After closing on XANT in August 2021, Aurea announced their intention to rebrand the company to InsideSales to its current customers based on the heritage, trustworthiness and success of the original brand. InsideSales is now a critical pillar in Aurea’s future of commerce solutions portfolio, helping to create B2C-like buying experiences for B2B transactions.

“InsideSales is a storied name in enterprise software,” said Aurea CEO Scott Brighton. “Over the course of 15 years — from 2004 to 2019 — it became one of the most recognizable brands in the industry. We’re excited to honor that track record of success, innovation and commitment to improving how B2B enterprises sell to each other by restoring the classic InsideSales.com brand name immediately.”

Aurea purchased XANT, once valued at a peak of nearly $2 billion, on their quest to create B2C-like buying experiences for B2B transactions. Products like PlayBooks — which optimizes sales representative contact rates through powerful AI — are now critical components of Aurea’s Future of Commerce library.

The library includes more than a dozen software solutions like InsideSales, Infer, and FirstRain, enabling B2B salespeople and marketers to target and engage prospects across the entire sales and marketing funnel more intelligently. InsideSales technology will help bridge the all-important gap between marketing and sales engagement — the initial prospect contact.

As part of the rebrand, the XANT.ai domain and website will be retired in favor of an updated experience at https://www.insidesales.com.

“Data, analytics, and AI capabilities have become integral for success in the sales and marketing space. This partnership with XANT will enhance our revenue acceleration offering to deliver the kind of data-driven customer experiences needed to drive sales today,” said Narasimha Kini, EXL Senior Vice President, and Business Unit Leader. “XANT is a proven innovator when it comes to AI-driven sales platforms. We are proud to bring this solution to market and accelerate the adoption of modern digital selling strategies to power growth and profitability for our clients”

The partnership will also offer XANT and its customers the ability to leverage EXL’s wide-ranging expertise in digital transformation and operations management through implementation and business consulting engagements.

“We are thrilled to have EXL join the XANT partner network. EXL is an innovation leader, and our product and service is better as a result of this partnership,” said Dave Boyce, XANT Chief Strategy Officer. “We look forward to working side by side with the EXL team to drive meaningful results for our customers.”

About EXL

EXL (NASDAQ: EXLS) is a leading operations management and analytics company that helps our clients build and grow sustainable businesses. By orchestrating our domain expertise, data, analytics, and digital technology, we look deeper to design and manage agile, customer-centric operating models to improve global operations, drive profitability, enhance customer satisfaction, increase data-driven insights, and manage risk and compliance. Headquartered in New York, EXL has approximately 31,600 professionals in locations throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, India, the Philippines, Colombia, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. EXL serves customers in multiple industries including insurance, healthcare, banking and financial services, utilities, travel, transportation and logistics, media and retail, among others. For more information, visit www.exlservice.com.

About XANT

XANT offers the leading Enterprise Sales Engagement Platform that accelerates revenue. With Playbooks from XANT, sales professionals increase productivity, optimize customer interactions, and connect to the right buyers. Playbooks manages lead follow-up and prospecting cadences, automates administrative tasks, and uses data to predict who, when, and how to engage buyers for the best outcome—all to set your sales reps up for success. Using Playbooks, thousands of sales teams have been able to accelerate revenue using buyer behavior data and AI—including Groupon, Dell, Sage, Ping Identity, Caesars Entertainment, Pluralsight, Motorola, Fidelity, American Express, and Athena Health. For more information, visit www.insidesales.com.

Our RevOps Summit is coming up on July 14th  and we think you should be there. Here’s why: 

1. Enjoy a wealth of revenue operations knowledge. 

Join this mindshare of revenue operations know-how. Revenue operations (rev ops) is an effective and efficient way to standardize process and accelerate growth within an organization as a whole. Rev ops oversee all revenue impacting activity to ensure actions are intentional. This means that there is data, strategy, and process backing up every activity. At our summit, we’ll dive into what rev ops is, how your team should be using it, what trends to look for in the industry, and more.

2. Hear from speakers who know what they are talking about. 

Hear from over 20 revenue experts from G2 Crowd, RevOps Squared, MarketStar, Canopy, Vidyard, Vengresso, Tenbound, Go Nimbly, and more. Content will cover actionable strategies on revenue operations. Topics include operationalization of an effective sales coaching program, how to stop pitching and start solving, tech in rev ops, helping customers discover what they really want, and more, all from experienced industry professionals. 

List of speakers:

• Matt McNulty, Heads of Rev Ops at Canopy
• Sean Ball, VP of Marketing at DurhamLane
• Mike Weir, CRO at G2 Crowd
• Lorena Morales, Rev Ops Executive at Go Nimbly
• Jen Igartua, CEO at Go Nimbly
• Philip Mickey, Director of Marketing and Rev Ops at MarketStar
• Richard Sgro, General Manager at Modern Sales Pros
• Ryan Breneman, Director of RevOps at ObservePoint
• Nick Siddoway, VP of Sales & Marketing at Primary Intelligence 
• Ray Rike, CEO of RevOps Squared
• Brad Rosen, Head of Sales Operations at Sales Assembly
• Justin Michael, CEO & Founder at Salesborgs.ai
• Michael Pedone, CEO of SalesBuzz
• David Dulaney, CEO of Tenbound
• Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at Upkeep
• Mario Martinez Jr, CEO at Vengreso
• Tyler Lessard, Revenue Operations Lead at Vidyard
• Dave Boyce, Chief Strategy Officer at XANT
• Scott Sutton, VP of Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo 
• Sean Ball, VP of Marketing at DurhamLane
• Steve Richard, Founder of ExecVision
• Tim Wackel, CEO & Founder of ExecVision
• Tyler Lessard, Revenue Operations Lead at Vidyard
• Don Otvos, VP of Revenue Operations at LeanData
• Jen Gergen, Head of Operations at AA-ISP

3. Get ahead of industry trends.

A solid operations team is essential to success in any organization, but revenue operations is a fairly new concept. Revenue operations cover sales and marketing operations for a centralized strategy from the top to the bottom. Some rev ops even go through to customer success and renewals. To put it short, rev ops in the strategy behind the customer journey. And if industry trends have told us anything in the last year, it’s that buyers are in control and they care about the customer experience. In 2020, consumers shifted to value experience overpricing when deciding whether or not to purchase.

