7 Ways to Improve Sales Engagement and Drive Revenue Growth With G2

Much like playing in the NFL, sales is a game of inches.

Vince Lombardi, one of the most iconic coaches in football, famously said that “Football is a game of inches, and inches make a champion.” Lombardi has so much respect that this phrasing partially inspired a rousing speech by Oscar-winner Al Pacino in the film Any Given Sunday.

The idea is incredibly simple yet applicable to much more than a game. Revenue teams try to implement whatever they can to ensure better outcomes. But whatever you’re doing, your competition is also searching for where they can get an edge.

Your success hinges on finding the advantage and gaining those extra inches. As the world’s largest marketplace for B2B software, G2 collects data that helps sellers achieve their revenue goals and gain the edge.

In this article, we’ll explore how G2 can be a crucial component in improving sales engagement workflows so you can:

• Identify early demand and beat your competition to the punch
• Build efficient pipeline with hyper-targeted account lists
• Increase deal size and win rates

Shifts in buyer behavior and the rise of sales engagement

Competition in B2B software is more intense than ever. The proliferation of this industry means that buyers have tons of vendors to choose from and a seemingly endless supply of content to digest. Buying software is far from simple, with frequent shifts in buying behavior.

Between more interactions, stakeholders, and changing requirements in the software they seek, buyers face a fair number of challenges. Additionally, it’s worth considering that the higher the average contract value (ACV) for a given opportunity, the more likely the overall sales cycle will be longer. This adds an extra layer of uncertainty when revenue organizations need to build reliable pipeline.

On the flip side, teams must contend with shrinking budgets. When you have fewer or consolidated resources to get results, it becomes a question of how to make the most of spending to drive revenue growth.

The need for efficiency and prioritizing accounts more likely to convert is only growing in importance for revenue organizations. Faced with the reality that only 5% of buyers are currently in-market at any given time stresses the importance of focusing on the right opportunities. This has given rise to sales engagement as a more regimented and data-driven practice.

Certain organizations may have structured methodologies for sales engagement, but it is still a concept that requires a personalized and adaptive approach to cater to recipients’ distinct challenges and needs.

So far, we haven’t even touched on how difficult it’s become for sellers. For example, as valuable and vital as MarTech and revenue software is, it’s hard to ignore the impact on average sales teams, considering how much of their day gets bogged down by administrative tasks. Sales teams are faced with an abundance of signals coming from numerous tools in their sales stack that hinder their ability to keep engagement streamlined.

How G2 empowers sales engagement

You need to drive a consistent pipeline of opportunities, win more deals, and expedite as much as possible. All while maximizing your efforts and resources to ensure better outcomes.

The good news is that you have an ace up your sleeve. As the world’s largest marketplace for B2B software, G2 has unique insights about the 6.5M buyers researching software every month.

By strategically leveraging industry-leading data and your favorite leading software in your tech stack, you can improve and optimize your approach to sales engagement. Let’s examine 7 specific ways you can achieve your revenue goals with G2 products and our key partner integrations.

1. Reveal indispensable insights about buyer and customer needs

Access to the right intelligence and data, with the right tools to act on it, can truly set you apart from the competition. When you need to engage accounts, precision can be a deciding factor.

Intent data is an excellent data source to fuel your account outreach strategy because it uncovers which companies are actively researching solutions like yours. More importantly, it provides unique insights that empower your sales team to focus on accounts signaling they’re more likely to convert.

G2 Buyer Intent harnesses behavior data from real folks using G2 to learn more about software. This data gives marketers and sellers an exclusive look at how buyers depend on G2 throughout their journey to discover specific categories and products that fit their unique buying needs.

Using ICP and technographic filters with G2 Buyer Intent

While it’s good to get an aggregate view of the accounts surfaced with G2 Buyer Intent, not every company might be an ideal fit to engage. That’s where utilizing certain filters gets you straight to the accounts that matter most.

• ICP filters: You can use various filters to sort through and narrow down buyer intent companies that match your ideal customer profile (ICP). Choose from different criteria, such as market segment and company size, to align the data to your ICP.
  
• Technographic filters: You can take it even further by utilizing G2 Stack technographic data. This yields information about what specific software buyers use in their tech stack, giving you an opportunity to mention how your solution is complementary and target prospects within those ecosystems. What’s more, you can also use this technographic data for greater targeting capabilities in marketing, by integrating technographic data with tools like HubSpot and LinkedIn Matched Audiences.
  

2. Book more meetings with personalized outreach

Once you identify the types of accounts and companies indicating they’re in-market and a good fit to engage, it’s time to get personal. Having this information gives you a competitive advantage, but not for long. Your team needs to move quickly to maintain this edge.

Out of the box, G2 Buyer Intent data reveals information about intent activity at the account level. You know which companies are performing research and have good background context about their needs, but reaching the right decision-maker is key. Your sales team will be far more effective if they can do what they do best — connect with buyers on a personal level.

To surface contact data for these companies, you can activate one of the following integrations available on the G2 Partner Hub:

• ZoomInfo
• Cognism
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator

With this contact data, you can begin your strategic outreach to target your persona and even pinpoint more individuals that might make up the buying committee.

3. Discover where in-market buyers are in their journey with pinpoint accuracy

One of the prime benefits of intent data is that it can remove a ton of guesswork in a typical sales cycle. Arming sales professionals with the right context about buyers sets them up to succeed if they know where they are in their buying journey.

