EMPOWERED CUSTOMERS, ENGAGED SELLERS:
4 STRATEGIES FOR SMARTER SALES
August, 2014
 Peter Ostrow, VP and Research Group Director;
Customer Management, Sales Effectiveness
Report Highlights
p3
Best-in-Class
companies are
nearly 4-times more
likely to pursue
customer data
integration
initiatives.
p7
Customer retention
is 14% higher among
companies applying
big data analytics to
sales deal velocity.
p10
100% of the Best-inClass provide Sales
with remote social
media access.
Laggards? 0%.
Few market watchers today will deny that the revolution in
customer empowerment is in full swing and is rapidly spreading
from consumer to business environments. In an age when a
single tweet can bring down years of brand-building labor, how
is a modern seller best provided with an opportunity to restore
equilibrium to the buyer / seller dynamic?
p12
The Best-in-Class are
twice as likely as All
Others to enable
mobile content
creation for sellers not just
consumption.
2
With better-informed
and savvier buyers,
enterprises and their
front-line reps need
to re-think the sales
information engine
that drives
continuous revenue.
Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
There is little doubt that the digital-era customer experience has
changed everything we once knew about the trading of goods
and services. Think about the generations-old experience of
purchasing a car: before the mid-1990s, the seller held all of the
power and did a remarkable and frustrating job of confusing
customers about the most elemental fact involved: the actual
price of the vehicle. As Consumer Reports, Kelley Blue Book,
Yelp, and, ultimately, social media rose in popularity, the
pendulum of knowledge and influence swung dramatically
toward the buyer. Today, buyers mostly explore and price out
cars online, and then sometimes drop by a dealership to handle
the paperwork.
Much as this democratic, user-generated content revolution has
spelled trouble for the classic car salesman, so too are enterprise
business-to-business (B2B) sellers challenged by the welldocumented "hidden sales cycle" that allows their prospects to
do significant homework before facing off in a 1:1 conversation.
With better-informed and savvier buyers, enterprises and their
front-line reps need to re-think the sales information engine that
drives continuous revenue.
Strategy One: Establishing an Integrated Sales Data Path
Fortunately, enterprise sales leaders and operational managers
recognize this situation. New Aberdeen research published in
The 21st Century Buying Experience: Say Farewell to the Sales
Cycle (July 2014) highlights "customers are demanding better
service than ever" as the leading (62% popularity) business
pressure among all survey respondents. With the radical change
that has taken place in the buyer's journey, the Best-in-Class
companies (sidebar, page 3) are the quickest to take action,
nominating "integrate multiple internal sources of data into a
single view of each customer" as their leading strategic action,
with a 63% voting rate. This approach is a logical manner in
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
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which to corral an exponentially growing number of customer
data silos that many businesses now own: marketing
automation systems, customer relationship management (CRM)
platforms, contact center deployments, and help desk
operations. With these multiple and often conflicting "versions
of the truth" about prospects and customers, companies find it
more difficult, not less, to stay a step ahead of their buyers unless they figure out how to create a clean, accurate, visually
efficient snapshot of the customer for their sales reps and
managers.
The Best-in-Class
Defined
The performance metrics used to
define the Best-in-Class (top 20%),
Industry Average (middle 50%), and
Laggard (bottom 30%) among
these sales teams are:
CRM alone is not a solution here, as it traditionally does not align
all business motions to the customer's buying journey. Indeed,
Aberdeen's Sales Effectiveness research introduces a multitude
of integrated technologies that enhance the power and reach of
core CRM, creating a better user and customer experience. Still,
simply throwing technology at sales challenges is not effective
without a solid underpinning of strong data management.
Percentage of Respondents
Figure 1: Maturity of Customer Data Integration by Best-inClass
40%
Best-in-Class
Full integration
30%
20%
31%
35%
13%
• 13.2% average year-over-year
increase in net client value, vs. 1.0%
for the Industry Average and a 1.9%
decline among Laggard
respondents
• 11.6% average year-over-year
increase in overall team attainment
of sales quota, vs. a 0.3% increase
for the Industry Average and a 0.7%
decline among Laggard
respondents
No integration
25%
23%
9%
10%
0%
All Others
• 94% customer retention rate, vs.
