Allbound Engagement Playbook

Allbound Engagement

The antidote to underperforming GTM

Thrive or die in the age of the customer

In case you haven’t heard by now, today’s B2B buyers expect outstanding customer experience. They value the experience you provide throughout the entire buyer’s journey as much as the service or product you offer. And a lot of the issues that are poisoning your go-to-market (GTM) strategy likely stem from your struggle to meet your buyers’ growing expectations.

Digital noise

Poor customer experience

Teams working in silos

Every day, B2B buyers are bombarded with hundreds of emails and ads. Digital and in-person events have become generic and easily forgettable and the level of competition grows by the day. All this means we have to do more to create a connection and drive engagement.

What’s poisoning your go-to-market strategy?

Digital noise

Poor customer experience

Teams working in silos

Today's customers are informed and connected. They have greater access to information than ever before and they have high expectations for their customer experience. If you don’t provide a great customer experience you risk blending into the background and being easily forgotten.

Your GTM team faces the growing pressure of market conditions and the challenges of stretched budgets and resources. Without a strategy that brings your entire GTM team together behind a shared goal, you risk falling short of your business goals and burning your team out.

60% of B2B tech buyers are millennials, a generation that is twice as likely to discover products online than older generations

TrustRadius

80% of B2B customers expect an experience that is as good or better than B2C

PWC

Allbound engagement

The marketing and sales teams of the future work as one unit as one GTM team and treat outbound and inbound as one motion. We’re all bound to the same goals and targets so it only makes sense to find a way of working together towards our shared goal. What if we told you can take inbound and outbound and tie them together with a bowtie?

The antidote to your go-to-market poison

Allbound is a new methodology for B2B GTM teams that looks at inbound and outbound as a single motion working towards shared revenue goals. Allbound brings demand generation, ABM, sales, partnerships, growth and customer success together under one motion that can remedy underperformance across the board through allbound engagement tactics. Allbound engagement is a new way to respond to the growing expectations of customers and thrive in the age of the customer. The allbound engagement methodology helps you identify moments that matter as a team and create experiences that generate results across the full customer lifecycle. Now you can engage prospects and customers and stand out from the crowd using gifting, direct mail, virtual experiences, event packs and swag.

Who is allbound engagement for?

Allbound engagement is for every B2B GTM team that wants to win and thrive in the age of the customer. Regardless of what stage your business is at and how mature your strategy is, you can use the allbound engagement methodology to identify key moments in your buyer’s journey that can be optimized for a better, smoother customer experience. Whether your current strategy is underperforming or you want to get even further ahead of competitors, allbound engagement offers you ways to improve and drive better business results than ever before.

How to get started with allbound engagement

Allbound engagement is a methodology that activates your entire GTM team so driving alignment between your sales, marketing and customer success teams is key. Information should flow both from the top down and from the bottom up so that everyone involved has a complete picture of the goals you’re trying to achieve and the obstacles you have to overcome. Each team member has an equally important part to play in delivering the best possible customer journey. Here are some of the key players and the roles they need to play:

Assemble your team

Senior sales, marketing and customer success leaders

Your senior sales, marketing and customer success leaders will be the driving force behind the strategy. Their job is to make sure your strategy is informed by high-level business goals such as revenue and pipeline targets and everyone involved understands how that translates into their day-to-day.

Marketing team

Your marketing team will be executing a lot of your allbound engagement strategy and they are going to be tasked with educating internally on what the strategy entails and managing the day-to-day of running your campaigns. They are going to be working closely with sales, BDRs and CS across all initiatives.

Business development representatives (BDRs)

BDRs are often the first point of contact for your potential customers, so in order to deliver a consistently amazing experience, it’s essential their outreach and process is synchronized with every subsequent step in the customer’s journey.

Business development leaders

BD leaders such as BDR managers are essential to making sure senior leadership understands the challenges their teams are facing, and those challenges are reflected in their strategic decisions. Equally, they should be able to translate high-level goals into tangible goals for their team, such as number of opportunities generated, number of meetings booked, flip rates, annual recurring revenue (ARR) generated and individual BDR activity targets.

Customer success managers

CS managers are your GTM team's direct connection to customers and are responsible for passing valuable insights and feedback to the rest of the team that will inform your allbound engagement strategy – from your customer’s current challenges and blockers, to questions about your product and services.

