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.  

When the *stuff* hits the fan, most will double down on what they’re already doing, but with a little more grit, more snarling, more sweat.

In sales, we mistakenly call this productivity, but really it’s a synonym for increasing activity. What’s really going on is movement without direction. 

Battle strategists will tell you that when faced with unforeseen obstacles (i.e. COVID), operate with more fluidity, reevaluate positions and objectives and take practical measures in face of the present, not the ideal.

In sales, this looks like figuring out what really works, what’s really worth your time, and scaling that, instead of just scaling—doing more of what works, rather than just more of the same.

Last year sucked for everyone. A lot of black holes and misalignments were exposed. The silver lining, though, is that sales teams began to embrace technology as a means for structuring and guiding sales rep’s effectiveness, more than they had before. 

Leaders suddenly needed better visibility. They realized they couldn’t operate remote teams very well without data or process. 

These are signs people have begun to reevaluate strategies and to operate with more fluidity.

Product teams face the same challenge. Fortunately, at XANT, we had already built a platform to support the future of sales. That future just came a lot sooner than anyone thought. 

So, like our customers, we reevaluated objectives. We spoke with hundreds of customers and prospects, looked at trends, met with analysts, and came up with 3 categories into which we could invest product dev cycles to further up-level our customers:

• Effectiveness – How do you get more from your effort?
• Remote work – How do you make it work remotely?
• Compliance – How do you protect data while using it to guide effort?

This served as our north star and now we’re excited to announce a number of transformative innovations which set a new bar for the future of sales.

AVAILABLE NOW 

Problem: Strong leads slip, then revenue follows. Sellers leave revenue on the table when they don’t contact leads quickly enough. To start, 77% of leads never get touched. Too many of those represent closeable pipeline but don’t materialize—reps don’t prioritize them or a rep falls behind, maybe they lose track during an influx, or it could be that because of an ownership rule, while a rep is out of office, the rest of the team is locked out.

Solution: Shared Records. This is a problem that affects almost every business development and inside sales team. With Shared Records, you can prompt Playbooks to automatically designate records for either personal ownership or shared ownership—where anyone on the team can access and where urgent tasks can round-robin automatically from rep to rep. No more lockouts! No more missed revenue!

Problem: Slow lead follow-up. Leads are 8x less likely to convert after the first five minutes. Quick inbound lead response must be an essential motion, but, of the 23% of leads that actually get worked, almost 60% don’t get a first call attempt until after a week. Teams simply aren’t making the cut.

Solution: Immediate Response. Engage with prospects the moment they express interest and are loaded into CRM. New leads are routed to the next available rep within 5 minutes of a new lead being created until someone works them.

Problem: Ineffective cold-calling. How well is your remote cold calling going? By definition, remote work means prospects, not just sellers, are dispersed, and it’s even trickier to get a hold of people. In this world, mobile numbers are gold. But how do you get that number? 

Solution: Try Another (Verified) Number. Reps call to have conversations. For that to happen they need numbers that work—verified numbers. Once a rep makes a call, they will get a prompt to try other, verified, direct dial numbers (even if they didn’t have them in CRM) to increase their contact rates. 

Problem: Prioritization is a guessing game. There’s no shortage of things to do, but additional effort doesn’t automatically translate to additional reward. You need to do more of the right things. If you have 100 things to get done in a day, but only have time 50—which 50 should you prioritize? Which 50 do you leave off? Most teams aren’t equipped to answer that.

Solution: AI Record Prioritization Using XANT Intelligence. The combination of collective data and ML modeling can now be used to identify which activities are most beneficial, and it doesn’t require professional services or customization. You can sort recommended tasks based on closability scores, contactability scores, or a blend of both, and you can do it out-of-the-box. Get the most effective tasks done first and start seeing more impact fast. 

COMING SOON

Problem: Simplifying work when you have so many tools. Reps don’t have time to go looking for the tools and features they need to engage with customers. Those should be readily available where they work—in their inbox. 

Solution: Gmail Integration 2.0. We’re bringing the full breadth of our email IP to the Gmail inbox. Verified email addresses are automatically suggested. Pull an email template from your Playbooks email library. Advanced email tracking shows you when someone views your message, forwards it, downloads an attachment, clicks a link, etc. Auto-fill fields with your favorite snippets, set up reminders to follow-up in a timely manner (whether they respond or not). Send emails when they’re most likely to be read. And much more.

Problem: Generic compliance protocols not tuned to your needs. Increasingly, concerns about data integrity and protection force businesses to evaluate the compliance needs of their industry. But a lot of standard protocols are generically built and not adjusted based on those needs. 

