Trigger Events: Making the Most of Real-Time Sales Intelligence

In the old days of selling, quaint as they may seem today, the concept of sales intelligence consisted of little more than attempting to call into the cleanest list of leads. Sales leaders pressured their marketing counterparts to open their wallets when generating rosters of interested potential buyers, whether through direct mail, trade shows, or simply purchasing lists and databases from external providers. Times have changed, as the saying goes, and in a remarkable fashion.

Today’s business-to-business (B2B) professional sellers have direct access to the same endless sources of data that their customers use to vet their products and services within the highly effective “hidden sales cycle” that puts the buyer into such an enviable driver’s seat position in the ever-changing balance of power between provider and customer. As a result, enterprises are learning how to improve from Eliminating the Noise: Best Practices for the Five W’s of Sales Intelligence (August 2013) in order to remain competitive. One crucial element of the contemporary, data-driven culture of B2B communications focuses on a sub-set of the sales intelligence space known as “trigger events.” These are real-time changes in social, economic or business climates that can have an immediate impact on the marketing, selling and customer service interactions that drive and populate Aberdeen’s continued research in the Sales Effectiveness space. A new Research Brief showcases best practices and technologies for leveraging trigger events in the interest of achieving stronger overall corporate sales results.

Setting the Stage: Do Triggers Work?

We begin this analysis via the standard Aberdeen research methodology of linking performance and behavior. Sixty-three percent (63%) of Best-in-Class firms currently deploy formal trigger event tools – notifications, RSS feeds, alerts, posting / tagging updates and the like – among their front-line sellers, while the utilization levels dropped to 52% among Industry Average companies and 45% for Laggard firms. This initial fact correlates the use of trigger events directly with better business results. In addition, it is amplified significantly when we cut the data differently: by comparing the output and sales effectiveness of the companies using alerts – 49% of all respondents – with that of non-adopters. In the figure below, we see that increased customer loyalty, better sales forecasting prowess, and a higher percentage of individual success among the sales team members are aligned with the utilization of trigger data.