4. Invest in your team and your operation. 

Leave with tactics to get better results for your team. Creating a better, smoother process for your customers is a huge investment for your organization. The customer experience is more important and more public than ever. Here are a few stats to really drive that home:

•  93% of consumers say that online reviews influence their decision whether or not to buy. 
• In B2B sales, 92% of buyers say reading a positive review influences them to purchase. Get advice from revenue operations experts on how you can improve your process, create a better experience for your customers, and ultimately impact your bottom line.
• 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Don’t miss out on potential customers and more revenue because of a poor customer experience. Invest now and your bottom line will thank you later.  

5. Connect with other industry professionals. 

This has been a tough year for connections. Even though many of us are virtual, we can still make connections and grow our networks. Expand your circle—hear from a new crowd and learn from the best in the industry. 

6. It’s FREE!

Do we really need to say more about this? It’s free advice from some industry pros. Plus, if you can’t make it to the event live, you can still get access to the recordings—so sign up! 

Convinced yet? Register for the event here.

Revenue operations are the behind-the-scenes happenings in a sales org. Operations (ops) define processes, implement strategies, enable sales teams to do their work, and ultimately drive results. The systematic element of sales allows sales teams to track progress and repeat successes with the knowledge of what activities are working with customers and what activities are wasting reps’ time. Without a revenue operations role, marketing and sales teams would have no strategy and no process. 

The Value of Rev Ops

Operations makes an organization’s actions intentional—meaning there is data, strategy, and process backing everything up. Rev ops ideally cover all revenue-facing processes including the the full sales cycle from the top to the bottom of the funnel. They follow leads through to close and sometimes cover customer renewals in CS.

Many operations suffer from issues related to the all-too-common disconnect between marketing and sales. If these two aren’t working together, they are significantly less powerful. Rev ops marries marketing and sales for a cohesive and efficient experience for buyers. 

Buyers are in control of the modern sales industry—they are increasingly gaining power and they care about consistent, value-adding experiences. Customer experience has quickly a top priority in the sales world. In 2020, consumers notably valued experience over pricing. 

86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience and 93% of consumers say that online reviews influence their decision to buy or not buy. The same trends are found in B2B sales—92% of B2B buyers say they are more likely to purchase after reading a positive review. Providing an easy and enjoyable process for customers is vital for retention and growth. 

Operations should have a thorough understanding of the customer journey, where they are falling off, and what’s working—this gives them the power to master all touchpoints of an account and optimize the whole customer journey as a centralized owner of the process. 

The Issues Rev Ops Teams are Facing 

The enemy of operations is a poor definition or poor execution of process. Operations need to not only define and strategize an effective process but execute and often adapt that process to ensure it is always working for the organization. Coordination is key. 

There are several teams that work directly with sales—sales enablement, customer success, and marketing. Likewise, there are multiple teams that directly support revenue growth and maintenance. The overall mission of each of these teams is to set up customers for long-term success. With that, there often comes some overlap, confusion, and miscommunication when it comes to responsibilities. 

Part of the job of rev ops is to ensure that every department has clear and specific tasks and deliverables. These groups need to plan and coordinate together to avoid overlap. When process starts to break apart and become a Frankenstein, created by different teams only focusing on their team, overlap happens. Rev ops coordinates between teams and departments to streamline and execute process and ultimately avoid overlap so that the whole organization can win and not just one team. 

Where there is no process or methodology, there is no strategy. And what is sales without strategy? Guessing. Random outreach. Hoping for the best.

But as previously mentioned, ill-defined process and randomness is the nightmare of an operations professional. 

Rev Ops: Sales Success is Our Success

A strong revenue operations team creates a clear process, with defined measures of success, and holds teams accountable. When they’re enabled to effectively execute their mandates, it creates a domino effect that leads to consistent revenue, more satisfied customers, and predictable growth. 

Rev ops measures team success with performance-centric goals. Go-to-market teams should be hitting 60% attainment consistently as a baseline. If attainment is lower than this, ops should determine if they are supporting the right channels, modeling the ideal customer profiles, and implementing an effective strategy. The ideal machine that rev ops runs through process is based on volume on the right activity—the more volume or greater sample size, the more predictable it becomes. 

Both sales enablement and revenue operations are measured through revenue attainments. Tying them together can help to close communication gaps and ultimately lead to the success of the sales team. 

Ops teams traditionally rely on basic territory planning and account planning for an initial prioritization, but there isn’t really much prioritization strategy beyond that initial plan for more organizations. Certain tools, like Playbooks, use data and buyer intelligence to help you know what to prioritize for the best planning. 

Rev Ops Tools 

Consistency of the sales motion is key. There are several tools that can enable operations to consistently track progress, implement processes, and execute strategy—the top one being CRM. Everyone who is successful in a rev ops role capitalizes on the CRM. CRM adoption and data integrity are vital, they create a common source of truth that everyone in the company can rely on.

Visibility into the entire revenue funnel to understand the customer journey is a must for operations strategy. Rev ops need to know what happens as a lead progresses the funnel.   

Tracking is also extremely important for operations. To perfect their sales process, they need to know what’s working, what’s not, and where people are dropping out. Reps are often tasked with logging activity in the CRM, and when that logged information is incorrect or unreadable—any decisions made off of it are unreliable. Too many teams shoot themselves in the foot this way. Reliable CRM integrations ensure that nothing goes unlogged or incorrectly tracked. No more bad, siloed or duplicated data. The CRM becomes a one-stop source of truth. 

Be Elite With Playbooks

Playbooks was built with operational effectiveness in mind. Leaders get more visibility into reps’ performance and outcomes. They can easily enhance workflows with automation and compliance, track progress, make decisions backed by data from native CRM reporting packages. 

Standardize and structured workflows through PLaybooks ensure that process is not forgotten and that work is done in a consistent manner.  