Solution: New and Expanded Compliance Flexibility: Flexibly program Playbooks to fit the unique compliance needs of your business and industry. For example, different states treat sales calls very differently, some mandating lockdowns on cold calls during events or times of the year. This new layer of flexibility would allow teams to block outbound calls to states during local holidays or during a state of emergency. 

Problem: Lack of engagement and inconsistent motivation. One of the biggest demotivators for a rep is to not be able to clearly gauge how well they’re performing or how they compare with their team. A dose of competition goes a long way to keeping teams consistently engaged and stretching their performance. But most tech fails to seamlessly incorporate these insights, or they require additional steps to see them.

Solution: Personal Leaderboard. Reps can see detailed reports of their performance and trends for the day, week, or month. Track inputs, outputs, records touched, emails sent, dials made, talk time, correct contacts, and more, and how they compare with their peers.

Problem: Treating all prospects and customers the same. A subpar, generic cadence won’t work on most people. Buyers are more educated, more prepared, and sellers need to be too. 

Solution: Play Library. See and download best-in-class Plays from a single-click Play Library. Build or customize Plays based on what you are trying to accomplish and who you are trying to reach. Grab effective Plays for awareness, education, engagement, information, nurture, etc. And choose the pace—fast, moderate, or slow—based on factors unique to your business.

Problem: Failing to map to all essential members of a buying group. In the new buying landscape, there can be up to 10 people (sometimes more) involved in the buying process. Most reps don’t reach them all, and probably don’t know who they are, which leads to missed revenue. How many times has a rep been caught off guard late in a deal when they learned of an important influencer on the buying team they didn’t know about before?

Solution: PeopleFinder. Easily identify verified new names and numbers for members of the buying committee directly within Playbooks. Playbooks will recommend people, provide their contact information, and state their role in the buying committee. With one click, you can begin a more effective, multi-threaded approach to your target accounts.

COMING THIS YEAR

Problem: One-size fits all doesn’t work. Different buyers engage in different ways. A one-size-fits-all tactic doesn’t work. Hot leads go cold quickly when you employ generic Plays (cadences) or when you simply aren’t fluid in your approach to engaging customers and prospects.

Solution: Dynamic Plays. XANT Intelligence gathers data to adjust Plays as they run. For example, if your contact is prone to respond to emails, even if you’ve never emailed them, a Dynamic Play will automatically adjust to focus on emails—ensuring engagement continues. We’ve already seen a 22% lift in open rates and a 30% lift in contact rates based on early usage of Dynamic Plays. 

Problem: Not applying customer-centric strategies. Every customer is different, every play should be too. The generic spray and pray method won’t work on the modern buyer. Buyers now are more educated than ever—they know what they want and so should you. 

Solution: Optimal Play Selection. The optimal Play or sequence for each buyer is going to be different—and now you can easily know what Play to put into motion for each lead. XANT Intelligence uses data to predict outcomes and recommend activities for each Play and each buyer.

CONCLUSION

We built Playbooks to give sales teams a way to effectively navigate digital disruption. These innovations are simply the next notches in the belt to guide your sales engagement efforts. 

While your competitors get stuck in the froth of doing more, it’s time you grabbed your competitive edge by doing more of the right things with Playbooks, and make digital selling your bread and butter for 2021 and beyond!

The problem is that the default strategy for business development and sales teams to get better results is more often than not just an exercise in “doing more”—because more activity is easy to measure. When you get more done you feel good about it. “Yesterday I completed 50 tasks. Today, I did 60. That’s progress.” 

The thing is, doing more is only progress if it’s more of the right things—things that lead to more quality conversations.

Don’t make the mistake of doubling down on more of what doesn’t work. That just creates more black holes in your funnel. Sure, you’ll see some marginal benefit as a by-product of increased effort. But there’s no leverage in untargeted activity. 

And no amount of optimistic forecasting, soft skills training, or increased productivity can compensate for reps failing to actually connect with interested buyers in meaningful first conversations.

What should you focus on? It’s your job to figure out which tasks get you to intersect buyers at the precise time they show interest. 

ENGAGE LEADS IN MINUTES, NOT DAYS

Let’s zero in on that last part: time. Teams used to pound the notion of speed-to-lead—the idea that to influence a buyer, you have to get to them fast and first—into our reps’ heads.  

Is it still important? Of course! If anything, it’s more important today than it was 3 years ago. Even more important than it was last year. 

Buyers now complete 60-70% of their criteria before they ever engage with a rep. Buyers have access to more information than your reps. They’re harder to reach. Your reps’ window to influence buying decisions is shrinking. 

