At Warmly, we believe that enterprise-grade revenue orchestration doesn’t have to come with an enterprise price tag.

Our goal has always been to bring AI-powered revenue orchestration to the SMB market, and our latest feature release is helping do just that.

Introducing Warmly’s inbound chat workflows, the new Drift sales chatbot.

Following the recent acquisition of Drift by Salesloft — which is just one episode in an ongoing series of acquisitions and consolidation in this space — many small and medium-sized businesses are looking for a more affordable way to orchestrate conversational chat workflows.

The State of Conversational Chat 

Alright, a bit of background.

The revenue space (sales and marketing software tools) has been undergoing massive changes in recent months.

Some of these changes are technological (owing to the increased adoption of AI), but a lot of it is strategic and takes the form of mergers, acquisitions, and a general move away from standalone best-in-class tools to tech stack consolidation and all-in-one suites.

The acquisition of Drift by Salesloft is the perfect example of this.

Both tools, by themselves, are struggling to meet projected valuation and revenue outcomes. 

The acquisition speaks to a challenging market environment not only for software companies but also for their customers, who are looking for ways to cut down on costs, reduce the number of vendors they are working with, and consolidate their software stacks.

This might make sense at the enterprise level, but for SMBs, it opens up a huge rift that was already cracking when Drift got bought by Vista Equity back in 2021 and shifted its focus towards large companies abandoning the small business.

SMBs simply can’t afford enterprise-facing tech like a Salesloft-centric stack.

Small businesses were already looking to Drift alternatives, but for many, this is the final nail in the coffin.

That’s due to the concern that the acquisition represents a lack of future development and the ability to innovate (bigger companies move more slowly).

So, small and medium-sized companies with aggressive growth goals who need to stay competitive are looking for a more agile alternative to conversational chat.

Well, here it is…  

Warmly’s Inbound Chat Workflows 

Warmly’s latest solution, inbound chat workflows, is a direct alternative to Drift’s conversational marketing function.

The difference?

It’s actually affordable for SMBs.

Sure, Drift has a couple more features that focus on the enterprise use case, but for what small and medium-sized businesses need, we’re basically at feature parity.

Here’s how it works:

A sample workflow with Warmly’s new sales chatbot

On the front end, customers interact with a chatbot that pops up in the bottom corner of their screen.

It’s completely customer-led, meaning they get a signal to engage, but it's up to them to initiate the conversation. 

Then, depending on how they engage with the chatbot, they move down a logic tree of potential answers. Think of it like a “choose your own story” book. The answers they choose as they engage with the chatbot determine what content they see.

For example, here’s what the initial option set looks like on our own site:

What comes next depends entirely on which option the visitor clicks. For instance, choosing “Looking to learn more about Warmly” delivers this:

On the back end, you create what those conversational journeys look like. 

Let me show you what I mean. Here’s what that same workflow looks like as you build it in Warmly.

At each level, you can craft the exact text that the chatbot displays, the potential answers a prospect can choose, and the various branches/scenarios that can come thereafter.

Zooming out, you can see how the whole workflow looks:

Every workflow you build should lead to a desired outcome, which will be relevant to the customer's needs as well as your business goals and processes. For instance, you might have the chatbot suggest that the customer speak with a sales rep.

The appropriate rep can then receive a notification via Slack, take over the chat, and even engage the prospect in a live video call right on the website using our warm chat feature.

In the workflow builder, you can choose which CRM owners to mention in Slack and even select a rule for whom notifications should go to if there are no CRM owners assigned.

Personalized workflows for relevant customer conversations

Here’s where things get really interesting:

Not every prospect needs to be presented with the same chat workflow. 

Using Warmly’s website visitor deanonymization feature, you can identify who is visiting your website (at the company or individual level, depending on the prospect), integrate best-in-class firmographic and intent data, and then automatically activate a given workflow based on filters such as:

• Demographic data (for example, the industry that the company is in)
• Intent data (e.g., the number of people from that company who have visited your site)
• CRM criteria (such as deal stage or account owners)
• Traffic source (whether they came from paid ads, referral traffic, outbound email campaigns, etc.)