Playbooks gives them a better window into the weak points of a process, the black holes, and the areas in which to double down. You don’t have to worry about the waste of random acts of selling the risks of operating without clear processes and controls. Reps are guided to the next best activity and the next best contact through a guided sales experience.

RevOps Summit

Looking to become a rev ops expert? XANT is hosting an upcoming RevOps Summit featuring several industry experts and operations professionals. This event is virtual and completely free. Tune in on July 14th from 9 AM to 12 PM PT to hear more about the behind-the-scenes work of operations and how they can dramatically impact your results. Register for the summit here.

Of course… the data isn’t always spot on. 

B2B buyers are completely digital and in control.

Buyers are used to having the information and resources they need to build their own criteria. And they are harder to reach than ever. 

Random acts of selling are inefficient and unpredictable. Reps guess at what’s important and what to do. Don’t be that guy: 

Managers respond by getting them to just do more stuff, then call it productivity. 

Don’t confuse busy with productive or effective. Waste scales as well. 

Without process or insights, sellers target randomly and often target the wrong people altogether. They look busy, but it won’t lead to consistent results. 

Too often reps get deep into a deal only to be surprised they haven’t looped in all the right people.

What they really need is not more, at first, but better. Then more of what works.

Use your selling time for, well selling. Move from guessing to guided. 

Scale what works best.

Stop guessing. Start selling. 

For more content like this, follow us on Linked In. 

Our relationships with brands changed once we got our hands on smartphones. Brands consumed huge amounts of data to understand us and to give us relevant suggestions. And we discovered we could do a lot of things on our own. We have more control and don’t depend on human intervention as much.

Today, B2B buyers are completely digital. They do their own research. They create their own criteria. They talk to people in their own networks. They don’t bring vendors in until the very end. They sit in larger committees. They use more channels. 

And they’re harder to catch if you don’t know where or how to look.

So reps make a lot of guesses and don’t hit quota. How do brands respond? They squeeze out more activity from reps, but then call it productivity. The thing is, it’s not productive. It’s just guessing at scale. 

Stop guessing. Stop doing more of what doesn’t work. Start doing what buyers do intuitively: guide actions with provable recommendations and automation. 

Consumer technologies blend intelligence and automation together behind the scenes to do this. They deliberately craft experiences for us that are buyer-centric (us-centric). We create similar guided experiences for our customers on Playbooks, and we do it in ways that are unique for sales engagement. 

Cadence alone is now table stakes. Sales engagement is somewhat of a commodity. But with the right kinds of automation, a reliable and compliant system, and with intelligence about your buyers’ behaviors, you can go beyond guessing at scale and start guiding your selling. 

That’s where Playbooks lives. So, if you wanted to know How is Playbooks different and how does XANT create guided sales experiences for customers, here are the foundational pieces:

1. Integration
2. Automation
3. Telephony
4. Compliance
5. Buyer Intelligence
6. Reporting and scorecards
7. Speed-to-lead

1. INTEGRATION

The way we approach integrations on Playbooks amplifies the investments you’ve already made in CRM. We don’t try to duplicate the CRM itself. 

Works Out of the Box with Your Customized CRM Setup

You have a customized CRM environment. If you have reliable connections between your sales tools and CRM, you spend less time and money on maintenance, on removing data silos and duplicate records, on performing manual tasks that should be automated.

Most solutions require a ton of mapping to CRM, then market it as “flexibility”. What it really means in practice is constant maintenance and more cost. If you make a change to CRM, you have to update your mapping…every time. You own the burden of calibrating both systems regularly. Some vendors compound the problem by letting users create records outside of CRM and take actions without syncing back. 

Most can’t sustain this, so they don’t. The quality of those connections decays and becomes unreliable. 

This is how data silos emerge. Sales starts working exclusively outside of Salesforce. Marketing creates duplicates inside of Salesforce. Sales blames Marketing for feeding them crap leads. Marketing blames Sales for not working leads. An eternal revenue tug of war ensues.

We avoid all of this. Once Playbooks is plugged in, you never have to touch the integration.

Better Reporting Because We Don’t Place Arbitrary Caps on Fields 

A sub-par CRM integration means you have to cap the # of CRM fields you can scan and sync. High-quality integration = no caps.

There are no caps with Playbooks. We built our tech natively around Salesforce and have reinforced it over 15+ years with heavy investments in security and reliability using, in part, custom tools (meaning their tools for diagnosing and fixing problems weren’t adequate so we built our own and they’re great). 

We’ve reached the point where we can automatically monitor and update everything. In fact, there are more than 25 additional cadence-level and outcome level fields in CRM we constantly scan and update, and even alert reps of changes based on their own rules. Nobody else does this. It matters because it means you get better visibility.

For example, if one of your reps calls on the task object in salesforce from Playbooks, we’ll report back to salesforce when the call was made, how many rings the rep waited, the duration of the call, which campaign it came from, etc. Others simply load disparate details onto the subject line of the task object, which you can’t report off of. 

Remember: high-quality integration = no caps.

Better Automation and Lead Response 

The quality of your integrations directly affects the quality of your automation. Playbooks customers can create automation rules for almost every workflow. 

Take lead response as an example. The old way (or the way other solutions work) for managing inbound leads is when a new lead is created, a manager or an admin has to manually assign it to individual reps. Once assigned, everyone else is locked out.

What if the rep is on vacation or sick leave? What if they fall behind? What if the manager or admin is backed up because of an influx? 

Instead, we automatically assign records for personal or shared ownership, auto round-robin leads until someone takes action, kick leads out from an assigned rep back to a shared pool based on elapsed time without action, etc. 

When your chances of connecting and converting inbound leads decreases by 8X after 5 min, responding quickly is no longer a nice-to-have. Your speed-to-lead is only as good as your integration quality and automation capabilities.

Near-Perfect Uptime and Reliability Because We Don’t Recreate CRM

Always on and always working. That’s our standard. It’s hard to do when you try to recreate all the integrations that already exist in CRM.  

