With the latest economic shift, we’ve noticed a push for AR programs to tie their activity to sales activation (Spotlight Blog: Why AR Is Essential During A Recession). AR experts practicing insights-driven AR programs understand that the true value of AR lies with sharing learnings from the channel back to key pillars of your organization like marketing, sales and product. We’ve gathered a list of five ways you can partner with your sales team today to help with activation and value from the channel.
5 Ways To Partner With Sales
- Recommend advocate analysts: Utilize the relationships you have built with analysts and encourage prospects to reach out to analysts for third party validation of your value. This is why a regular interaction cadence to build advocacy is important. Just keep in mind that the prospect will need a subscription to the firm.
- Utilize Win-Loss: Include analyst engagement in your win-loss reporting. Whether it’s in your CRM or on a shared drive, have a place to track if there was any analyst engagement in the sales cycle (were they recommended to you by an analyst, did they engage with an analyst, who/what firm did they engage with, etc.). This can help you tie revenue back to your AR efforts.
- Promote key research: Leverage relevant research when connecting with prospects. This can include analyst blogs, market research and evaluative reports. Provide the sales team with talking points on how to utilize the research you are featured in by identifying key insights and recommendations, and when to reference that specific report. From an evaluative report perspective, keep in mind that being a non-leader doesn’t mean you shouldn’t utilize the report. Many times midmarket and enterprise customers have varying use cases and needs.
- Leverage analyst inquiry: Analysts are talking to potential customers and competitors everyday; many of these discussions overlap with your sales team. Utilize inquiries to gain insights on common roadblocks the sales team is facing, the competitive landscape, and emerging markets. It is also beneficial to meet with an analyst on your go-to-market messaging for feedback to ensure your positioning will resonate with the market and prospects. Bringing back those insights to inform your organization can provide value across multiple verticals.
- Share customer success: It’s just as important for the sales team to support the AR team. Client success stories can be great content to bring back and share with an analyst. Analysts want to hear about the challenges customers face, who the vendors considered were, and why they ultimately selected your company. This helps them better understand how your company wins and more importantly when they should be recommending you to potential buyers!
We’re Better Together
At the end of the day, AR isn’t just about building relationships with analysts – it’s also about working across internal teams. Partnering alongside sales can help both teams win, and Spotlight will be here every step of the way!
Ready to get started? Reach out to our team if you’re ready to see how we can work together and reach your AR goals!