But that’s not the only conversational chat solution.

Warmly’s Approach to Website Chat 

Our new conversational chatbot workflow tool is just one feature we’ve added to our expansion revenue orchestration solution.

For high-intent leads, though, we’ve actually got something even better:

Warm AI chat.

Our AI-powered chat solution gathers all of the intel you have on the prospect — thanks to integrations with third-party buying intent data from Bombora, best-in-class company and contact data from 6sense and Clearbit, as well as your CRM and sales engagement tools.

Then, it custom crafts messaging to convert website visitors into real sales conversations.

PS. Learn how the team at D2D Experts uses AI chat and sales emails that convert at 10x the rate of their human-written outreach.

The big win here is that prospects can interact with the chatbot in plain English, and it appears as if they’re speaking to a real person who not only understands what they’re after but responds in context.

It's a more proactive approach to website chat. That said, it's generally better reserved for identified site visitors who have demonstrated at least some level of intent.

Here’s how Max Greenwald, our CEO, recommends building rule-based automation to make proper use of both our warm AI and inbound chat features.

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With this broad framework for website visitor interaction, you can strike the right balance between proactive chat for high-intent prospects and reactive chat for low-intent visitors.

That last category is important, too.

You don’t want to be wasting resources engaging with people who are never going to be your customers (such as a non-ICP fit), so why bother funneling them through to a sales rep through an AI-driven or inbound chat workflow?

Warmly: The SMB’s Revenue Orchestration Platform 

The acquisition of Drift by Salesloft highlights one of the key problems with Drift originally:

It was too focused on the passive inbound chat use case.

Warmly’s introduction of sales chatbot workflows is an SMB-focused replacement for Drift, but rather than being a standalone tool; it sits within a wider architecture of AI and automation-powered revenue orchestration.

Here are just a few of the other features Warmly offers to help small and medium-sized businesses compete with enterprise-grade behemoths:

• Website intent and visitor deanonymization
• Best-in-class contact data and third-party buying intent data via Bombora, integrated directly into your CRM
• An AI-driven chat solution for warm leads with automatic notifications to sales reps via Slack when prospects are ready to engage
• The ability to convert website visitors to paying customers with live video chat
• Automated email and LinkedIn outreach to orchestrate omnichannel campaigns

To sweeten the deal, you can get started for free right now without having to speak to a sales rep or go through a painful qualification process.

While our AI chat and inbound chat workflows are only available on our paid tier, you can start de-anonymizing your site visitors for free.

In the world of sales, the age-old question persists: “How many sales discovery calls are too many discovery calls?”

 When you’ve got KPIs to hit, that limit can seem very far away. And with the advent of sales prospecting automation tools, it’s easy to think that a full calendar means better chances at closing. 

There’s no doubt that adding automation tools to your sales tech stack can increase leads. In one study, 80% of marketers saw their leads increase when using marketing automation tools. 

But are more leads always better?

Here, we come to the biggest paradox in sales: that quality always beats quantity when it comes to new leads. 

And when you’re targeting those juicy, high-ACV leads, you might want to put down the snazzy marketing automation tools and go old-school. 

The History of Outbound Prospecting

Sales prospecting has come a long way since the early days of large-scale campaigns. It was only in the 1950s that marketers realized that consumer behavior could significantly impact sales; thus, demographic segmenting was born. 

Since then, the sales process has become more aligned with marketing goals. Sellers learnt that inbound prospecting was as valuable as outbound, and could vastly increase the number of qualified leads. 

Throughout all of this, one thing was key: it’s quantity over quality. Hit as many people as you can (even if they don’t exactly match your ideal customer profile), and see what sticks. 

Cold outreach reigns supreme

Until the turn of the millennium, B2B lead generation was a case of outbound prospecting. Whether this was conducted via direct mail, cold calling, or email (the first email marketing campaign was conducted way back in 1978), selling was simply a case of finding your prospect’s phone number, reaching out, and persuading them to buy. 

Unfortunately, frozen-cold outreach doesn’t come with fantastic odds. The average cold-calling success rate is just 2%. Every salesperson intrinsically understands there’s a fine line between being persistent and becoming a nuisance.