81% among Industry Average and
19% for Laggard firms
1%
All enterprise
applications
with customer master/
transaction data fully
integrated are
enriched with data
from external sources
0%
Data manually
moved between
applications
Limited integration
between
data silos forcing users
to reference multiple
sources
No
integration
n = 104
Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2014
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With the radical change that
has taken place in the
buyer's journey, Best-inClass companies are the
quickest to take action,
nominating "integrate
multiple internal sources of
data into a single view of
each customer" as their
leading strategic action.
Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
This is where top-performing sales organizations use one of their
many best practices to achieve stronger business results than
under-performers: more aggressively integrating all customerfacing enterprise applications into a true, accurate, unified, 360˚
view of prospective and current spenders. Figure 1
demonstrates that, while the majority of companies are
relatively weak in adopting this approach, a direct correlation
between business results and application integration is proven.
This efficiency can play out in many scenarios where wellintegrated enterprises are better at leveraging data for their own
(and customers') benefit. For example, consider that a senior
seller at Company A is nearing a deal with a key buyer at
Company B, and they develop a scope-of-work document that
heads to legal or procurement colleagues within both
companies. It is then discovered that a long-gone employee
from B neglected to pay a small invoice from A and,
unbeknownst to the seller and the buyer, the two firms are
actually in small claims court and forbidden from doing more
business with one another until the once-forgotten case is
resolved. The fallout? A deal is lost or delayed, a quota missed, a
desired product not acquired, time wasted, and reputations
damaged. Had the selling organization connected the dots
earlier, perhaps the accounts receivable and sales teams could
have collaborated, and turned the debt into an up-sell
component of the now-stalled deal.
Think of the 360˚ customer view this way: building out a datadriven customer lifecycle management approach ensures that
the best message is delivered to the right buyer at each
watershed moment - prospect, hand-raiser, lead, opportunity,
purchaser, renewal - in their customer journey. This nirvana
does not, of course, take place without significant attention paid
to the core competencies that underlie the technologies.
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
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Consider the findings in Figure 2, which reflect a number of the
best practices that top performers adopt more frequently than
weaker sales organizations.
Percentage of Respondents
Figure 2: What Exactly Does Customer Data Integration
Require?
70%
55%
Best-in-Class
63%
48%
Laggard
44%
38%
40%
25%
Industry Average
56%
19%
48%
27%
23%
10%
Back-office processes/
technologies integrated
with customer-facing
processes/technologies
Relationships between
customers and other parties
can be uniquely defined
Customer-facing staff have
strong visibility into inventory,
accounts payable, payment
history, etc. to enable more
effective up- or crosssell opportunities
n = 104
Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2014
Here, the data supports a well-known trend in enterprise
customer management: the blurring of traditional marketing,
sales, and service job roles. It is common knowledge, supported
by frequent Aberdeen research, that contemporary marketers,
once held accountable for sheer prospecting volume, are now
compensated on, and tasked with, generating sales revenue.
Sellers, too, are now adding "micro-marketing" capabilities to
their personal tool sets, determining the flow and content of
messaging, assets, and social media output to which their
buyers and accounts are exposed. Hence Figure 2 supports the
idea of total customer data integration by connecting front- and
back-office applications, normalizing parent-child account
relationships, and using stop-gap measures to prevent the
Company A / B scenario explored above. In fact, current research
data shows that companies that aggressively integrate
enterprise and desktop applications achieve 22% stronger
Simply throwing
technology at
sales challenges is
not effective
without a solid
underpinning of
strong data
management.
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Firms that connect all
external party records to the
CRM and unified internal
data repository out-perform
non-adopters around
increasing customer
retention, CRM adoption, the
average deal size, the
number of reps achieving
quota, and the average net
client annual spend.
Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
customer retention (73% vs. 60%) rates, and see 22% more sales
reps achieving annual quota (44% vs. 36%), compared to firms
that do not adopt this core competency. On an annual basis,
firms that connect all external party records to the CRM and
unified internal data repository out-perform non-adopters
around increasing customer retention, CRM adoption, the
average deal size, the number of reps achieving quota, and the
average net client annual spend.
Strategy Two: Salespeople Shouldn't Lie. Facts NEVER Do.
