld of Sendspark.

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That’s a great way to expand the reach of your demand generation content, but we can get a little more direct when it comes to chasing leads.

One of my favorite tools for tapping into the power of a partner network is Reveal.

Reveal syncs partner data into your CRM, automatically mapping over account details and helping you identify new opportunities.

It can tell you, for example, the gaps between the accounts in your CRM and the active accounts a partner has. 

We could identify, for instance, an account that Sendspark recently closed but that we don’t have in our sales pipeline. 

If we feel that they’re a fit for Warmly’s ICP, we could reach out to the account manager and ask for a warm referral (which will be a much more effective way into a conversation than a cold email).

3. Ask for referrals from existing customers 

Speaking of referrals, asking for an introduction to potential customers from existing users is a great one-two combo.

Not only does it deliver quality leads that already trust your brand (because they’ve been referred by someone they know and trust to give good recommendations), but it also provides an opportunity to interact with current paying customers.

A good way to incentivize this behavior is with a simple referral offer like a discount on their next invoice or even a direct payment.

Woodpecker, for example, pays you 20% of the recurring revenue on closed deals as part of their referral program.

4. Go freemium or offer a free trial 

Lead generation is all about offering something for free in exchange for contact details.

Why stop at content, though? 

What better way to capture interest (and customer data) than by actually giving prospects a taste of your tool?

There are two ways to go about this.

A free trial is a common approach, where the user gets full access to your platform for a set length of time (14 days seems to be the norm), after which they need to whip out their credit card. 

This is generally the point when a sales rep reaches out to try and close a deal.

A better alternative here, though, is to:

  1. Give them at least 30 days (more time in the platform means they’re more likely to embed it in their workflows and be compelled to continue paying).
  2. Have sales (or a customer success agent) engage early on, helping them to get the most out of the tool from the outset and encouraging adoption.

Freemium is an alternative structure where you offer a simplified version of your product entirely free of charge.

It needs to actually be usable, however. Otherwise, it's just a free trial under a different.

At Warmly, we have a free option available, and many of our customers get value out of it every day.

On our pricing page, prospects can see exactly what the difference is between the free and paid plans in terms of seat, lead enrichment, and feature limitations. 

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Both are viable options for generating leads. Generally speaking, though, free trials are better as part of a startup sales motion, as earlier-stage companies haven’t yet validated their ability to convert free users to paid plans.

5. Create an interactive tool 

An alternative to the freemium or free trial models is to break out a simple feature into a free interactive tool.

Take SEO research tools Ahrefs.

They offer a selection of free tools, such as a keyword generator or a broken link checker.

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These tools give potential customers a taste of what Ahrefs can offer. Of course, it's just an appetizer (though it's still usable). The mains are available only in the paid plan, and Ahrefs smoothly directs buyers over to the pricing menu.

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6. Drive engagement with an AI chatbot 

One of our favorite ways to turn traffic into leads is by engaging website visitors with an AI chatbot.

This works best when you’ve got a visitor identification software platform set up on your website. 

This way, you can deanonymize the visitor, sync third-party buying intent and customer data, and have your AI chat tool craft personalized messages that go beyond “What brought you here today?’

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Warmly takes care of all of the above, but a unique feature is the ability to engage customers in an instant live video call.

Here’s how it works:

Once our AI chatbot identifies a level of purchase intent that requires a sales rep interaction, a Slack notification is sent to the account owner or sales team.

Then, sales can take over the chat, offer a live video call, and even close the deal right there.

That’s how brands like Pump use Warmly to drive revenue fast.

Get the case study: How Pump $20,000 closed in the first week using Warmly.

What’s next? Post-lead gen steps 

So, you’ve successfully generated some high-quality leads.

Where to from here?

Lead Scoring 

The first step here is to score and categorize your leads based on the categories you created back in the prep stage.

In short, you award points to leads based on activities they complete. A form fill for an ebook might be worth 5 points, a webinar attendance might be worth 12, and so on.

Then, you determine the thresholds they need to pass in order to reach certain categories. For example, you might determine that a lead that hits 80 points tips over into the SQL category or is categorized as a warm lead.

You can also set override functions here to consider high-intent actions. For example, if a prospect reviews the pricing page more than three times, they might get upgraded to an SQL regardless of how many points they have.

Inbound marketing tools like Outfunnel are helpful here for automating lead scoring.

Routing 

Next comes routing.

This is essentially the process of determining the appropriate sales rep to send a lead to based on factors such as prospect industry, rep availability, or territory distribution, and then mapping those leads over to an account in your CRM and routing them to the right salesperson.

Chili Piper is a solid tool here, and Warmly also has automated qualification and routing workflows built in.

Use lead routing to send urgent, hot leads right through to sales reps, as well as to route scored and categorized leads to an appropriate inbound SDR.

Sales Process Orchestration 

Once your leads are scored and routed, its time for your sales process to kick off.

What these steps actually look like depends on your exact sales motion.

You might go straight to a phone call, put a prospect into an email nurturing campaign, or run an omnichannel playbook with personalized and targeted ads, LinkedIn outreach, and dynamic video email.

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Your specific tactics and channels will depend on what your data says works best, but there is one piece of general advice that we can give here:

Automate.

Use modern sales orchestration tools to automate as much of your sales motion as reasonable while using AI to maintain a degree of personalization.

This approach will help you nail speed to lead — the early bird really does get the worm in the sales game — while reducing your total overhead by reducing the number of human reps you’ll need.

Consider this workflow in Warmly:

  1. A prospect lands on your website after discovering the insightful and educational content you’ve been publishing.
  2. The person is anonymized, matched to an account in your CRM, and enriched with best-in-class contact, behavioral, and intent data.
  3. An AI chatbot delivers personalized messaging, engages the visitor, and captures more intent information.
  4. A synchronized outreach campaign is triggered across LinkedIn and email, synced to your sales tech stack.
  5. The outreach campaign drives the visitor back to your pricing page, and the prospect signs up for a free trial.
  6. The prospect is categorized as a high-intent lead and routed to the right sales rep, who receives a notification via Slack to engage. 
  7. The rep schedules a customized demo and consultation call with the customer to help them get the most out of their free trial.
  8. At the end of the trial period, the rep leverages user behavioral data to connect with the prospects’ buying needs and motivations and closes a paid deal.

Seven of the eight steps listed above happen automatically, without the need for manual sales team intervention, thanks to Warmly’s deeply integrated architecture and automated sales orchestration.

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Making the most of your lead generation campaign with Warmly

Warmly, our signal-based revenue orchestration platform, is the perfect partner for your next lead gen campaign.

You can capture leads with our automated meeting booker, enrich account information with best-in-class data sources, and run AI-powered outreach sequences across a variety of channels.

It’s how companies like Namecoach turn traffic into revenue.

Get the case study: Discover how Namecoach booked 26 meetings in 6 months using Warmly.

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