SaaS vendors often try to integrate not just with CRM but with everything. The questions you should ask are: Which are the right integrations? and Do they work? 

What are the right integrations? Unless it directly improves the user experience, all you’re doing is taking resources away from your CRM integration, exposing your connections to additional points of potential failure, and exposing your data to security risks.

It also aggravates the putrid sore of data silos and duplication errors. 

For example, your intent data platform already syncs to Salesforce. Playbooks automatically watches for field changes prompted by intent scoring to trigger actions based on rules. Sales tech that duplicates these integrations creates overlap and complicates the data sync to Salesforce because now you’re pushing and pulling the same information between three separate systems.

Simplify, and scale surgically if it improves the experience.

Do More From Any Object

The value of sales execution technologies, and specifically sales engagement, is in the actions you can take. The better the integration, the more fields they automatically map to, the more quality actions you can do.

Some technologies limit actions to just two CRM objects: Leads and Contacts. But don’t some reps work off of Opportunities? In the account-based world, isn’t it more common to plan around Accounts rather than Leads? Don’t some CSMs work off of Cases? 

We give you the flexibility to build workflows off any object that best fits your processes.

Integrations matter. 

2. AUTOMATION

When you think about all the data, systems, and processes we expect sellers to work through while demanding consistency, is it any surprise we end up with so much waste and guessing in sales?

If there’s no clear process, reps will make one up. If reps don’t know who to sell to, they’ll work down a list. No buyer insights >> lose time researching. Poor data sync >> manual logging and data silos. No CRM monitoring >> lose sight of key events. No auto lead assigning >> leads go cold.   

The promised land would be for reps to spend all their time engaging and selling to real buyers. You cannot get close to that without automation. We’re not talking about building an email spamming engine. This is about facilitating sellers to do less of what distracts and more of what works. Let robots set the guardrails.

Accurate Data Entry

Playbooks automatically captures and records data to and from any CRM field. No arbitrary field caps (I’ll repeat that a few times). No complex mapping. It simply plugs into your customized CRM instance, monitors every field, interprets the field type and updates. Once in, you never have to mess with it. Remarkably, this is uncommon, or at least unreliable, for sales tech.

For example, those 25 more fields we update in CRM for every interaction, beyond what other platforms do, gives you better reporting. 

For example, if a rep calls on the task object in Salesforce from Playbooks, it will report back to Salesforce when the call was made, how many rings the rep waited, the duration of the call, which campaign it came from, etc. Other platforms simply load disparate details onto the subject line of the task object, which you can’t report off of effectively. 

Seamless Engagement Off Any Object

Playbooks supports workflows off any object, not just the Lead or Contact objects. We don’t restrict which objects you use—work how you want, aligned to your processes and your ideal motion. Automation makes it easier.

For example, a CSM can auto-enroll customers, who are 3-6 months out from a renewal, into a renewal Play (cadence or sequence in Playbooks) so they can stay ahead of customer contracts instead of playing a traditional reactive game. 

Deal Progression

Process matters in digital selling. There are usually a few standardized processes in most funnels. Defining how deals progress is one thing; having automation facilitate deal engagement, and progress deals from Play to Play is next level.

For example, your AEs can enroll Opportunities into Plays based on distinct sales stages. Playbooks will automatically trigger the Opportunity to jump from stage to stage by Play based on changes in the Opportunity status. It will even prioritize the opportunities most likely to close so you don’t waste time chasing bad deals. 

Auto Record Enrollment

Auto-enroll records (Accounts, Leads, Contacts, Cases, Opportunities) into Plays using rules based on any criteria you choose. If a Play is successful, Automation Robots in Playbooks will automatically enroll other similar records into that same Play—creating a repeatable motion. You can also apply tiered rules to include things like prioritizing records by score.

For example, speed-to-lead matters. You can easily calibrate an Automation Robot to automatically enroll new demo or pricing requests into the appropriate Play and alert reps to take action.

Flexibility with Shared and Personal Records to Improve Speed to Lead

No other platform automatically assigns records for either individual rep ownership or as part of a Shared Record. With Shared Records, leads and contacts are placed in shared pools for any rep to work—Playbooks will automatically round-robin those records until someone takes action, or kick individually assigned records back to the shared pool if a rep doesn’t take action in time. 

For example, when there’s an influx of leads, managers and admins can get backed up manually assigning them out. Playbooks will automatically designate them as Shared. Or if a rep is out sick, instead of locking the rest of the team out, set a time-based rule to automatically kick records back into a shared pool.

Alerts and Activity Triggers Keep Teams Engaged

CRM change alerts and activity triggers keep reps from missing out on key events. Playbooks monitors all CRM fields and updates information in both systems (without arbitrary field caps like on other platforms). Create rules for the types of alerts reps receive and the actions an event should trigger.

For example, reps can juggle a lot of opportunities simultaneously. They may unintentionally let some slip through the cracks. You can set Playbooks to alert reps to take action on an opportunity if there’s been no activity for several days.

Buyer Behavior Insights and Predictions Including Smart Email Send 

(much more on Buyer Intelligence below)

Playbooks runs several buyer-specific algorithms that predict behaviors and offer insights, including the level of buying influence of a contact at a company, their channel preference, verified contact information, and the best time to send them an email.

For emails, as an example, reps can either pre-select a time to send emails or they can enable SmartSend, which predicts when the recipient is most likely to respond. Customers see an average of 23% lift in contact rates from this feature alone. It also recommends verified email addresses to replace bounced emails you have on file.

In the era of modern digital selling, robust automation is an essential mechanism to create guided sales experiences. Embrace it like a warm blanket to improve how sellers and buyers interact. Most treat automation as a means for getting stuff done. Think quality first, then you can scale. 

3. TELEPHONY

Dialing works. People who say cold calling is dead just aren’t good at it. High performers use what works best for the situation—not just what they’re comfortable with. They figure out what mix is most likely to get a positive outcome. 

But…different buyers respond to different channels. This means you need as many weapons in your arsenal as you can effectively manage, including reliable telephony. Reliable means it works when you need it and how you need it. 

