When was the last time you ‘triggered’ an event in your life? As human beings, our triggers tend to be limited to our big life decisions - leaving a job, travelling around the world, getting married, starting a family or a new business, or buying a house etc...
For companies, however, trigger events occur far more often and are typically less personal to the organisation – diversifying into a new market, restructuring the business, appointing new management teams, investing in a new region etc. In the B2B context, these triggers can mean sales opportunities if you are able to engage with prospects in a timely and contextual way.
Trigger events are important because deploying sales capital at just the right inflection point can be a game changer in your sales process. Research shows that Best-in-Class firms who deploy formal trigger event tools to their front line sellers close more business (Tweet this), have increased customer loyalty, better sales forecasting prowess, and a higher percentage of individual success among sales team members.
Most switched on sales people are already doing this for themselves on some level or another, and typically in a rudimentary, zero cost/low cost way, through Google Alerts, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But this tends to be a result of individual endeavour rather than an enterprise wide initiative, and many of these social media tools require you to pay for the more advanced benefits to get meaningful insight. Hence, it’s better for both you and your organisation’s overall sales performance to incorporate trigger events into the formal sales process at an enterprise level. After all, going social is the new virtual currency of almost every B2B marketing and selling conversation today (Tweet this).
There’s a reason why trigger-event users are more than twice as likely to report their sales intelligence as being extremely accurate: they incorporate the latest, breaking-news style content into the view of the prospect, the account, and the market. It’s the old adage, ‘knowledge is power’ (but only if it’s passed on to the relevant sales teams!)
Tailoring the flow of sales intelligence filtered down to the needs of a territory or to an individual sales rep, is an enviable advantage to have, especially with today’s informed and expectant customer. It’s also tied to Best-in-Class performance and trigger event support. The hard truth of today’s competitive climate means sales are on the back foot, trying to engage with informed and empowered buyers. Sales organisations need to act on two important fronts: through changes to the business process, and through deploying and leveraging new technologies. If you’re not already incorporating the powerful tactic of trigger-events, chances are your competitors soon will be. Let that be a trigger for you.
This is the first in a long line of blogs around modern selling techniques so please stay tuned for more updates. I'd also love to hear from you, what's your opinion on this topic? Let me know in the comments sections below or send me a Tweet @kevinkimber. For more information on this topic take a look at this research from Aberdeen Group.
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