But teams are still thinking in terms of days and weeks before the first attempt. Just this month, a report from one of our competitors suggests the ideal time frame within which to make that first attempt is 2 days. 2 days!!!

We did some research. On 5.7 million marketing leads. And 55 million sales tasks. Across 400 companies. Conversion rates were 8X higher when the rep attempted to make contact within 5 minutes vs waiting 6 minutes or more. A far cry away from 2 days.

But what’s amazing is that of all the leads worked (and not many were; more on that below), less than 1% were attempted within that ideal 0-5 minute range and fewer than 15% were attempted within the first day.

Instead of starting with more activity, focus on making your reps 8X more effective. Would that translate to more deals closed for you?

NOT ALL LEADS ARE CREATED EQUAL—DON’T TREAT THEM THE SAME

Our research showed another interesting trend: of the 5.7 million leads we reviewed above, only 23% of them ever received even a single contact attempt from a rep, which means 77% of leads never get touched, except by your marketing automation tool.

First, this suggests teams have embraced a counterproductive behavior of enrolling most, sometimes all, leads into email nurture campaigns, even though marketing automation is supposed to warm people up, not replace meaningful sales engagement from a rep. Sales-ready leads don’t need to be warmed up! 

Second, we audited a few million closed-deals from several thousand companies to see if rep efforts were aligned to deals that actually closed. Reps were spending 297% more time chasing deals that never close vs deals that do. That means only about ⅓ of the deals we pursue are actually good. The same math applies to leads. 

So if you only chase 23% of all available marketing leads, just ⅓ of that, or 7.6% of the total, are in the sweet spot. Taking it one step further, of the 77% of all available leads your reps ignore, ⅓  of that, or 25.6% of the total, is actually worth your time. 

Lastly, even though it’s 8X better to engage within 5 minutes, an astonishing 57.1% of all attempts occur outside of a week.

The takeaways here are: 

1. Teams leave way too much on the table
2. There’s still too much guessing in sales
3. Guide reps to engage sales-ready leads quickly, then let marketing automation nurture the rest until they’re ready to talk

BE PERSISTENT—YOU’RE IN SALES AFTER ALL

But how soon should sellers give up? It’s true you won’t connect with and convert every marketing lead within that optimal 5-minute window. But is one attempt really adequate? How about two, or three?

The reality is, after the first attempt to engage an inbound marketing lead, your efforts begin to mirror outbound engagement. Why not follow similar engagement best practices?

Generally speaking, reps think they’re a lot more persistent than they really are. The average number follow up attempts for outbound motions is around 1-2. With inbound motions, we’re a little better, but still 80% of our follow up activities on inbound marketing leads fall below 5 attempts; most sit around 2-3. And let’s not forget that 57.1% of first attempts don’t begin until after more than a week. 

If you’re willing to strike early and you stick it out with 7 or more attempts, your connection rates will go up conservatively by 15%. 

DON’T WAIT TO REFOCUS

Getting to buyers first has always been important. But it’s not just about getting there first anymore; it’s about getting there earlier enough to influence decisions. It’s about taking advantage of what marketing is doing to generate interested leads, and not allowing that interest to sizzle away.

COVID only made it more urgent. B2B buying and selling were already evolving when 2020 accelerated the transformation, but most teams were not ready. They were forced to adjust in ways that adversely affected marketing lead performance at each stage in the sales funnel. There has never been a more urgent time to align strategies to data.

What does this mean? Doing more isn’t the answer. And while speed-to-lead should be a tactical priority, it really comes down to aligning your strategies to data so that you’re able to do more of the right things and less of the wrong things. Playbooks can help you do it now. 

____________

Data for this research came from an analysis of over 55 million sales interactions at 400+ companies across 5.7 million inbound marketing leads over a 3-year period, and from user outbound activity and outcome data on Playbooks over a 2.5-year period.

50% of buyers still choose the vendor that responds first. How do you make sure you’re first?

Since contact and qualification rates plummet by 100x after the first 5 minutes, shortening your speed-to-lead is key.

The problem: Buyers aren’t sending you signals of interest until they’re already 60-70% through their buying decision. Your ideal window to engage buyers is shrinking. 

And too many teams allow hot leads to turn cold—assigning leads is a bottleneck, reps get bogged down, leaders don’t have enough visibility or control. 

These practices cause high-volume muscles to atrophy! 

You shouldn’t have to wait for someone to manually assign leads. And you don’t want to lose traction because the assigned rep is out of the office or backed up with overdue tasks. Maybe you shouldn’t even assign some leads to a specific rep in the first place!

