7 Ways to Elevate Your Sales Enablement Strategy with Buyer Insights

Your team consistently strives to implement new strategies that close deals faster and drive more revenue — but so do your competitors. 

So, how do you stay one step ahead of them and ensure that your solution stands out as the top choice? 

You need hyper-personalized sales outreach and engagement throughout the entire buyer journey. 

In this blog, we’ll walk you through some of our best tips for using buyer insights to:  

• Build trust with prospects early in the buyer's journey 
• Identify early demand to prioritize effective sales outreach and engagement
• Build an efficient pipeline with hyper-targeted account lists
• Increase deal sizes and win rates

Before we dive into our tips, let's recap how we define sales engagement and why it's so important in B2B purchasing today. 

What is sales engagement?

Sales engagement consists of all the interactions between sales representatives and potential or existing customers throughout the buying journey. 

This includes emails, calls, meetings, and even social media interactions. At every touchpoint, the primary goal is to educate prospects about the benefits of your product, build deeper relationships with them, and ultimately guide them to make a purchase decision.

Why is sales outreach and engagement important?

Effective sales outreach and engagement are crucial to understanding customer needs and delivering personalized experiences that resonate with buyers. The more you personalize your outreach, the more likely they will become customers. 

However, this can be challenging when competition in B2B software is fiercer than ever. You need to consider more than just what buyers want and which competitors they’re considering — you need to understand their purchasing behavior.

Buyers also face increasing rounds of input from various stakeholders and changing requirements for software they want to add to their tech stack. This translates to longer sales cycles, especially for deals with a higher average contract value (ACV).

It also adds an extra layer of uncertainty for revenue teams that need to build a reliable and consistent pipeline. The solution? Focus your efforts on leads that align with your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Top 7 tips for using buyer insights to improve sales outreach and engagement

Using buyer behavior data to uncover leads with the highest potential to convert can help you better allocate resources and drive a more efficient pipeline. 

Then, by identifying key intent indicators such as engagement with review platforms, browsing patterns, and content interaction, you can tailor your outreach strategies to meet buyers where they are in their decision-making process — with the right message at the right time. 

1. Build trust and credibility with customer reviews

Today’s buyers are less interested in attending multiple rounds of sales pitches about a product and more interested in which solutions real customers recommend based on their experience using the product.

That’s why it’s no surprise that many buyers start their journey by looking at customer reviews on sites like G2, where more than 90M users go every year to read authentic peer reviews that can help validate purchase decisions—social proof matters.

The more reviews your product has on sites like G2, the better visibility your brand has in the market, and the easier it is for you to stand out from the competition as the top choice in your category.

Start by making sure that your profile on G2 is optimized with high-quality, recent customer reviews. You can manually collect reviews, activate certain integrations with in-app prompts, or utilize G2 Review Generation campaigns to ramp up collection.

The more reviews you have, the better chance you’ll also land a coveted spot in G2 Grid Reports. 

Released quarterly, G2 Grid Reports are the culmination of the reviews and other performance indicators that demonstrate how you stack up against key competitors in your industry. 

These reports give your sales team a better understanding of which products and competitors will most likely come up in conversations with buyers and help strengthen your position as a market leader.

Once you’ve established a strong presence on G2 and claimed your rightful place as an industry leader on Grid Reports, it’s time to show off your achievements. 

G2’s Content Marketing Subscription enables you to create custom assets highlighting market sentiment about your company or product.

You can also use G2 Reference Pages to create a shareable, branded web experience with specific content from G2, including reviews, Grid Reports, custom CTAs and more.

An example of G2 Reference Pages

You can even customize these pages with reviews and testimonials that speak about the most common pain points your prospects face and how your customers used your product to solve them—and create specific reference pages that align with your target personas

Think of these as mini customized landing pages that can be spun up in minutes with no additional resources needed from your brand team or developers. 

2. Uncover accounts most likely to convert

Now that you’ve built a strong brand presence with reviews, you can use G2 to find your future customers. Intent data uncovers buyers actively researching your solution and your competitors. More importantly, it provides unique insights that empower your sales team to focus on specific accounts, signaling they’re more likely to convert.

G2’s Buyer Intent data harnesses behavior data from real people 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 products or services that fit their unique buying needs.