Account executives

AEs have a crucial role to play in welcoming new customers and ensuring a smooth transition for the CS team. They should be able to communicate the problems a new customer is looking to solve and the goals they want to achieve to the CSM to ensure customers are off to the best possible start.

Account managers

Ideally, AMs will be working alongside CSMs to monitor the health of the customer’s account and identify opportunities for growth and cross-selling. The more you engage with the customer, the more opportunities and connections you will be able to spot.

Partner marketing

Whether you have a designated partnerships team or an individual who is responsible for driving revenue from partnerships, their role is to amplify the effectiveness of an allbound strategy by creating joint value propositions with strategic partners and leveraging each other’s strengths and brand recognition. This collaborative approach amplifies engagement efforts, expands reach, and provides a comprehensive solution to effectively engage customers and prospects throughout their journey. Any partnership marketing opportunities and co-marketing campaigns need to align to the allbound engagement strategy, share the same messages and work towards the same goals.

Revenue operations

Like any strategy, allbound engagement works best when it’s based on solid data. Revenue operations can provide the most accurate and timely insights on trends in the market, opportunities for improving your sales and marketing process, and reporting on revenue goals. The role of revenue operations is to provide a single view of revenue impacts shared between sales, marketing, customer success and finance. Having the support of your RevOps teams as part of your allbound engagement strategy throughout the entire revenue cycle will help you generate more consistent and predictable growth.

The start of every new strategy involves a preliminary research phase that will shape your approach and tactics down the road. When it comes to allbound engagement, it’s important to look at the buyer’s journey in its entirety and identify where your most acute pain points are. Dive into your data and identify the main blockers in your customer journey. Are you struggling to generate pipeline with digital only methods? Do prospects keep ghosting your sales team? Are your close rates keeping you awake at night? Or perhaps your win rates against the competition make your eyes water? Is there more you can be doing to drive growth from your current customers? Pick three to four moments in the buyer’s journey where improvements will have the most significant impact on your bottom line.

Identify the moments where you’re struggling

Slow-moving sales cycles

Underperforming digital channels

High meeting no-show rates

Poor email response rates

Low event attendance

Here are some common pain points that you can address with allbound engagement tactics:

Slow customer adoption

Dissatisfied customers

Unresponsive customers

Customer churn

Once you’ve identified the moments in your buyer's journey that you want to focus your efforts on, it’s time to brainstorm some ideas on ways to introduce new and memorable touch points that will help propel conversations. Here are some of moments you can focus on and ideas for tactics you can try...

How to use data to pave the way to success

As we mentioned, you will need to dive into some data to not only identify the right moments in your strategy where you can improve performance, but also to inform the approach for those moments. Here are some of the different types of data you can look into and what they can tell you.

3rd party data

2nd party data

1st party data

2nd party data from your strategic partners and platforms like G2 and Capterra is a great way to enrich your existing audience and widen your reach. With a platform like Crossbeam, you can identify the overlap between your partner’s target audience and yours, and single out shared prospects and customers, which allows you to create highly targeted co-marketing campaigns.

Your own website traffic and engagement data is a great place to start when creating a more personalized experience for your prospects and customers. Platforms like Dealfront and Zoominfo can be helpful in making better use of your own data. You can use any data you collect about your website visitors such as industry, job title, or location to segment your audience and create personalized web pages and targeted email campaigns, for example.

Leveraging 3rd party data from providers such as Cognism, Demandbase, and 6sense is a great way to enrich your 1st party data with intent data and create timely and highly-personalized marketing messages and campaigns. 3rd party data providers can also provide intelligence on target accounts who are engaging with your competitor’s website, giving you a chance to proactively expand your reach to new potential customers.

Further reading: How to drive pipeline with Reachdesk and 6sense How to drive pipeline with Reachdesk and Demandbase

Use those different data sources to identify the right moments to reach out and use them as triggers for your outreach. Here are some examples:

A lead reaches a specific lead score (or 6QA if you’re a 6sense user)

Once a prospect has had a certain number of engagements with your brand and content and they’re deemed interested enough in your solution, it’s a great opportunity to show them you appreciate their interest with a personalized message and a gift. For more ideas, read our guide on how to drive pipeline with 6sense and Reachdesk.

A prospect signs up for your marketing event

After the prospect registers for your webinar or in-person event, send them a reminder email and a lunch voucher a few hours before it’s scheduled to begin.