Whatever the diagnosis, you can make life easier for yourself by adopting a more flexible approach.

INTRODUCING SHARED RECORDS

We’re excited to announce the first Shared Records capability in sales engagement. It amplifies your ability to provide coverage of records and to easily drive a faster speed-to-lead.

And it extends the value of our Personal Records and Urgent Tasks capabilities already available in Playbooks. Here’s what they look like together:

Shared Records works alongside Personal Records and Urgent Tasks in Playbooks to give you a much more robust way to manage lead response.

Automatically assign strategic leads and accounts to individual reps, or keep them unassigned, in a shared bucket for anyone to work. 

Mark either “personal” or ”shared” tasks as urgent so they get prioritized, and so you can automatically alert reps when tasks are overdue.

Here’s why sales leaders AND their reps are pumped for this…

PUT PRODUCTIVITY AND CLOSABILITY ON HYPER-DRIVE

Today, managers or admins have to manually assign records to individual reps—unnecessarily wasting time 

If that time is stretched even a little, leads will become cold. 

And when they’re assigned to a rep who goes on a vacation, or is out sick, or simply falls behind, those leads, again, become cold. 

Prospects and customers move on. 

The window shuts.

Revenue slips. 

In Playbooks, you can automate time-sucking administrative tasks with Robots. You can also assign records for personal or shared ownership based on rules you define. 

Let’s say you’ve just completed a webinar or a virtual event and you have a huge influx of leads to sift through. You probably don’t care which of your reps reaches out, as long as someone does quickly.

In this case, you can set the rule for a Robot to have all leads from the event automatically assigned to the Shared Records bucket. They’ll get enrolled into the right Play and will be prioritized. Shared Records with Urgent Tasks will round-robin from rep to rep until somebody gets to it. 

No more bottlenecks. No more manual processes. No more unnecessary delays. Just speed-to-lead and a much higher chance of closing deals.

CUSTOMERS ON PLAYBOOKS CAN’T WAIT

Like all our product developments, we first tested out the concept for Shared Records with customers.

Here’s what Brian Browne, Sr Manager, Americas Marketing BD at VMWare said:

“Our reps always have a set number of strategically assigned leads, but once they work those leads, Shared Records will give me the flexibility to send them to the well. With a single click, my hardest working reps will have the most opportunity for success. And I’ll never have to worry about leaving revenue on the table.”

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT

Want to see how Shared Records on Playbooks can help supercharge your team’s productivity and accelerate revenue?

If you’re a XANT customer already, I have good news: You’ll have access to Shared Records in a couple of weeks! Talk to your Customer Success Manager to get started.

Reps only close deals when they make contact with the right people at the right times. When they don’t, they fill their pipeline with garbage and spend too much time working on deals that will never close.

Connecting to more members of the buying committee, earlier on in the buying process,  is a huge factor in accelerating your impact on revenue.

As a leader, you already know you can’t afford to leave the decision on how to spend time entirely up to reps. It’s not their fault. The human brain just isn’t equipped to do the analysis required to align all our efforts to the limitless nuances in our customers’ behaviors. And yet we expect them to do this in real-time? Fuhgettaboutit!

What’s New: Propensity to Engage Model & Verified Mobile Recommendation

We’re excited to continue bringing the full arsenal of our Buyer Intelligence to all customers. Our new Propensity to Engage Model and Verified Mobile Recommendation feature amplify the power of collective data and AI for customers as soon as they go live, without any coding or custom modeling.

If you’re not familiar with Buyer Intelligence, here’s a quick summary: The Playbooks platform actively and securely captures all interactions and outcomes with buyers in real-time. That’s Collective Data. The engine powering Playbooks then builds buyer and company profiles from the data, and scores leads, contacts, and accounts based on their likelihood to engage and buy. It also identifies behavioral insights in the data about how to engage and when to engage. That’s Buyer Intelligence. (For more detail on Buyer Intelligence click here)

Propensity to Engage Model

Our new baseline Propensity to Engage Model is the first-of-its-kind and scores a prospect’s likelihood to engage with reps out-of-the-box. 

So, if basic CRM fields are populated and reps actually follow the model’s recommendations—assuming they’ve got more work to do than they have time to do it in—this model will prioritize activities with leads and contacts that have the highest chance of success.

Think of it: no more wrestling with what to work on next.

Let me break it down further, first with a graph of what’s going on behind the scenes:

It basically says:

• Every CRM record has a propensity to engage score between 0-100
• We break those records up into 10 equal-sized buckets 
• The graph reads from right to left, your best records in yellow and the ones with low scores on the far left
• That little percentage above each bar is the aggregate % uplift in connections you’d see if you were to work from your best records on down, right to left

And before you ask, the answer is YES! The numbers above the yellow bars are correct! This is pulled from live data.

