An article for Growth & Sales Teams in the Finance Industry, exploring how AI can drive sales and opportunities.
Big outreach opportunities for financial services firms are often triggered by market signals, like M&A rumours. The problem is, once these updates hit the mainstream news, every salesperson in the sector jumps on the opportunity, so there are real benefits in acting early, and being relevant with outreach.
However, while teams know what they want to sell, and who they should be selling to, the real trick is knowing how and when to engage them.
As a result, relationship and key account managers in financial services are forced to scour through huge amounts of data looking for the right target. Then comes the real challenge – engaging the right target at the right time. Finding this sweet spot is tricky but critical to building a trusted relationship with prospects.
AMPLYFI’s research found that a quarter of B2B buyers cite ‘relationship-focused’ sales strategy as the most effective way to engage them (24%). As part of this approach, sales reps need to demonstrate organisational knowledge beyond “you mentioned news about an M&A”, as well as weaving in sector understanding. In fact, buyers rank industry knowledge as more important than product knowledge (28% vs 24%) when it comes to outreach.
The issue is, to do this effectively, relationship and key account managers need to conduct extensive research, and unfortunately, traditional methods of market intelligence gathering takes time – something that teams do not have the luxury of. The end result? Rather than sending that captivating introduction that builds a lasting relationship, sales teams do what they can within the limited time they have, meaning ‘light touch’ email templates are usually left gathering virtual dust in a junk box somewhere.
When the majority of sales professionals (66%) believe their targets would be more achievable if they had extra time to conduct further research, doing nothing is no longer an option.
Email is currently a wasted sales tool
The average B2B decision-maker receives 11 cold sales emails a day – spam filters likely catch the rest. Thanks, in part, to a litany of awful sales templates and increasing time pressures, inboxes have become a junk yard where only the lucky few will find anything of remote value. Nearly nine in 10 sales reps say pressure to hit targets prevents them from tailoring outreach as much as they would like, which leads to blanket emails that miss the mark more often than not.
In an attempt to overcome this barrier, teams have developed quick ways to try to capture attention, such as names in the subject line, quirky one liners, and different formats and lengths of email.
But in an industry where emoji-filled subject lines are unlikely to help your email stand out (in a good way, at least), the question has been asked – how can financial services use email effectively for outreach?
Improve prospect outreach with Market Intelligence
Key account managers need critical information on markets and prospects to hand, without the painstaking hours of scrolling through channel after channel to find it.
The good news is, this isn’t a utopian fantasy. In fact, it’s the reality of what artificial intelligence can make possible today. AI can give financial service teams the ability to take market signals, contextualise them to the organisation and drive better outreach, with less effort.
In practice, good outreach can start to take a multi-thread approach to different stakeholders, providing contextual information to each, whether it be the CFO, CIO or even the CEO. With the right market intelligence, sales emails become far more relevant and effective.
With AI-powered market intelligence, financial service teams can bring email outreach back from the dead and unlock what is still a hugely valuable sales tool. Armed with insights into the relevant stakeholders, teams can send out considered and high value communications that will be of genuine benefit to each recipient, rather than going for the spray and pray approach and hoping for the best.
Get the data behind our insights
Read our FREE comprehensive guide, as we reveal how decision-makers actually want to be engaged.
Download today and discover:
- Email’s true place in the modern sales landscape: What’s next after ‘spray and pray’?
- The cold, hard truth about cold calls: Are you wasting valuable time trying to reach gatekeepers?
- How to get better results: Which channels are actually getting noticed?
Download this free comprehensive guide to see what we found.
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