Much is written and shared today about all of this information in
the context of "big data," a term thrown around freely to
describe the seemingly endless flow of structured (database
records, customer accounts, spend histories) and unstructured
(user-generated, social) data that flies around us on a 24/7 basis.
In the context of empowered customers and engaged sellers, the
definition can be narrowed down from the above-mentioned
concept of the "right message, right person, right moment," to
the real-life management of revenue opportunities during the
typical B2B sales cycle. In Aberdeen's Big Data for Sales: Are We
Ready? (March 2014), few companies were leveraging the
predictive analytics function of advanced big data products for
sales forecasting, but Best-in-Class firms reported a 27% early
adoption rate, compared with only 9% of Industry Average and
Laggard performers.
Predictive analytics aid both quota-carriers and sales leaders
alike in understanding which products, SKUs, geographies,
buyer personas, and pricing combinations are more or less likely
to result in closed deals, based on patterns discerned among
historical sales data. For example, a sales manager overwhelmed
at month-end with reps' requests to "just help me get this deal
over the goal line" has limited bandwidth to offer her expertise,
so how does she determine which deals are worth her energy?
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
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With big data analytical tools in hand, she might know that her
team closes 72% of red widget deals in Ohio, but only 51% of
green gadget programs in Arizona; advantage, red widget deal.
Segmenting the research data to compare the performance of
companies that actively apply this analysis to sales deal velocity,
with non-adopters, reveals the rewards for enterprises that
make the investment, as shown in Figure 3.
Percentage of Attainment
Figure 3: "Big Data" is More than a Popular Fad
90%
88%
Big data/analytics applied to deal velocity
All others
77%
70%
61%
59%
50%
41% 38%
30%
22%
14%
10%
Customer
retention
Reps
achieving
quota
Lead
acceptance
rate
Lead
conversion
rate
n = 261
Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2014
A helpful by-product of this data-driven deal management
competency is more accurate sales forecasts, which by
themselves are mere leading indicators of better data
management, but in a macro sense add significant value to the
enterprise. Best-in-Class sales leaders deliver more accurate
sales forecasts to their peers in line-of-business management
roles: Human Resources plans hiring more efficiently, Supply
Chain runs a more lean logistical process, and Customer Service
gears up for the right amount of volume. Still, analytical sales
forecasting doesn't take root by simply acquiring SaaS licenses;
it requires the competencies (high or very high self-reported
proficiencies) summarized in Figure 4.
More accurate
sales forecasts,
which by
themselves are
mere leading
indicators of
better data
management, in a
macro sense add
significant value
to the enterprise.
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
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Percent indicating 4/5 on a 1-5 scale
Figure 4: Is It Time to Bring out Your Crystal Ball?
70%
60%
50%
Best-in-Class
61%
61%
46% 45%
40%
Industry Average
Laggard
45%
42%
33%
33%
30%
25%
28%
22%
21%
20%
10%
Using forecasting process
to add extra resources
to deals most likely
to close
Understanding which
Using forecasting process
opportunities are most/ to “walk away” from deals
least likely to close
least likely to close
Using forecasting
process to identify
potential “no
decisions”
n = 139
Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2014
Best-in-Class companies
apply facts and unarguable
data to business scenarios
that are traditionally quite
emotion-driven: "Come on,
boss, let me discount this
deal a bit more. I have a
great feeling about it."
Here, Best-in-Class companies apply facts and unarguable data
to business scenarios that are traditionally quite emotion-driven:
"Come on, boss, let me discount this deal a bit more. I have a
great feeling about it." Seriously? Top performers replace gut
feelings with data, and more effectively allocate resources to
"know when to hold 'em, and when to fold 'em" better than
Industry Average and Laggard sales teams.
Strategy Three: Crowd-Sourcing Your Way Past Quota
While gut feelings have little value for sales forecasting, this is
not to say that the human factor does not impact decisionmaking in professional B2B selling. When we consider the
enormous impact of social media on virtually every facet of our
private and business lives, the blurred lines between fact,
opinion, and even misdirection come into play. Enter
Aberdeen's multi-disciplinary research defining the marketing,
sales, service, human capital management, and mobility
benefits of workforces connected by "social stream" or
"newsfeed" collaboration platforms. Figure 5 showcases some
of the more corporate advantages of Enterprise Social
Collaboration (ESC), particularly around how Best-in-Class
organizations achieve better business results in part due to their
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
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ability to manage staff time expenditures far more efficiently
than under-performers. If it's safe to assume that in sales, "time
is money" then ESC platforms contributing to more selling time
certainly makes them worth the investment.