What does it REALLY mean?

One of our top reps likes to ask customers, “If your reps had 100 things to do in a day but only had time for 50, which 50 would they leave out?” It’s a tough question to answer. We answer it.

Most reps don’t have time to work through all possible tasks and records. So instead of leaving it up to guessing, Playbooks sorts records in order of their propensity to engage score. 

The graph tells us that IF reps follow the top 30% of scores first (the yellow bars), they’ll see an aggregate lift in contact rates of 101% (or double) over their baseline. 

Do the math for your team. What kind of impact on pipeline and revenue would you see if you could prioritize those customers who are twice as likely to have a conversation with your reps?

For most teams, it’s materially huge, and has a compounding effect that trickles down to the bottom line.

The net-net is when reps use scores => more contacts with the right people => more quality conversations => more pipeline => more wins and revenue down funnel.

How easy is it to use? Here’s a screenshot. All you do is sort by CONTACTABILITY and you’re ready to fire. Just one click.

Mobile Recommendation

Now, as if an automated engagement model wasn’t cool enough, we’re also introducing the first-ever Verified Mobile Recommendation feature.

XANT processed over 300M unique phone numbers on nearly 2 billion dials, and mobile phones has emerged as the best contact method. 

Our Mobile Detection feature (which is already in the product) identified millions of verified mobile numbers, giving us the ability to recommend net-new mobile numbers for customer records.

In other words, we’ve already mined the gold. Now, we’re just serving it up to users.

Getting technical on how it works: We procure contact data from reputable data brokers on behalf of customers. Using our Buyer Intelligence, Playbooks matches and verifies data before sharing mobile and direct dial numbers with reps to make sure we provide high-quality recommendations. Users will see the recommendation appear in a “Try Another Number” prompt.

Here’s why it matters: Contact rates for verified mobile numbers are 2-3X higher than baseline contact rates, and people change their mobile numbers far less frequently than landlines. Mobile phone usage in B2B has shot up over 33% in just the last two quarters and yet fewer than 30% of cadences leverage a direct mobile number!

Here’s what it looks like: Just click the number by the mobile phone icon. One-click—easy and automated:

What to do next

Is this all too technical? Maybe, but if you only take away one thing, remember this: 

These new features feed off XANT data to serve one primary purpose: connect your reps to buyers faster.

Do you want your reps guided through their engagement?

Do you want your teams to spend more time on the right things?

Click on the banner below to see a demo:

Talk to one of our consultants today and let’s get you started!

We’re excited to introduce you to Playbooks Reports by XANT. 

Playbooks Reports brings all the performance and outcome level insights you need to generate more revenue faster. And it works out of the box on our Playbooks Platform without any additional CRM configuration.

You’ll spend more time coaching and mentoring reps, and improving their performance, and less time wondering what in the world is going on. 

A Variety of Metrics

Use default views of total activities for inbound calls, outbound calls, emails sent, and other tasks, or easily select custom metrics. For example, see activities by a specific call disposition, or choose an email interaction metric like opens, replies, or clicked links. Review your teams’ total talk time over an adjustable period or see how many meaningful conversations are occurring right now.

Visualize Activities

We built Reports with a beautiful new data visualization engine within which you can view sales activities by totals or by averages per day. You can drill into specific sales teams or into individual reps’ performance. You can even look into your historical activities with weekly and monthly trends.

Choosing Conversion Metrics

Go even further with your performance analysis by layering in a conversion metric on top of your data. Customize Reports to include conversion data by selecting your most important activity metrics and then choosing from more than a dozen different conversion metrics. For example: compare total emails sent vs email opens; phone calls placed vs. correct contact rates; or all activities vs Plays marked successful.

THE BIGGER PICTURE OF REPORTING

We’ve always taken a different approach to reporting than others in our space. Our customers don’t want a shadow CRM; they want to amplify the value of their CRM investments, and a big part of that is how we treat and report on data. 

One of the ways we’ve aligned to our customers’ needs is by pushing all activity and outcome data back into the CRM with a reliable, native integration and complete bi-directional sync.

That will never change. 

Those insights are an important mechanism by which everyone across your organization can see the impact your team is having on the business. 

But we take it even further. For example, we add up to 25 additional fields in your CRM allowing us to produce a wealth of custom, cadence-level reports for you to properly manage to key outcomes.

See who’s working, what’s working, what’s not, which campaigns deliver meetings, which ones lead to closed deals, A/B test Plays and templates, measure the effectiveness of your efforts, and continue leveraging real-time dashboards.  