And so, sales prospecting gets a bad rep. Why bother cold emailing hundreds of people when you could focus on marketing to bring in those qualified leads naturally? 

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It all goes digital 

Salesforce was founded in 1999. By then, it was clear that sales and marketing were going digital and that companies had to make a concerted effort to align their sales prospecting methods with the marketing team. 

Online advertising exploded. Email marketing took off. In 2005, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan coined the term ‘inbound marketing.’ 

In the age of rapidly increasing internet adoption, B2B companies realized that it wasn’t all about aggressive cold selling: it was equally valuable to educate those potential customers who weren't buying from you yet. 

The Rise of Sales Automation

Between the early 90s and the late 2010s, the B2B SaaS market flooded with sales and marketing automation tools. Now, you didn’t even have to write those emails to prospects—software could create an email sequence for you. 

In 2020, McKinsey reported that one-third of all sales tasks could be fully automated. It was no longer necessary for your AEs to be filling up their time with things like regular check-ins with prospects. In fact, 44% of sales reps are too busy to even attempt follow-up. 

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The value of the marketing automation market is estimated to reach $13.71 billion by 2030. But where does this leave sales prospecting? Is it increasingly a case of leaving lead generation to the bots while sales professionals focus on strengthening relationships? 

Or do we need a more flexible approach?

Do More Leads Equal Quality Leads?

So, now we get to the main question: is the quantity of leads better than the quality of leads? We’ll be honest, at Warmly, we’ve had our fair share of experiences with quantity over quality. 

We once had 80 meetings, but most of the companies we talked to weren’t a good fit. There was no urgency or priority for them to solve the problem. You can imagine where that got us: it was like throwing a party and realizing that most of the guests were only there for the free food and didn't care about celebrating your cat’s birthday. 

Spending ages talking to people who aren’t serious is wasted time. Not only does a higher quantity of leads reduce the time you can spend on each lead (you’ve got KPIs to hit! Not time to burn!), but it also reduces the chance of sufficient personalization for each lead. 

Of course, this is where automation can be a help, not a hindrance—initiating conversations at the top and early middle of the sales funnel. However, according to HubSpot research, 75% of marketers believe that personalized experiences drive sales and repeat businesses. 

As much as chatbots and other AI marketing automation tools are helpful for this stage of sales prospecting, they fail the personalization test. So, while they can be handy for getting those little fish onto your hook initially, automation isn’t something you want to use on a whale. 

Nurturing Ideal Prospects, Not Every Prospect

Having 1,000+ qualified leads sounds like a great prospect until you realize you don’t have the manpower to reach out to every single person, let alone follow up. 

We knew Warmly was guilty of prioritizing sales KPIs over nurturing specific prospects at times. So, we spoke to Brian Gerrard, sales director at Outreach, about his take on the quality vs. quantity debate. 

His response? “Disqualify fast.” 

There’s more to it than that, of course. His approach to outbound sales is a multi-step process of identifying ideal prospects. 

1. Identify the whale companies. Discard any others. 
2. Filter those prospects by those that fit your ICP.
3. Research. 
4. Engage with low-level accounts at that company. 
5. Engage, engage, engage. Do research. Learn what they need. 
6. Then, target the executive decision-makers. Tell them how your solution fits their problem.
7. Follow up. 

Unfortunately, given the level of individual research required and the flexibility needed to engage effectively, this kind of sales prospecting isn’t something that you want to rely entirely on automation for. 

So, your sales teams need to be more proactive. And to do that, they need the right data.

Harnessing the Power of Intent in Sales

This is where intent comes into play. Intent allows you to generate smarter leads, not more leads. 

It’s like having a secret weapon that lets you know who’s genuinely interested in your cat's birthday and who’s just there for the free food (you want the people who care—not the gatecrashers.) 

Intent data can be split into explicit and implicit. Explicit signals could be something like search queries, while implicit signals demonstrate intent less obviously, like a user spending time on your pricing page. 

Using revenue orchestration tools (like Warmly,) gives you the power to classify leads based on how ready and willing they are to buy at that moment. 