An outage, bad call quality, systems not playing nice with one another, or any other issue that affects your customers’ phone experience, can all result in missed revenue.

We built the first dialing technology in 2004 and authored the IP that currently supports all digital sales tech (i.e. click-to-call, immediate response, inbound call paths, next record, etc). As part of that pioneering work, we created our own telephony backbone. 

That lets us do telephony differently from all other vendors. We can afford to offer customers flexibility with three options:

1. Process phone calls on our telephony
2. Run an SIP integration from our telephony 
3. Make calls through your computer (WebRTC)

1. Process Calls on Our Telephony 

The first option uses direct connections to traditional carriers around the globe from your existing phone system. It supports better call quality and faster speeds to resolve issues than other setups. 

Third-party telephony providers are discount services. Tech vendors who only plug into them can’t resolve any telephony-related tickets directly—they route their customers’ to the provider, adding customer tickets to a global backlog. We connect directly to carriers globally and thus have unlimited flexibility to reroute calls as needed or to simply address issues without delay. 

2. SIP Integration From our Telephony

The second option uses a SIP integration from our telephony to connect to your local networks and PBX to facilitate calls. It can bring massive cost savings. Using your networks and PBX means none of the telephony goes through XANT, so we don’t charge you anything for it. But it requires a fairly technical integration that typically only large complex businesses can accommodate. 

3. WebRTC

The third telephony option is dialing from your computer, which has become more common and is now available through Playbooks. If your reps work from home and place outbound calls from their cell phones, as an example, call quality can be unpredictable and at the very least inconsistent. Think of all those sellers who are now selling from a basement office or their high-rise apartment. 

It’s by no means a perfect solution to the problem of poor and inconsistent call quality because it’s dependent on your internet speeds. But, computer-based calling can be a convenient, low-cost alternative when other solutions prove inadequate.

4. COMPLIANCE

Sales reps never ask themselves before a call, “Am I adequately compliant to call this person?” They rightly expect systems to do that. It would be impossible for any seller engaging prospects and customers in multiple regions to be familiar with the standards of compliance in every city, state, and country in which their customers operate.

And legal factors aren’t the only ones to consider. Are your sellers consistently compliant with your team’s processes? Are they delivering the right message? Do they consistently follow sales best practices of persistency, immediacy, etc? Do they adhere to system policies, like accurately maintaining activity logs in CRM?

You cannot ignore any of them. All of them can influence your performance and reputation. And no individual can stay on top of them without help.

With Compliance Comes an Abundance of Nuance

There’s regulatory nuance from state to state, region to region, and so on. How do you avoid creating roadblocks for reps, while keeping your company compliant and safe from fines, legal issues, or from simply developing a bad reputation with your potential clients? 

It’s complicated—you have to ensure you follow data and security compliance, call compliance, email compliance, CRM compliance, while aligning to the codes of the locations you are prospecting into. 

For example, Pioneer Day in Utah on July 24th is a state holiday on which vendors are not allowed to prospect. But if you’re not from Utah, there’s no way you’re going to know that. 

Not All Potential Snares Are Legal But They Still Matter

Then, of course, there are the unique sets of standards, processes, and protocols your business wants to enforce.

For example, you have those situations that could expose you to a sort of insensitivity, and leave your brand looking tone-deaf, like prospecting into a region that is currently in a state of emergency due to a natural disaster.

Compliance also has to do with adhering to best practices and to process—following your team’s predetermined sequences of engagement, of opportunity progression, or just staying aligned to your strategic narrative. Creating a consistent and compliant culture leads to predictable results.

A Foundation for Compliance on Playbooks

Most other sales solutions don’t adequately consider all facets of compliance, including the items you’ll see on the next page. But we built Playbooks with an architecture designed to support an expanding spectrum of seamlessly deployed capabilities to help you stay compliant in all ways that matter to your business. 

In the end, this should result in helping sellers connect with buyers faster and in more effective ways. It’s about establishing a sales system that helps reps succeed through consistent and reliable workflows with peace of mind for them and their customers.

Playbooks + Compliance 

You won’t get a return on your sales tech investments, or amplify the value of CRM, from user features alone. The architectures supporting the platforms you adopt have to meet a high bar of compliance requirements. From data governance and security to platform availability, there are a number of must-have components that, in the current landscape, you simply can’t afford to operate without.

Call Compliance

• Configuration with regional call recording and monitoring restrictions
• Call recording access restrictions
• Local call restrictions configurations 
• Do not call restriction configurations
• Dynamic call record pausing
• Call recording API’s
• One-to-one dialing

Email Compliance 

• Email opt-out and email blacklisting
• Email send limits
• Detect invalid email addresses and prevent spam scores from increasing
• Do not track configuration
• Invalid email address detection
• Custom  and locked email templates 
• Merge fields and placeholder fields

Data Compliance

• Encrypt data in transit and at rest
• Anonymize data in use
• Control over feature access, data storage and data access, email tracking, calendaring data, etc.
• Preservation of customer data sovereignty by global region
• Permission group configurations
• SOC2 certification with policies baselined against industry security protocols (ISO, NIST, CoBIT)

Workflow Compliance

• Workflow adherence reporting
• Custom sorts to enforce priority levels based on rules or scores
• Skip reporting to see if and where reps skip steps and what the impact is
• Play Adherence Reporting to see how many activities reps complete in Plays

CRM Compliance

• CRM merge field limits
• Customers have control over which fields are shared with Playbooks
• CRM sync logs
• Customizable sync controls
• API limit toggles
• Uncapped CRM field scans and updates

See the full list of Playbooks compliance features here. 

5. BUYER INTELLIGENCE 

Buyer Intelligence is…intelligence about your buyers. 

Selling is like steering a boat at night through fog. You need a lighthouse to navigate. Buyers are your lighthouse, but they regularly change their positions and behaviors. Catching their signals gets you where you need to go.

How do we tap into their signals for our customers? 

First, we collect data from every interaction and outcome that takes place on our platform. That’s thousands of sellers interacting with millions of buyers across billions of actions all leading to either closed-won or closed-lost deals. 