This level of visibility is one of the reasons why enterprise teams love our unique platform strategy. 

Reports only enhance our broader strategy by giving you easy, real-time access to actionable insights directly within the Playbooks Platform.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT

Want to see how Playbooks Reports can help your team accelerate results?

Click this banner to schedule your demo today:

If you’re a Playbooks customer, you already have access to Playbooks Reports!

Talk to your customer success manager today and get started.

In an article published this week by Gartner titled Future of Sales 2025: Data-Driven B2B Selling to Drive Digital Commerce, they reveal, “60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling by 2025.” 

Why does selling need to be data-driven?

Because buyers have changed forever. Research from Forrester has shown that B2B buyers navigate 60-70% of their buying journey in digital channels before ever engaging with a vendor’s reps. 

Buyers expect easy, quick access to information. They expect a multi-channel experience. And they’ve been infused with so much of their own data insight that traditional sellers can’t keep up.

What kind of impact do these changes have on sales teams?

Managers and leaders have lost visibility and control over process and performance. Reps waste time chasing bad leads, accounts, and opportunities. 

In fact, reps spend only 25% of their time actually selling. And how effective is that time? Our research shows reps spend 297% more time on deals that will never close vs deals that will. 

What do you need to do?

Sales leaders and managers need more effective ways to consistently improve performance and enforce repeatable processes. Reps need more effective ways to prioritize and connect to the right prospects and customers earlier in the buying process.

The biggest sales questions have become even more critical to answer: Who should I sell to? How should I engage? What should I do next? 

Left to intuition, though, it has become next to impossible to answer these questions. And it reinforces the need for a solution that automates mundane tasks and interactions while taking the guesswork out of selling, pointing sellers to the next most valuable activity. 

To do this, Gartner lists 3 actions sales and IT leaders need to focus on:

1. Build an advanced sales technology roadmap
2. Prioritize AI-based guided selling
3. Invest in technology that attracts new talent and enables virtual selling

What is XANT doing to help?

A core tenant of our approach to accelerating revenue results is infusing unique data insights into sales workflows. 

We call it Collective Data. Collective Data is an anonymized and encrypted metadata set of over 27 billion interactions and outcomes. Nobody else in the world has this data. 

The significance of the data is that it contains real-time insights into buyer behavioral changes, which we infuse directly into prioritized workflows in the form of predictive recommendations.

From day 1, our customers enjoy the benefits of having real-time, data-driven recommendations guide reps through their engagement with customers and prospects. 

We’ve packaged the growing list of intelligent features into two product capability sets:

1. Embedded Propensity Scores

Propensity scores are just what you’d expect: scores on behavioral tendencies. Currently, we deploy a number of models that score the likelihood of a lead or contact to engage with your reps, and the likelihood of a contact, account, or opportunity to lead to a closed-won deal. 

Our robust prioritization engine gives you the flexibility to sort tasks according to custom business rules, AI scores, or a combination of both.

2. Buyer Intelligence

The most exciting application of our Collective Data is Buyer Intelligence. Simply put, Buyer Intelligence guides rep engagement through the funnel with accurate insights into your buyers. 

Buyer Intelligence includes unparalleled behavioral profiles with recommendations on how best to engage buyers (Buyer Hints), recommendations for additional people who may be relevant to the buying decision (Buyer Maps), recommendations on when to send emails to increase the odds of connection (SmartSend), verified contact data, collective data append, task value scoring, mobile and email bounce detection, and much more. 

Automating the Mundane and Prioritizing the Right Things 

Of course, none of these insights matter if you can’t prioritize the right things or enforce the process. That’s why we built the most robust automation and prioritization engine on the market. 

Eliminate your team’s obstacles to efficiency by using automation in the right way. The combination of our AI and automation focuses reps on the right activities, automates reliable data entry, and makes workflows more efficient.

Reps save time with auto-sending and auto-data entry, enabling them to turn their focus to the optimal activities recommended to them through AI. And when you combine advanced automation with Custom Sorting and Task Filters, you ensure teams spend their time on only those things that can drive an impact on results. Through automation, cadences and workflows can be standardized and set to ensure reps are consistently successful.  

–––––––––––––

Get ahead of the future of sales, according to Gartner, by using Playbooks. Utilizing data is no longer optional for sales. AI and automation are not only the future of sales, they are necessary for successful sales now—and they will only become more vital as the world becomes more digital. Don’t get left behind, get ahead—Demo Playbooks now. 

If you believe it’ll work for them, it will work for you. Drinking your own kool-aid, as it turns out, adds credibility to your story. 