Percent indicating 4/5 on a 1-5 scale
Figure 5: Enterprise Social Collaboration Yields More Efficient
Selling
40%
37%
Best-in-Class
33%
30%
20%
All others
30%
30%
24%
14%
16%
16%
10%
0%
Time to business- Time to find subjectcritical information
matter experts
Security
of access
Project or campaign
management ontime delivery
n = 133
Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2014
The reference to "selling time" does not, however, refer solely to
cold-calling, renewal-soliciting, and sales-pitching efforts. Social
media plays an equally important role in the lives of most
contemporary B2B sellers, not only for internal knowledge
sharing and team selling, but also in the context of external usergenerated content that informs quota-carriers and the
conversations they build with their target accounts and
customers. In No More Spaghetti against the Wall: How Best-in-
Class Sellers Use Social Relationships to Build a Better Pipeline
(February 2014), Aberdeen showcases a Best-in-Class set of top
performers that more aggressively listen to, and carefully
participate in, online discourses in an effort to cultivate and
maintain quality customer relationships. Social selling is less
about deploying specific technologies, than about representing
the core competencies (in Figure 6) that help businesses identify
Social media plays an
equally important role in the
lives of most contemporary
B2B sellers, not only for
internal knowledge sharing
and team selling, but in the
context of external usergenerated content that
informs quota-carriers and
the conversations they build
with their target accounts
and customers.
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
10
products, partners, services, and connections that ultimately
help reduce friction from buying and selling cycles.
Figure 6: Core Competencies of Best-in-Class Social Selling
Percent of respondents
100%
75%
Best-in-Class
100%
60%
60%
50%
19%
0%
Remote, mobile sellers
have full access to our
social media tools
Laggard
56%
36%
25%
0%
Industry Average
Sellers trained to
engage in online
conversation with
prospect / customers
31%
9%
Formal ability to launch
reactive social media
messaging based on
trigger events:
“rapid response”
n = 182
Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2014
Social selling is less about
deploying specific
technologies, than about
representing the core
competencies that help
businesses identify products,
partners, services, and
connections that ultimately
help reduce friction from
buying and selling cycles.
 Mobile and social go hand-in-hand: With 100% of Bestin-Class companies, and 0% of Laggards, the argument
for marrying the form and the content is a no-brainer.
Millennial sellers consider their smartphone to be at least
as important as their laptop, so why resist the
consumption and communication model with which they
are most natively comfortable?
 Social selling training is crucial. The fastest way to
motivate your prospective customers to walk away from
you is… to try and sell your goods or services too
blatantly on Twitter or LinkedIn. Best-in-Class companies
are more than twice as likely as under-performers (60%
vs. 29%) to formally educate their reps on how to curate
content, become subject matter experts, and exercise
patience with their online prospecting behavior.
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
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 Control the message like they do in political
campaigns. Ironically, the use of internal ESC platform
tools - never forgetting to integrate them with the CRM, of
course - can be used to more efficiently locate colleagues
who can help out as subject matter experts (SME) in such
time-sensitive situations. These SMEs can use the
platform to collaboratively construct and launch social
content to ward off negative publicity or competitive
threats; internal networking can also be leveraged to
elicit "warm introductions" by sellers to decision-makers
in their territory with whom they are not directly socially
connected.
Figure 7: Performance Management Capabilities: Grown-Up
ROI on Social Selling
Percentage of Respondents
75%
60%
45%
30%
Best-in-Class
62%
Industry Average
56%
47%
53%
Millennial sellers
consider their
smartphone to be at
least as important
as their laptop, so
why resist the
consumption and
communication
model with which
they are most
natively
comfortable?
Laggard
46%
39%
25%
13%
15%
12%
0%
Ability to connect
social media activities
with measurable
marketing results
Ability to identify most
effective social media
outlets, platforms or
channels
Ability to connect
social media activities
with measurable
sales results
n = 182
Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2014
The final lesson on social selling that the research teaches is that
while user-generated content is not an old phenomenon Facebook only turned 10 this year - its impact is nevertheless
measurable and therefore not immune to corporate return-oninvestment (ROI) analysis - Figure 8. Simply put, Best-in-Class
organizations use these platforms more aggressively, achieve
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
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better results by supporting them with best practices, and
successfully perform due diligence on their investments.
