The Problem with Traditional Account Research
How It Starts
Consider this scenario.
A business aims to open 500 accounts in the upcoming quarter. The SDR Manager allocates a hundred accounts each to their 5 SDRs to research, strategize and pursue. The sales representatives have to build highly personalized approaches for each prospect, for every stage of the sales pipeline.
To research an account, say Acme Corp, where does the SDR who has been allocated Acme Corp, start?
They go to their friendly neighborhood search engine – Google (or LinkedIn) and start typing:
Akme Corp company plans, Akme Corp annual reports, Akme Corp financial information, Akme Corp hiring, Akme Corp job listings, Akme Corp media reports, Akme Corp product launches…
For each such search query,
- The first page will be basically all ads: skip.
- The second page will likely comprise highly publicized news – perhaps one piece of information carried by 20 different websites.
- Quite often, reps get lost in the depths of the internet – for hours at a time – between endless cups of coffee.
How It Ends
Due to the nature of content generation online, account research is like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack – scrolling through and reading hundreds of pages to find an insight that might be of use. Imagine reading 1 Million Words to research a company!
Think about it: What are the chances that a SDR opened a PDF shared on the sixth page of the Google search results and read the 4th section on the 13th page where a relevant insight was in plain sight?
Google and LinkedIn have no reason to make it simple for SDRs who are doing account research. In fact, it’s almost as if SDRs have been set up for failure. It’s no wonder that less than 20% of sales teams achieve their revenue targets in B2B.
Can This Be Done Smarter?
Account research exhausts a huge chunk of time available with reps. According to Forbes, an SDR spends nearly two-thirds of their day on research, and only one-third on calling leads. This includes researching accounts that might not even convert, wasting time that could instead be used to generate revenue.
All of this begs these questions:
Sure, the information is publicly available and accessible, but how can SDRs optimize and find the ‘needle’ quicker?
How can we increase the time for the actual work at hand i.e. talking to prospects without compromising on research.
Can AI driven Account intelligence solve this problem?
Speed Reading
Is there a way to sift through all data available for our accounts, categorize and interpret instantly? This is the age of AI after all. It shouldn’t be that hard. All a computer has to do is speed read and make notes very quickly, faster than any human can do. This would really solve for an SDR’s time.
Account Intelligence
Account Intelligence is more than just summarizing information. It’s also about understanding which information is more important and relevant right now. For example, a new head of revenue appointment in a prospect’s company may be super important news. Or that the prospect has announced an expansion into a new territory.
Can AI parse through all available information and supply the top talking points, and do so continuously through the entire few weeks of conversation with the prospect?
B2Brain goes beyond information and offers insights
Automated Account Intelligence
B2Brain is built to read gigabytes of data and parse them into usable information for sales teams. SDRs simply enter the account names they are pursuing into the B2Brain console and get insights, talking points and highlights automatically. Take a look at the screen attached below to see what a SDR sees while using B2Brain.
Origin Story
Sridhar (Co-founder, B2Brain) says that they didn’t create B2Brain overnight. Back in 2012, he and his Co-founder Karthik were discussing how search engines like Google tend to maximize the number of search results and share an overwhelming amount of information. It’s not ideal for all use cases, and definitely not for a sales team looking for specific information within a specific time frame.
The correct way to solve this problem is to create a new crawler that searches millions of pages everyday and mines them for contextual insights for each company – prospect combination. Which is what B2Brain did.
Free Trial
B2Brain offers a free trial where SDRs can track upto 10 accounts. They can also test the other features that B2Brain offers including integration into CRM/SEP tools and team collaboration tools. Try it out today!