Imagine how much time gets lost on a prospective buyer when it’s unclear if they’re more top-of-funnel or on the verge of a purchase. By clearly grasping where they are, sales teams can gauge how to guide conversations and what levers to pull to move them down the funnel.

4. Build trust and credibility with buyers

90% of buyers are more likely to make a decision after reading a trusted review. The voice of the customer is a critically important aspect of the buyer’s journey, which is particularly true for B2B software.

If you want to build trust with buyers and customers, social proof is crucial. One of the most effective ways of validating product claims is by leaning on authentic customer feedback and testimonials.

Step 1: Optimizing your presence on G2

G2 connects your company with buyers directly to engage in conversations that can influence their buying journey. When you claim and optimize your G2 Profile, your business will leverage G2’s position as the world’s largest marketplace for B2B software.

Step 2: Performing well on Grid Reports

Released quarterly, G2 Grid Reports are the culmination of the reviews and other performance indicators that demonstrate how you stack up to competitors in your respective software categories. Additionally, these reports also give your sales team a better understanding of what products and competitors are most likely to come up in conversations with buyers.

Implementing a review collection strategy is crucial to performing well on Grid Reports because the recency of reviews plays a big part in the G2 scoring algorithm. A few ways to tackle this include conducting manual review collection efforts, activating certain integrations with in-app prompts, or utilizing G2 Review Generation campaigns to ramp up collection.

Step 3: Leveraging G2 Content Marketing Subscription to create engaging buyer experiences

Once you’ve established a strong presence on G2 and claimed your rightful place as a leader on Grid Reports, it’s time to show off your achievements. Utilizing the G2 Content Marketing Subscription enables you to create custom assets demonstrating market sentiment about your company or product.

G2 Reference Pages are another excellent way to showcase your strong presence and performance on G2. You can create a shareable, branded web page experience of cherry-picked G2 content like reviews, Grid Reports, and more. Also, you can customize these pages with engaging copy that incorporates a relevant experience for your target prospects. 

Consider creating a Reference Page that aligns well with each of your personas within your ICP to maximize the effectiveness of the messaging.Depending on where they are in their journey, you can share these content assets that will have the most impact.

5. Increase sales productivity and efficiency

One interesting piece of data from the 2023 G2 Software Buyer Behavior Report revealed that buyers have a strong desire to source solutions that fit into their existing tech stack. 82% of buyers surveyed said that buying software that integrates with tools they already have was very important.

A common theme in G2’s GTM Innovators podcast is the importance of integration across your tech stack. Several experts in go-to-market strategy on the podcast stress how integrations maximize the usefulness of data between different technologies and can be a critical component to achieving better alignment.

To help your sales team be more productive and efficient, consider how the right G2 integrations can make a difference. Top integrations include bringing G2 Buyer Intent into CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot or other popular sales software like Salesloft, ZoomInfo, and Outreach.

6. Accelerate deals and speed-to-lead with automation

Timing is everything — especially in sales. Another example that demonstrates the power of intent data is that sales teams can utilize it to initiate meaningful, contextually relevant messaging in moments that matter most. And because G2 receives so much traffic from qualified buyers, your profile has the potential to connect you directly with them.

Speed-to-lead is something that many revenue organizations struggle with. The longer it takes to follow up and engage with an inbound lead can make an incredible difference.

A game of inches means you must be faster than your competitors if you want to win. Let’s explore two different ways G2 helps speed up your response time with prospects.

• G2 Buyer Intent and Reviews + Slack integration: When software buyers commit relevant in-market actions on G2, this integration sends these intent data notifications via public Slack channels each hour. Members of these channels can then collaborate to plot the next logical step for each given opportunity.
  
• G2 Profile + Chili Piper integration: With this integration, you can turn your G2 Profile into a lead gen machine with your profile CTA. Instead of directing visitors from G2 to your website, hoping they take the desired action, you can remove the extra steps and automatically schedule prospect meetings with Chili Piper.
  

7. Mitigate the risk of churn

We’ve covered how G2 can be a game changer for sales engagement prior to purchasing. But you may not realize that you can also leverage the power of intent to manage and mitigate instances of customers showing indicators of churn. The idea here is to create multithreaded relationships with buyers and customers to understand what’s turning customers away and how you can build upon good relationships.

Say a customer shows signs of exploring comparisons within a software category or viewing an alternatives page on G2. With these intent signals, your customer-facing team will want to begin conversations with this customer to shed light on their challenges or where your solution isn’t providing the value they need. You’re better off addressing the chance of churn if you can prepare well in advance, and G2 Buyer Intent signals can be indispensable for boosting retention.

Additionally, intent data can also provide significant opportunities for upsells and expansions. By applying the same logic with keeping an eye on signals that indicate churn, you can see whether a customer is considering competitors or if there’s a chance to build upon an existing relationship.

How to increase deal sizes and win more often with G2

Revenue growth is always possible, even when the landscape is tough. Doing so is only attainable by streamlining your work with automation and staying one step ahead of your competitors.

If you want to beat your competitors to the punch, source predictable pipeline with high-converting prospects, and increase deal sizes and win rates, G2 is a must-have for B2B software vendors to enrich their sales engagement.