So I wanted to share a couple of simple but gnarly use cases for leveraging Playbooks to build a strong pipeline by engaging opportunities, and to plug revenue leaks, developed by one of our very own AE’s: the enigmatic, but always smiling, James Allen.

RESULTS TO EXPLAIN WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

Why am I picking on James? With the tactics below, James has hit a net-new win rate of 29% on Stage-2-to-Closed-Won opportunities, and he has doubled his quota attainment two years in a row.

This is the kind of stuff that actually makes a difference on performance, and we’ve replicated it across our own team. What kind of impact has that had? Our inside sales team has achieved 7 straight quarters of quota attainment.

SCENARIO 1: Discovery Call Prep & Opportunity Progression

A lot of good leads fall through because of a poorly executed discovery call. And reps waste a lot of time chasing bad opportunities that should not have made it into the pipeline in the first place. 

Our research shows reps spend 297% more time chasing bad deals as opposed to good deals. 

James, who may be related to Rain Man, has a fairly detailed process for prepping for calls with leads set up by Business Development and for developing Stage 1 opportunities.

He calls it, “My detailed process to prepare for calls with leads set up by Business Development – it streamlines how I move Stage 1 opptys to Stage 2,” AND he programmed it as a Play into Playbooks “so I don’t cut corners.”

A quick note on Plays for those who are uninitiated: Plays are strategic, multi-channel engagement strategies, or cadences.

HERE’S HOW IT GOES

First, before anything else, James built a custom Automation Robot to monitor changes on his accounts in CRM. When a new stage 1 opportunity is created by the BDR, the Robot auto-enrolls the opportunity into the below Play.

>>Important note: Yes! In Playbooks, you can build Plays off of the opportunity object, as well as off of leads, contacts, and cases AND you can auto-enroll these objects based on rules you define.

SCENARIO 2: Salvaging Neglected Opportunities

So often reps get overwhelmed juggling an unlimited stream of tasks and an infinite spectrum of client personalities and stages. 

Sometimes, stuff falls through the cracks. We’re all human. We forget stuff and we can’t watch the CRM 24/7. 

But Robots can!

Automation Robots in Playbooks come to the rescue yet again. They monitor the CRM 24/7. Managers also get added visibility because if they ever see a record enrolled in a Play like this one, they’ll know the rep is forgetting something. 

This next Play isn’t overly strategic or complex. In fact, it’s just two steps. But, it has saved more than one reps’ buttocks on multiple deals, multiple times.

HERE’S HOW IT GOES

The Automation Robot in this Play is set to monitor opportunities with a built-in alert mechanism for when they go 14 days without some kind of activity. 

If that happens, the Robot enrolls it into the below two-step Play and notifies the rep that they’re dropping the ball.

>Important note: Playbooks allows you to set up time-sequenced alerts. Think of all your CSM’s loaded with accounts that come up for renewal. Has anyone ever engaged an account too late about their renewal? Never again!

WHY THESE PLAYS MATTER

When you throw garbage into your pipeline, you’re committing your time away from closeable deals. It also increases your risk of letting good deals fall through the cracks. 

Clean up and structure your discovery process. Set up alerts. These hacks are two of easiest but most important things you can do to make sure you prioritize the things that matter most.

I’ve never had suicidal thoughts, thankfully, but for some years have gone through peaks and valleys. When in my valleys, I can get pretty down and irritable, and sometimes it lasts a while. 

My family feels it the most. My wife recognized I hadn’t been in tip-top shape for more than just a while. I admit I haven’t managed my workload or prioritized the more essential things in life very well recently. That has certainly contributed to my angst. (Not to mention 2020 is the craziest year ever.)

I didn’t want to go to the appointment at first but didn’t have a great excuse not to so I went. 

Now, I’m not going to give any more detail about my mental health, “cause that’s my business” (Tabitha Brown, you are a delight). But the reality is this is not uncommon and unfortunately there’s a lot of stigmatization around mental health.

THE STATE OF DEPRESSION AND BURNOUT

After doing a quick search, I learned, according to the National Network of Depression Centers, “Depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States among people ages 15-44.” (NNDC Research) And the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) finds “Almost 75% of people with mental disorders remain untreated.” (ADAA Research) 

Sales can exacerbate the stress. Even before COVID, 64% of salespeople agreed or strongly agreed they were close to burning out. (Thrive Global). 

This isn’t intended to minimize other significant problems in the world. Many people are suffering from significant issues. But it seems there are a lot of us who should take our mental health more seriously. 

