Make no mistake—the decline in outbound response rates in 2023 has dealt a heavy blow, forcing sales organizations of every stripe to make difficult pivots.
Battling the headwinds of shifting customer preferences and intense scrutiny of B2B investments, sales teams have responded by honing their ideal customer profiles and buying committee personas with surgical precision to the new market realities.
From there, organizations are taking two approaches:
1) Leverage AI and automation to scale inside sales activities and offset lower engagement rates. In most cases, it comes in the form of sellers using AI assistants or copilots to help them. In 2023, some providers pushed the envelope by building solutions to automate the entire sales process —from research to outreach and warm-up. These take different forms under names like AI S/BDRs, digital sales, conversational email, and more. Examples include AiSDR and Sailes for outbound prospecting and Conversica or Saleswhale (now 6sense) for inbound lead engagement.
2) Use buying signals and intent data to identify the best prospects to go after right now. AI is enabling new approaches to combine intent data (content consumed or ads served/clicked) with a broader set of signals such as employees switching companies, new purchases, job descriptions, or website visits. It is paving the way for a new breed of platforms that aggregate these signals, use AI to make sense of them, and score the best accounts to go after. Some vendors even add demographic, firmographic, and technographic data either from sales intelligence providers or by scouting the internet. Examples include Common Room, Lead Onion, or Madkudu.
I am thinking of adding these two categories to my SalesTech landscape.
So, I’m eager to learn what approaches and enabling technologies you see gaining adoption despite the outbound challenge.