Second, we use AI to mine for relevant signals about their behaviors from the data: are they influencers, are the decision-makers, what channels do they prefer, when do they engage, who else do they buy with, etc. 

Next, once we harness those signals, we anonymize and encrypt them, then validate them against third-party data. 

And last, we serve them up to reps automatically in Playbooks in the form of verified recommendations and scores. 

That’s Buyer Intelligence.

We Make Intelligence a Seamless Part of the UX in Playbooks

Even though we’re only scratching the surface, what we’ve built so far changes the game. Here are a few examples of Buyer Intelligence woven into the Playbooks experience:

PeopleFinder // Identifies additional people in the buying group, their roles, their level of influence, their contact information, and their engagement patterns

Buyer Hints // Insight into buyer profiles, purchasing behaviors, influence at the account, and recommendations for how best to engage

Verified Contact Data // Verified email and phone contact information, along with a timestamp for when it was last used successfully

Data Append // Appends enriched contact information into individual records in CRM

Mobile Recommend // Detects and recommends verified mobile phone numbers

Smart Email Send // Recommends the best time to send emails based on actual email open rates

Scoring // Scoring the likelihood of leads and contacts to engage and the likelihood of accounts and opportunities to close

The Flexibility to Control What Happens Next 

The flexibility we’ve built into Playbooks Automation and Intelligence allows customers to easily Prioritize how their teams work. 

• Create and adjust prioritized activities using rules, scores, or a combination of both to enforce the next best action.

• Quickly create custom sorts to prioritize daily tasks with up to 6 different rules.

• Filter tasks by activity type, record type, status, time zone, or by a combination of criteria.

• Give your managers control to set up Play structures with multiple sorts.

• Don’t just work off of static lists. Don’t settle on manual activities when there’s an alternative. And don’t invest in more guessing. Be deliberate about doing the best things next.

Great soft skills, grit and persistency are still essential. But you can also get that extra bit of advantage from technology and Buyer Intelligence to make your team more buyer-centric and to achieve predictable results.

6. REPORTING AND SCORECARDS

You can’t make something better until you know what’s working and what’s not working. Managers tell us all the time that they hate how much effort goes into building reports and tracking down data just to measure performance, hold people accountable, and get marketing and sales aligned. They repeat the process weekly, sometimes daily, but the data is often incomplete and inaccurate. 

Vendors promise actionable reporting and clear visibility, but it never quite measures up. The problem is made worse any time their tools behave like shadow CRMs. 

For example, if a tool lets reps take actions outside of CRM, stores data in separate silos, or populates in-app reports, all without fully syncing back—you’ll end up with a data integrity problem. That will create a reporting problem. One system of record is plenty to maintain. Two just exaggerates friction.

Sellers should sell and managers should coach. You should be able to dedicate more time to individual development and strategy—but that requires having the right insights.

Pre-Built Native CRM Reporting

We plug into your system of record natively and push data updates to all affected fields, without caps or downtime. Once again, the key is in the integration. Playbooks works with your customized CRM instance and doesn’t require a ton of mapping to get set up. 

Most systems require maintenance for the connections on both ends. It’s not easy, so teams don’t keep their bi-directional integrations current. It breaks down the data sync and decentralizes data stores. 

It’s not just that Playbooks automatically scans every field and updates those 25+ additional fields. It’s also that we deploy it in custom reporting packages pre-loaded into CRM, with performance insights. This means that whatever you need to see is in the CRM, and whoever needs to see it only has to open it up.

In-App Reporting, Scorecards, & Leaderboards

There are quick views into rep activity and performance for managers in Playbooks. These reporting dashboards aren’t disconnected from what you’ll find in CRM. They’re a simplified control center from which you can quickly assess what’s happening across your team. 

Gamification has always been an important part of keeping reps engaged and motivated. In Playbooks, you can set up Scorecards with custom KPI’s for the metrics you care about most. Personal Leaderboards show a team’s progress towards a goal and reward those that excel. Recognize reps who go beyond to serve your customers and use the insights to enforce better engagement and process adoption along the way. 

Sample Reporting 

TASK AND EVENT REPORTS

See all activities by team and by rep, adherence to Plays and templates, and results

STRATEGY REPORTS

Measure Plays and step adoption, effectiveness, rep progress, and outcomes.

INBOUND CALL METRICS

Measure wait times, grouped or batched, for inbound calls across time of day

EMAIL REPORTS

Measure email and template usage, replies, bounces, and overall engagement.

ACCOUNT PENETRATION

Measure overall activity level and effectiveness at penetrating accounts

ACTIVITY DASHBOARDS

Quickly see team performance and activity impact

IN-APP REPORTS

Drill into team and rep activity, Play and template adoption, including prospecting results, directly from Playbooks Reports

7. SPEED TO LEAD

Half of buyers still choose the vendor that responds first. What does ‘first’ mean in practice?

From our research on 6 million marketing leads across all industries, conversion rates are 8X higher within 5 minutes, contact rates are 2.5X higher within the first 2 hours, and win rates are 7.5X higher when a rep attempts to engage within the first few hours compared to waiting more than a week. 

Speed-to-lead is a big deal. It’s a matter of minutes and hours, not days.

The way buyers behave—doing their own research, talking to their own networks, creating their own criteria—means sellers have a very narrow window to respond to buying signals. 

But most businesses aren’t instrumented in the first place to get their fast, or at all. 79% of inbound leads are never touched. Reps only attempt to engage 9% within the first two hours. There’s a good chance you’re leaving a lot of cheddar on the table. 

Hot leads to turn cold real quick. Managers and admins get backed up manually assigning leads. Reps let things pile up. Teams get locked out of good leads when someone is sick or on vacation. And leaders can’t see well enough into their businesses to know what they’re missing!

Playbooks makes getting their first much easier. And it starts with Robots.

Doing Things Humans Don’t Need to Do With Playbooks Automation Robots

The more manual tasks a team has, the more waste they’ll create. It’s science. Not every essential task requires a human touch. But we make humans touch them.