WHAT IS XANT DOING

That’s why I appreciate that our CEO, Chris Harrington, on a company all-hands call yesterday, announced a company-wide mandated day off every third Friday of the month beginning September 25. 

The reason? To give employees time to be with our families, to de-stress, and to take care of what’s most important. 

This is huge! It’s not the only thing but it matters. And other companies are doing similar things, which is awesome. 

I told my wife and we’ve already planned a family hike. I’ll tell the kids I’m choosing to take off work and will look like a hero. Everybody wins. 

WHAT CAN YOU DO

Whether or not you’re able to take work off during the week, in whatever spare time you have there are some great things you can do to care for stress and depression.

I’m not an expert, but I can copy and paste stuff from experts. Here’s a list of recommendations I stole from ADAA (there’s a lot more detail on their site so check out the link below):

1. Distract yourself with positively distracting activities
2. Keep a schedule
3. Get outside
4. Stay in touch (with people)
5. Exercise
6. Laugh
7. Limit checking your phone
8. Enjoy time with your immediate family

ADAA Recommendations

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, get help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800-273-8255. Too many people struggle needlessly. 

A FINAL THOUGHT

Thank goodness for the people in our lives who love and care about us! 

When my twin daughters were 5 years old, one of them observed, while on a family drive and in a moment of unusual silence, “Dad, mommy’s the boss. You’re just the helper of the boss.”

Here’s to all the real bosses who schedule doctor’s appointments or seek help against our wills. 

XANT Received the highest score possible in Category Vision, and highest scores in AI, and Automation criteria

Forrester did a thing last week. It was a pretty big deal—they published the first-ever Wave Report for Sales Engagement, which we believe means recognition of our category as one of the fastest-growing, and most disruptive, in tech. (Not just sales tech, but all tech.) I’m old enough to remember a time when analysts didn’t think sales engagement was big enough to carve out its own category corner. How quickly things change!

Naturally, our team was excited about the increased exposure and emphasis on the value of sales engagement. We entered into this process with a few objectives in mind:

1. Enterprise.  We needed to reinforce our position as leaders in the enterprise. We placed bets several years ago to own the enterprise segment and we reoriented our go-to-market and product strategies accordingly. This included a global infrastructure, enterprise-grade data security and governance platform, a post-sales consultancy, and much more. 

2. Data.  We needed to emphasize our data-centric vision for the future of revenue generation. As digital and data disruption rolls forward with increasing momentum, it’s clear buyers will continue to have a larger share of the power in B2B relationships. Giving reps analytics and insight into their buyer’s behaviors will be key for them to have more quality conversations with influencers and decision-makers in purchasing committees, and to have them earlier in the buying process. 

3. AI.  AI. We had to demonstrate our differentiation with AI in guiding sales activities. In order for teams to create impact on revenue faster, they can’t just crank out more activities. Not all activity is good activity! It’s about doing more of the right things, which means determining what the right things are, eliminating waste, and automating the rest. 

So, how did we do? I may be biased but I think we crushed it! In Forrester’s 2020 Sales Engagement Wave, XANT was recognized with:

• The highest score in the Artificial Intelligence criterion
• The highest score in the Automation criterion
• The highest score possible in the Category Vision criterion
• The highest score in the Average Deal Size criterion (we believe this reflects our focus on the enterprise)

We also received the highest score possible in the criteria of: CRM Integrations, Email/Calendaring Integrations, Dialer, Data Augmentation, Marketing Platforms, Workflows, Activity Capture, Conversation Intelligence, Interaction Management, Recommendations, and last, but not least, Global Presence.

Let me summarize what that means for customers. First, our investments have paid off. It’s not a secret that data is key to closing the gap between sellers and their buyers’ changing behaviors. The kind of prioritization required to move the needle in sales is fueled by data and automation, not just scorching the earth with untargeted engagement.

Second, at the end of the day we exist to help teams have a quicker and more meaningful impact on revenue. Our platform already does more to guide rep engagement and align sales to changes in buyer behaviors than any other technology on the market. As the Wave report states, “XANT is an ideal fit for enterprise companies that want to help sellers better execute on buyer-centric sales strategies.” Exactly! And building on prioritization, we also improve rep and team productivity, help organizations enforce consistency, and give leaders the insights they need to build repeatable success. And we’ll keep developing on that foundation.

Third, Sales Engagement is on fire! There’s never been a more exciting time to be in this business. The competition is fierce to be sure, and there are great players who don’t allow us to be complacent.

Our priority is, and has always been, on our customers’ success and the impact they have on revenue. We’re thrilled for the recognition this Sales Engagement Wave gives us, and can’t wait to make more noise in the years to come.