A prospect requests a demo

If someone is ready to see your product or solution in action, the chances are they’ve already done a lot of research and want to get a sense of what working with you would be like. Make the right impression and improve your meeting show rates by sending a meeting reminder an hour before the demo with a lunch or coffee voucher for them to enjoy after the meeting.

A prospect engages with your content

Whether they’ve just downloaded one of your whitepapers or they’ve visited your product pages multiple times, these are signs that they’re interested in what you have to offer. Reach out to them and offer to answer any questions they may have on the content and send them a coffee voucher to enjoy while browsing it.

Job change on LinkedIn

A prospect’s new role could be a good excuse to get in touch with them for the first time. You’re likely not going to be the only person trying to get their attention at this time, so make sure you stand out by sending them a celebratory gift to congratulate them on the new role.

All the great campaign ideas above can be automated with a solution like Reachdesk.

When we say personalization is critical to an effective allbound engagement strategy, we’re not joking. By now you should’ve guessed that we don’t only mean addressing someone by their name in your email outreach. True personalization comes from researching the challenges the prospect or customer is facing and the goals they have. Whether that insight comes from a marketing intelligence platform or from the research your BDRs are doing, it should be at the heart of your messaging. Insert relevant references to personal information such as hobbies, interests or likes.

Get creative and personal

69%

of business leaders are increasing their investment in personalization despite challenging economic headwinds.

Segment

62%

of business leaders cite improved customer retention as a benefit of personalization efforts

Segment

Nearly

Read more on the topic: How to build personalization into your sales outreach The marketer’s guide to the modern B2B buyer’s journey How to build a winning sales sequence

Now that you’ve gotten the team correctly set up, identified the moments to improve, are being data, rather than gut-led, and have got personalized, it’s time to insert the latter into your execution. This is where you’ll need to lean on tools and technology you have available. Even though technology can definitely help your allbound engagement strategy run more smoothly, a fancy tech stack is not a requirement to make allbound engagement work. You can get started with just your CRM, basic marketing automation functionality and a good data provider. As long as your entire GTM team is aligned on the strategy and goals and is regularly communicating their learnings with each other, you’re in a good position to make improvements on the experience you’re delivering to your customers across the entire buyer’s journey. Regardless of whether you have an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy in place or even tools that support ABM initiatives such as Demandbase, 6sense or Terminus, you should be able to identify the companies you’d like to work with and engage them in a meaningful way. For those of you who have a more advanced tech stack in place here are some of the tools you will find useful in your allbound engagement strategy...

Make the most of your existing tech stack

Data analytics/ICP targeting/Engagement scoring: i.e. 6sense, Demandbase, Terminus

Display platform: i.e. Terminus, Demandbase, 6sense, Rollworks, Metadata

Sales automation tools: i.e. Outreach, Salesloft

Content marketing platform: i.e. Uberflip, Pathfactory

Meeting booking tools: i.e. Chili Piper, Calendly

Data providers: Cognism, Lusha, Apollo, ZoomInfo, 6sense

Content experience tools: i.e. Ceros, Turtl, Navattic

Allbound engagement: i.e. Reachdesk

Chatbot: i.e. Qualified, Drift, HubSpot

The allbound engagement playbook

Custom multi-touch attribution

Multi-touch attribution

Single-touch attribution

Whether first or last-touch attribution, a single-touch attribution means 100% of the credit goes to a single touchpoint. Single-touch attribution usually works best for businesses with a short sales cycle who focus on driving volume.

Linear, U-shaped, W-shaped, time-decay - there are many different types of multi-touch attribution models with varying levels of complexity. Most enterprise businesses choose multi-touch attribution to account for their longer sales cycles and more complex buyer journeys.

As they mature, most teams find that what works best is an attribution model that’s unique to their own business. This is what we’ve found to work best for us. At Reachdesk, we look at four main primary sources – inbound, outbound (BDR), partner, and self-generated (AE-driven). We assign the sources at the first-touch and the last-touch, crediting the last-touch source to the opportunity. To further understand the impacts we drive, the first and last-source both have a sub-source such as sales touches, or marketing campaign engagements. In marketing, we look at the sub-source when marketing is not credited for the opportunity to see how marketing influences opportunity creation.

How do you know if allbound engagement is working?