Take assigning leads, as an example. Most sales tech requires the manager or admin to manually assign leads to individual owners (why only to individuals? we’ll cover that next). If you have an influx in demo requests, that manager or admin will fall behind in manually assigning leads to the team. Interest wanes by the minute.

Or take teams getting locked out of leads. If a rep is sick or is on vacation, any records assigned to that rep sit in a digital vault. Most tech can’t pull those records out or reassign them. With a window of minutes and hours, this can be a death nail. 

For most vendors, this gap is partly due to below-par CRM integrations, and partly due to not understanding sales motions. 

If the underlying automation in your tech can’t support the simple use cases above (among others), you’re operating below your potential. 

Level up with Robots. 

Auto-Assign Leads and Keep Reps on Rails

This is pretty straightforward. You don’t need to manually assign leads. Robots can do that work instantly, or whenever you want them to. Basically, if you can say it out loud, Robots can make it happen. 

Here’s how it works. Robots query all CRM fields every 10 minutes by default, but for an immediate response, it happens in real-time. This means you can calibrate Playbooks to recognize urgent inbound marketing leads (demo requests, pricing requests, etc) as requiring an immediate response so that as soon as it lands in Salesforce, Robots will enroll them in Plays and assign them. 

Even in scenarios with existing customers, where you’re not concerned about net new buyer signals, this is handy. Let’s say your CSMs manage large portfolios of customers, each with unique contract start and end dates. Set a rule for a Robot to auto-enroll accounts 3-6 months prior to their renewal date so the rep doesn’t lose sight of their book of business. 

Shared Records and Auto Round-Robin Leads

Now we get into one of the unique hallmarks of Playbooks Automation: Shared Records for speed-to-lead. And it extends the value of our Personal Records and Urgent Tasks capabilities already available in Playbooks. 

With Shared & Personal Records, you can automatically assign strategic leads and accounts to individual reps, or keep them unassigned—placed in a Shared bucket for anyone to work. 

Urgent tasks for either Personal or Shared Records will get prioritized, automatically alerting reps when tasks are soon-to-be-due or overdue.

Time-based rules can be calibrated to pull Personal Records into a Shared Records pool if the assigned rep doesn’t take action quickly enough. 

Urgent Tasks on a Shared Record will round-robin automatically from rep to rep until somebody jumps on it.

No more bottlenecks.

No more manual processes.

No more unnecessary delays.

Just speed-to-lead. And a much higher chance of closing deals.

Speed-to-lead used to be more of a priority when teams generally accepted high-velocity selling motions. We’ve let those muscles atrophy in the last few years. It’s time to rebuild and retool.

_____________________

Embrace the new (and always changing) digital landscape with tools designed for it. Playbooks is built for the modern seller—guiding them to reach the modern buyer. No need to guess at what works, with Playbooks your actions are backed by data, and you connect with more of the right people in an efficient way, to ultimately create more predictable results. Learn more about Playbooks and give it a spin here.  

As organizations solidify their plans for the new buying landscape, sales leaders are adapting to the new normal. Many of the changes that happened in the past year are likely here to stay, and that has huge implications for sales teams that have had to go back to the drawing board on their sales organization and sales motions.

Since the landscape has changed dramatically in the past year, here’s what changed about the traditional inside sales vs. outside sales conversation and how sales are building new, digitally enabled teams, no matter where they set up their workspace.

The Death of the Conference Room Meeting

Some constructs of field selling are canonical, like conference room meetings and stakeholder meetings. Field reps work to get stakeholders into one room, where the decision-making happens between the champion, boss, and the approver. Before COVID-19, the conference meeting was earned once or twice over a 6-9 months sales cycle, but post-COVID, it’s earned zero times because conference rooms aren’t an option.  

Field reps need the same level of visibility they’d have in a conference room without insisting that it looks just like it used to. And, truthfully, buyers never really liked the conference room meeting anyway. The challenge for field reps is to create and deploy a process that is buyer-friendly but still gets things done.

Creating a digital conference room goes beyond Zoom calls. Sales reps need to create systems that allow them to get the visibility they would have if they were in the room. They can identify who is not in the room but should be, and create action plans and next steps for stakeholders.

Digital field reps will develop an ability to manage mutual action plans or “close plans” in a digital way. All of the same steps that happened in the field through emailed spreadsheets and word documents need to take place digitally in real-time: information security review, legal review, design review, sign-off from finance on ROI, etc.

Embracing Change and Changing Biases

When it comes to adapting sales teams to the new normal, bias from experience will be sales leaders’ worst enemy. The book many seasoned reps swore by has now been thrown out. The true risk for sales leaders is believing they have it all figured out. For teams to succeed today, they’ll have to forget their biases and embrace change.

For field reps who have become digital field reps, adapting to digital tools and engaging with the customer using those tools will be critical. Buyers are digitally native and frequent, asynchronous communications are the norm. Sales leaders who can step up to that challenge and play in a digital environment will be more productive than ever before. Investment in tools that allow sales reps to see their territories at a high level as well as engage in authentic, personal, and natural conversations with buyers will be key to making this happen.

Inside sales leaders will need to stretch their teams as well. As many teams are asked to do more with less, inside sales reps will need to work larger deals and step into a multi-stakeholder process. As they expand into enterprise-level deals, they’ll learn to manage longer sales cycles and stretch into selling more products and more complex products and services from the inside.

Sales leaders for any team, no matter how it is configured, must loosen up on definitions of standard operating procedure.

Strategic vs. Transactional Selling

The definitions between inside and outside selling have converged. However, there is still a relevant distinction related to the characteristics of the sales cycle. Many sales leaders continue to think about sales teams as inside vs. outside when the conversation has shifted to strategic (enterprise) vs. transactional selling.

This shift in terminology matters because even though field reps have been working from home, they didn’t become inside sellers. They continue to use their unique and valuable skillsets to work digitally.

A successful outside sales rep today embraces technology and uses the right tools. They have seen and embraced the shift in buying behavior and are using it to their advantage. For teams that can leverage their experience and expand their range of tools, they will be prepared to meet the challenges ahead.