Strategy Four: Success Requires an Anywhere, Anytime, Any
Device Sales Ecosystem
Finally, as initially referenced in Figure 6 (page 10), few sales
leaders today still oversee fully tethered, office-based teams,
once the product line is complex enough to merit a personal
selling touch that precludes an entirely inside sales-based
function.
Figure 8: Full Sales Mobility Reduces Sales Cycle Friction
Best-in-Class
Industry Average
Laggard
50%
50%
Percentage of Respondents
Fewer companies enable a
"do" mentality, which
translates to entering data
into the CRM, updating the
forecast, placing an order via
electronic signature,
observing or contributing on
relevant social media
platforms, or participating in
a digital reinforcement of
sales training content.
40%
30%
20%
28%
30%
34%
27%
24%
22%
17%
8%
10%
11%
14%
9%
6%
7%
0%
0%
All
consumption
Mostly
consumption
Balanced
Mostly
creation
All
creation
n = 246
Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2014
Aberdeen's Mobile Sales Enablement: Fulfilling the Promise of
Untethered Selling (February 2014) report reveals two important
findings, summarized in the Figure 8 data, which showcases a 15 scale of survey respondents' answers, regarding the extent to
which sellers are "creators vs. consumers" of content when in
the field or otherwise remotely selling and account managing.
The data shows, first, that most sales teams are still in "see"
mode, using smartphones and tablets to find information in the
CRM, look at the sales forecast, check inventory, or research
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
their accounts and markets. Fewer companies enable a "do"
mentality, which translates to entering data into the CRM,
updating the forecast, placing an order via electronic signature,
observing or contributing on relevant social media platforms, or
participating in a digital reinforcement of sales training content.
The second story in Figure 8 is performance-related: Best-inClass firms are far ahead of the curve in turning a consumptioncentered mobile sales experience into a balanced and flexible
environment. Best-in-Class firms empower their front-line sellers
to accomplish their job and run their own personal business
within the business, with a time- and location- and deviceagnostic set of platforms and practices. These top performers
are swiftly putting an end to deal-killing, "I'll have to get back to
you" moments by empowering total B2B sales mobility.
Top performers
are swiftly putting
an end to dealkilling, "I'll have
to get back to
you" moments by
empowering total
B2B sales
mobility.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The four major themes of this report - integrating customerfacing enterprise applications, deploying "big data" predictive
analytics, leveraging social media, and mobilizing sales reps’
work styles - are all documented as Best-in-Class competencies
recommended by Aberdeen. If any final proof-positive of the
direct implications of these approaches on enterprise sales
results is still desired, consider this survey question: "How would
you characterize your organization’s typical 'share of the
customer’s wallet'?" Best-in-Class firms nearly doubled underperformers (13% vs. 7%) in boldly stating that they were a
dominant provider in their space, with very high account
penetration; and 73% higher (38% vs. 22%) to indicate a nexttier, "we're doing well but more up-sells would be nice"
response. When end-users admitted that they are "definitely
leaving money on the table," Industry Average and Laggard firms
were more likely, 36% vs. 31%, to fess up to such a state of
affairs. No metrics around Sales Effectiveness will resonate
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Customer Engagement has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up?
more clearly with the CEO than "market penetration" and
“wallet share." Take a look at your own results and learn this
report's lessons from your peers on how Best-in-Class firms both
empower customers and engage their sellers, to produce winwin enterprise results.
For more information on this or other research topics, please visit www.aberdeen.com.
Related Research
The 21st Century Buying Experience: Say Farewell
to the Sales Cycle; July 2014
Mobile Sales Enablement: Fulfilling the Promise of
Untethered Selling; February 2014
No More Spaghetti against the Wall: How Best-inClass Sellers Use Social Relationships to Build a
Better Pipeline; February 2014
Big Data for Sales: Are We Ready?; March 2014
Author: Peter Ostrow, VP/Research Group Director; Customer Management, Sales Effectiveness
peter.ostrow@aberdeen.com
About Aberdeen Group
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