Target Your Customers with These 4 Multichannel Tactics
By Jonathan Gray
Multichannel interactions are the norm for brands and consumers. On average, prospects engage in up to 10 touches to gather information and communicate before making a purchase. 
The inside sales landscape is vastly different from a decade ago, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, online advertising, and social media. And with enormous improvements in data analytics and marketing and collaboration software, we now have countless ways to reach prospects at any of these touches.
It’s important to leverage those touches as often as you can: Position yourself as a thought leader by connecting with your prospects on LinkedIn or sharing insights on Twitter. Call, text, or email. Chat with prospects online or using Google Hangouts. 
The traditional inside sales approaches of phone calls and emails used to account for the overwhelming majority of interactions. Today, those techniques are being used less and less often in business-to-business sales. 
Account-based marketing now rules the roost. This approach transforms the way inside sales professionals work by leveraging online channels and targeting prospects with personalized, relevant messages. Try these techniques to get the most from your sales and marketing efforts: 
1. Let data find your leads. 
Many companies think they already know their best target accounts, but today’s data sources and analytics platforms add measurable, actionable information. Predictive analytics is in 89 percent of marketers’ business plans in 2016. 
Using sales performance data and interaction history as a guide, we recently worked with a technology company to determine what its newly acquired customers had in common. When we cross-referenced those attributes with millions of businesses on a B2B analytics platform, we turned up thousands of other companies that could become new customers. Not only did this data expand the company’s target account list, but it also helped eliminate accounts that were unlikely to convert and saved the company from wasting sales resources.
2. Practice account-based digital engagement marketing. 
Marketing automation tools make it easy to nurture and qualify leads. To ensure none falls through the cracks, hire experts to manage the process across the different technologies and marketing and sales operations. Marketers using an account-based digital marketing approach reported 91 percent of sales were “tightly” or “somewhat or moderately” aligned.
We worked with one communications company to target accounts that needed increased awareness of products and offerings before entering the sales process. We developed a marketing plan that leveraged programmatic advertising, content marketing, and retargeted display ads to create multiple impressions — which more than doubled the company’s lead volume and conversion rates.
3. Connect with decision makers any way you can. 
Your clients are constantly talking, chatting, emailing, and texting — so you should be, too. One cloud-based technology company’s inside sales managers leverage all these forms of communication, plus the brand’s LinkedIn and Twitter pages, to share content with decision makers in its book of accounts.
This content drives back to each salesperson’s website, tracking who these customers are and what brought them there. The customers can then engage with the salesperson on the website through voice or chat. And for some clients, texting has become the preferred (and effective) way to communicate about their software purchases.
4. Have an appetite for experimentation.
Show prospects and clients you can keep them at the forefront of today’s technologies. For example, one global online advertising company conducts virtual breakfast meetings over Google Hangouts. To make the collaboration sessions more intimate, the advertising company has breakfast delivered to the client’s office. 
You have more options at your disposal than ever before to engage with prospects in the sales funnel. If you know what platforms your customers are using, you can lead the charge to provide them with the widest range of solutions using the most relevant channels. The best approaches leverage online advancements, software, and data to make strategic decisions and close sales.
Jonathan Gray is the senior vice president of marketing and leader of business development and marketing services for Revana. His team oversees marketing analytics and integrated marketing services programs that automate electronic marketing strategies on behalf of industry-leading clients. He was involved in developing new digital marketing and sales solutions, such as Revana Analytic Multichannel Platform (RAMP) and RevanaAQ360SM, which won a Gold Stevie as the 2016 Best New Marketing Solution.