How to Personalize Your Sales Outreach Using Data

Personalization: It’s on everyone’s mind. How to provide that hyper-personalized experience to show your customers that you know, and can provide them, what they need. While there is a lot of talk as to how to deliver personalized messages effectively and efficiently, there’s a big first step: How do you even figure out what they need and want in the first place? And how can you accelerate the sales cycle by knowing before they do? Let’s take a look at some customer insights that can help you increase your conversions:

Accelerate Sales Using Personalization

1) Identify Where Your Customers are in the Sales Cycle

Throughout the sales cycle, you continuously modify your contact strategy: you serve different content, change your messaging, shift your focus, and even change how often you reach out. With the right analytics you can identify where your customers are without having a 1:1 conversation. The first factor you should consider is content digestion. Analyzing clicks, time on page, and scroll depth can give you insights as to the content they’re interested in…

  • High-level (top of the funnel) vs. more detailed (bottom of the funnel)
  • Brand-focused (top of the funnel) vs. product-focused (bottom of the funnel)
  • Short/easy-to-digest (top of the funnel) vs. long (bottom of the funnel)

Tag your content by these parameters to make it easy to discover on a user-level what each prospect is digesting to identify patterns without extra grunt work.

2) Discover Their Interests

In marketing and sales we spend a lot of time trying to determine what our customers are interested in so we can tailor our value proposition, messaging, and product offerings. Until you have that first sales conversation to learn your customers’ challenges, try some of these tactics:

  • Ask, but creatively. Publish a quick and fun quiz that either directly asks your prospects what they’re are looking for, or infers it from related questions. Make sure there’s a “fun” spin so it’s enticing and lives on its own as a feature.
  • Utilize your email opt-in. Add an opt-in layer where you ask users which topics they would like to receive information on.
  • Look at topic digestion. While users may say they’re interested in one thing, their activity may say another. Look at which topics they view online – particularly time spent on page – and make sure that information reaches their CRM profile.
  • Sell Socially. You can find out a lot of information just by plugging into your prospects’ social networks. The most progressive sales teams are leveraging technologies to pull data from LinkedIn into their CRM to enable customization.

3) Look at What They Already Purchased

For existing customers, transactional data can be a gold mine of insightful information. You can look at what they’ve purchased before and try to repeat it, but there’s also an opportunity to sell them something new:

  • Time of Purchase. How long ago was the last purchase and what is the normal lifecycle for the product? If they are repeat purchasers, is there a pattern? Use that timing to drive when you reach out and use that outreach to upsell or cross-sell. Ensure you tailor messaging at other times to other complimentary products.
  • Purchase Authority. Is your prospect the key decision maker, or are there other who need to weigh in? Identify their role in the past purchase and the role of the others involved so you know who to talk to and when.
  • Product Specs. Products change and advance, enabling the opportunity for upgrades. Keep a clear view of the new products/solutions in market and their upgrades so you can continuously visit your CRM to identify new sales opportunities.

Personalize Your Outreach

Now that you have some additional customer information, what can you do with it?

  • Use the information in your sales conversations – focus on particular topics you know they’re interested in
  • Insert information regarding the content piece they viewed most within your outreach
  • Use appropriate sales enablement materials based on where they are in the buyer’s journey
  • Time your communications based on their past purchase behavior and include complimentary products as appropriate
  • …and more!