As sales leaders consider their modern sales teams, it’s important to let go of the idea that the selling landscape will return to normal. The challenges that many teams face will not be solved the same way as before. Sales reps should pick up new, digital tools and processes that enable them to engage with customers and their territories in new, creative ways. And, as the rules of engagement continue to change, the sales leaders who can adapt first will be the ones who win. 

As part of the Playbooks Buyer Intelligence suite, PeopleFinder identifies individuals who may be part of the buying group, contacts that hold similar positions or were involved in similar deals, their influence and role in an account, and other relevant insights. It then provides verified recommendations from those insights, even if the contacts are not in the reps’ CRM.

Buyer Intelligence has long been a cutting-edge differentiator for XANT. It uses insights from all interactions on the platform to build comprehensive buyer profiles. Insights are then verified with third-party data, anonymized, and encrypted to preserve personal information.

“PeopleFinder saves reps from wasting valuable selling time looking for prospects or targeting the wrong ones,” says Chris Harrington, CEO of XANT. “A rep can log on and immediately get contacts recommended that are relevant to their most recent targeting, additional members of the buying committee, or existing contracts that are up for renewal. No time is wasted, they just go straight to selling.”

“We saw a need in the sales industry to connect reps to buyers faster,” comments Mark Littlefield, VP of Product Management at XANT. “PeopleFinder automatically gives reps new contacts regularly right in their Playbooks menu. They can immediately have the contacts’ name, title, account, company, role in the buying committee, and any phone number or email connected with that contact before them. No more wasted time, just connecting with prospects. It’s a massive time-saver for reps.”

Find more information on PeopleFinder and Playbooks here.

THE PROBLEM: 

Sales reps spend on average 35.2% (or ⅓) of their time selling. That’s only 14-hours in a 40-hour workweek. Meaning they spend nearly 65% of their time on other activities—including looking for contacts. 

Even when they have contacts, reps can still run into time-wasting roadblocks like targeting the wrong prospects or getting deep into a deal only to find there are other important members of buying committee that they haven’t considered.

So, how do you ensure reps aren’t wasting time and focusing on the right contacts? 

That’s why we crafted PeopleFinder. 

THE SOLUTION: 

PeopleFinder provides intelligent contact recommendations to reps reducing wasted time and quickly connecting reps with the prospects most likely to engage. 

The number of people in the buying committee has surged in recent years, leaving many reps to fall short of closing deals simply because they don’t reach enough of the right people. For example, if you have two key contacts on file, Playbooks will identify and provide contact information (validated with third-party data) for additional decision-makers who can influence the deal—significantly increasing your chances of closing the deal. This contact information comes with information about the individual such as their level of influence, role in the deal, etc. 

HOW IT WORKS:

When a rep logs onto Playbooks, there is a yellow, clickable “NEW” on the menu—when clicked it provides all-new, recommended contacts that haven’t been used yet. 

PeopleFinder is a massive time saver that solves the issues of reps wasting time looking for contacts or tracking down the wrong ones. XANT’s Buyer Intelligence draws from the records of all users of XANT tech to build buyer profiles and identify individuals who might be part of the buying group or other contacts information for other similar personas—this information is then verified with third-party data. Recommendations include contacts outside of their CRM.

Simply put: PeopleFinder suggests the next best person to contact, additional members of the buying group, and provides their level of influence in the deal to help reps get to selling faster and close more deals. 

PeopleFinder is the secret superpower your reps need to get more of the right things done. Demo Playbooks today to learn more about PeopleFinder, Buyer Intelligence, and what your team needs to take the guessing work out of selling and close more deals. 

High-performing SDR teams focus on the fundamentals — rapid lead follow-up, better lead quality, proper automation implementation, and optimization of processes. Instead of constantly doing more of the same motions to build pipe, they’re focused on building systems that utilize data and their SDRs’ productivity to its full potential.

The Variables of Successful SDR Teams

SDR organizations spent 2020 adjusting to remote and digital selling. Equipping and supporting a remote workforce quickly took time and effort. Many SDR organizations have adapted to these changes and are focused on understanding their new normal.

Understanding the activities that matter most to your business and your sales cycle can help guide your strategic plan. Our research found that the top 50% of the attainment group prioritized dials, emails, and some social selling techniques. These variables should be taken in context with other data like customer needs and buying cycles.

The benefit of analyzing this data is to understand which activities provide the best outcome and then push your SDR teams to prioritize the tasks that matter and stop wasting time on the tasks that underperform.

Less Hunting, More Targeted Outreach

An SDR’s time is valuable. Putting their skills to the best use means nurturing contacts that are most interested and most likely to want to continue a conversation with sales rather than hounding uninterested leads.

Automation tools and honing in on lead scoring to identify the best contacts is one way SDR teams can make sure their activities yield the best result. Our research found that when it comes to sales types, quota attainment remains fairly consistent. However, marketing SDR teams succeed best when they’re in lead/contact-based teams.

Regardless of team focus, SDRs achieve attainment when they’re talking to interested prospects. Doing the work ahead of the first contact by scoring leads properly, generating interest through marketing, and building automation allows SDRs the time they need to focus on the contacts most likely to close.

Replace Guessing with Guided Sales Engagement

The first step to a successful SDR team is knowing your unknowns: which actions garner the best results, what do your teams need to be successful, how do you find and nurture the contacts that want to hear from you? To answer these questions, you need data to counteract gut instincts and insights where your SDRs and reps can use them the most. Then your SDRs can move from haphazard and indiscriminate sales activities to the ones that work.

Playbooks by XANT gives your sales leaders the visibility, accountability, reporting, and guidance they need to make reps their most effective. Instead of spamming contacts with email or endless cold calling prospects that aren’t interested, SDRs can spend time on the most important tasks and be more creative and targeted in their outreach. Automation takes onerous manual tasks off their plate and lets them do more with less effort and better results.

Building a successful SDR team relies on good strategy, structure, and data. Reaching attainment in the new sales landscape will take creativity, experimentation, and a robust system that can support your team no matter where or how they work.