Use ICP and technographic filters to find best-fit accounts

An aggregate view of the accounts surfaced with G2 Buyer Intent is helpful; however, only some companies might be an ideal fit to engage with. Utilizing more specific filters can help you zero in even further on the accounts that matter most. Here are a couple of filters you can use:

ICP filters: Use various filters to sort through and narrow down buyer-intent companies that match your ICP. You can choose from different criteria, such as company size and revenue, industry, geographic location, and can even upload specific domain names to align the data with your ICP.

Or use G2 Stack technographic data to see specific software buyers use in their tech stack. Use this information in sales conversations and recommend ways that prospects can use your solution with other products in their tech stack.

Finally, filter based on specific engagement across G2 and get ahead of the competition by including key competitors your ICP compared you against. 

A screenshot of G2 activity filters

3. Discover buying stage and activity level to inform sales conversations

Some buyers may have just started evaluating their options (top-of-funnel), or they might be narrowing their shortlist down to just one or two options once your sales team engages with them. 

Giving sales teams insight into where each account sits in their buyer’s journey helps better guide their conversations so that they can move the account further down the funnel toward purchase.

Intent data from G2 reveals two key indicators of an account’s stage in the buyer journey based on their behaviors and which pages they visit on G2. Each account gets assigned a buying stage and activity level: 

Buying stage: Like typical sales funnels, accounts surfaced with G2 Buyer Intent fall into one of three stages — awareness, consideration, and decision. 

For example, a company in the awareness stage might look at your category and view your sponsored content on other product pages within your category. As they move further down the funnel and compare your product to a competitor’s or look at your pricing, this is a strong indicator that they are approaching or currently in the decision stage.

Activity level: By aggregating engagement data like time spent per page and the total number of pages visited, you can see how active an account is on G2. The more active an account is, the more engaged they are in research and the more receptive they’ll likely be to sales outreach and messaging.

4. Book more meetings with personalized outreach

Once you identify good-fit in-market buyers, you can use integrations to layer in more account intelligence from your CRM. As a result, you can add more personalization and automation to your outreach, such as targeting prospects that might be farther along in the sales funnel who are checking out a competitor and indicating high activity. 

Out of the box, G2 Buyer Intent data reveals information about intent activity at the account level. You can find out which accounts are actively researching solutions in your category and have a good background context for their needs. However, reaching the right decision-maker within the account is critical. 

Then, you can pinpoint individuals on the buying committee and speak to them upfront about how your solution solves their unique pain points. The result? You win their buy-in earlier and speed up the sales cycle. 

5. Use automation to accelerate deals and speed to lead

Timing is everything — especially in sales. 

Faster response times when leads first show interest, plus contextually relevant messaging, ensure that you start conversations with potential buyers before your competition even knows they are in-market. And because G2 receives so much traffic from qualified buyers, you can connect with them even faster by leveraging automation with outreach tools like Slack and Chili Piper.

G2 Buyer Intent + 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.

A screenshot of the G2 Buyer Intent + Slack integration

G2 Profile + Chili Piper integration: 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.

A screenshot of the G2 + Chili Piper integration

6. Leverage customer relationship management (CRM) and MarTech integrations to increase sales productivity and efficiency

To help your sales team be even more productive and efficient, consider how all your sales engagement tools work together to tie buyer behavior to sales outreach and engagement.

G2 customers often integrate buyer intent with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot or other popular sales software like Salesloft, ZoomInfo, and Outreach. They also leverage integrations with MarTech, like RollWorks, to drive better targeting before leads engage with sales.

7. Mitigate the risk of churn

You can also leverage the power of intent data to spot early signs of churn. 

If a customer shows intent signals that they’re exploring comparisons within your software category or viewing a competitor’s page on G2, your customer-facing team can proactively reach out to understand their challenges, identify why your solution isn’t providing the value they need, and offer solves to prevent churn and encourage retention. You can also use signals to spot potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities. 

Key takeaways

• Revenue growth is always possible, even when the landscape is tough. If you want to outperform your competitors, source a predictable pipeline with high-converting prospects, and increase deal sizes and win rates, remember: 
• Customers are your biggest advocates: Prove your worth to buyers by highlighting customer reviews in outreach and engagement. 
• Don’t underestimate the power of intent data: Get key insights into your buyer behavior and engage prospects at the right time and place. 
• Integrations can supercharge your tech stack: Connect your tech stack with G2 to automate and personalize sales engagement. 

Ready to learn more about how G2 can help you book more meetings with ready-to-buy prospects? Speak with an expert.