Perhaps one of the most challenging and critical projects for every high-performing GTM team is finding the attribution model that allows fair and accurate reporting and meaningful goal-setting. Here are some of the most common attribution models and how they can help you measure the impact of your allbound engagement efforts.

Find the right attribution model for your business

Select your pipeline measurement metrics

At a high level, a GTM team is collectively responsible for opening and then closing pipeline. Having a shared list of metrics to measure pipeline performance is key to making better decisions about your strategy as a team.

Questions to answer:

How many of the opportunities generated were touched by both marketing and sales?

What’s marketing’s contribution to pipeline?

What is the average deal size for both sales and marketing?

What are sales self-generating?

How are partnerships contributing to pipeline growth?

How are sales, marketing and partnerships working together towards pipeline goals?

Keep an eye on pipeline velocity

One of the main goals of your allbound engagement strategy will be to accelerate your sales pipeline so pipeline velocity is a key metric to watch. Knowing your pipeline velocity helps you increase the revenue flow into your business every day and allows you to make timely adjustments.

Questions to answer:

How many qualified opportunities do you generate?

What is your average deal value?

What is your win rate?

What is the average sales cycle length?

How to calculate pipeline velocity:

Number of qualified opportunities x win rate x average deal value / average sale cycle length

Opportunities generated Value of qualified pipeline Value of all pipeline generated Social reach Brand perception

Meetings booked Number of accounts reached and engaged Number of stakeholders within each account engaged Win rate Annual contract value Customer acquisition cost

Customer net promoter score Customer retention rate Product adoption rate Renewal rate Customer testimonials, reviews, and case studies

Target

Engage

Grow

Metrics to watch

Here are some of the metrics you can use to measure the success of your strategy...

Is this you at the moment?

Do you wish you looked a bit more like this?

You’re struggling to do more with less under growing pressure and trying to compete in an increasingly crowded market.

Low pipeline

You struggle to generate pipeline because the digital overload most B2B buyers are inundated by every day results in lower response rates from prospects.

Increased customer churn

Customers are more likely to leave you because they’re not adopting your products and are not getting the engagement they need.

Losing to competitors

Competitors who are able to differentiate and create a smoother customer experience snatch deals from you.

Wasting your team’s time and energy

Your teams are not able to focus on the strategic initiatives that really matter because they’re busy producing more noise.

You’re focusing on creating an outstanding experience for your prospects and customers by delivering moments of genuine human connection.

High customer and prospect engagement

You find moments that matter across the buyer journey and create meaningful connections with prospects and customers. This leads to higher response rates and more pipeline and revenue.

Healthy, happy people

You give your team tools that save them time and bring creativity and joy into their work.

Better alignment between teams

You unite the efforts of your sales, marketing and customer success teams under a shared strategy.

Strong customer advocates

You build strong relationships with your customers which helps you boost renewals and growth opportunities.

What’s poisoning your Go-to-market strategy? Allbound engagement - the antidote to your Go-to-market poison Who is allbound engagement for? How to get started with allbound engagement? The allbound engagement playbook How to measure the success of allbound engagement?

80%

of customers value experience just as much as products and services

Salesforce

66%

of buyers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations

Salesforce

Interactive demo tools: Navattic

Number of qualified opportunities X win rate X average deal value average sales cycle length

Success stories from Reachdesk customers

Clearwave 14% increase in meeting attendance

Divvy 15% increase in meeting show rate

Paycor 160% increase in response rate quarter over quarter

SentinelOne 1.1M pipeline generated

Reputation $6M of pipeline influenced

Hokodo deals 3x more likely to close using gifting

In the age of the customer, savvy businesses know that delivering an exceptional customer experience every day is a requirement, not a nice-to-have. Allbound engagement gives you the methodology and tools to activate your entire GTM team and deliver moments that matter, regardless of what stage you’re in. Add highly personalized and data-driven gifting to the mix, and you’ll have an unstoppable GTM strategy that will set you light-years ahead of your competitors.

Conclusion

download pdf

Our tip here is to choose only a handful to begin with. Remember, everything could always be better. It’s about choosing those that can be quickly turned around without too much hassle. Once you choose, it’s then about the plan of attack. You want to avoid shooting in the dark, so when building your plan, you should look to get your hands on as much data as possible. This may seem daunting, but most of us are sitting on a wealth of data that we either don’t know about, or don’t know how to unlock.