This adds an additional dimension to your sales prospecting, where you can filter for your ICP and by how likely they are to buy, resulting in higher-quality leads. Then, refocus your AE’s efforts onto these qualifying leads.

Effective Sales Prospecting: Back to Manual

We know that there’s a place for automation in the sales pipeline, but when it comes to whale accounts that have shown intent, there’s no substitute for manual personalization. 

In fact, when your AEs and SDRs aren’t tied to automation KPIs, you’ll give them much more freedom to innovate their sales strategy. In the end, sales is about instinct, not prescriptive tasks. 

But what’s the secret behind implementing an efficient manual sales strategy? 

Manual = more?

Brian Gerrard doesn’t disguise the fact that manual is his preferred way of selling. “Call me old,” he told us. 

But it’s not just about a preference for legitimate interactions—there’s proof that manual prospecting works. 

In one test, a personalized communication sales team was pitted against a 100% automated team. Naturally, the automated team contacted far more prospects, but that’s not the end of the story. 

In fact, the team that conducted personalized sales outreach booked 60% more meetings than the automated team. Bespoke communication also resulted in a higher percentage of booked meetings.

Image Source: Outreach

The takeaway? Manual might take longer, but as long as you’re targeting the right prospects, the ROI is higher. 

Take an example from Warmly. One of our AEs got a prospect’s attention on the 8th email of a 12-step sequence. But what if those eight emails were actually three manually-written emails? Would it have taken so long to get their attention?

Probably not.

“Warm prospecting never ends.”

Ultimately, the mantra is, ‘Warm prospecting never ends.’ With manual sales prospecting, you have to be in nurture mode for every lead, all the time. 

The process starts with research, and that’s accomplished before you even get to stage one of the eight-stage refinement process outlined above. After that, you’re continually nurturing your prospect with every touchpoint. 

Although ringing someone up or pinging them a DM on LinkedIn might sound like cold outreach, as long as you’ve done intent research beforehand, that customer is already warm—even if they’ve never spoken to you before. 

Consequently, you can categorize every prospect as one of two things: either active or an opportunity. 

An active lead is one where you’ve agreed on the next step with them. An opportunity lead, meanwhile, may not be ready to buy just yet, but you want to keep them within the sales cycle. 

With opportunity leads, the hardest part isn’t converting them—they’ll do that in your own time, as your intent will tell you. The hardest part is making each and every interaction with them unique. 

Step-by-Step Manual Sales Prospecting

Sure, manual prospecting takes time. But there’s no reason why your manual sales prospecting techniques can’t be as streamlined as your automation tools. 

To do that, you need to identify the most effective sales prospecting tools and get more confident with turning off that auto-sequencing. 

The Before Stage

Research, research, research 

Everything starts with your target accounts—but identifying those can be one of the biggest challenges of sales and marketing today. 

To evaluate accounts, refer to your ideal customer profile, competitor research, and those current customers with 100% net revenue retention (which we call retainable addressable market.) 

Then, cross-reference these segments with potential leads to find those companies, decision-makers, and organizations that are really the best fit. 

Create an account plan

If you’re letting an automated tool manage your outreach, then it might never have come to mind to create an account plan. However, your most valuable accounts deserve it. 

Your plan doesn’t have to be long. Pick out the most vital information that you and your sales team need to know to prove that your solution is best. PR releases, LinkedIn posts, and recent webinars are some of the best places to find this information. 

Match every piece of info you find with your target’s business objectives. If you’ve done your research right, you can usually identify one or two areas they’re evidently struggling with.

Find alignment in your sales deck

Now it’s time to bring all that information together in a powerful sales deck. 

Naturally, your value proposition is crucial to your deck. But if you can’t explain where your solution fits into your prospect’s existing workflow, you may as well give up now.

As part of your sales deck, particularly for mid-funnel prospects, build a flow chart that explicitly outlines how you'll make their work easier. 

Sometimes, you might not be able to build this kind of flow chart right away with the information that you have. Maybe it takes 1-2 calls with lower-end accounts to gather the information. But when you do have it, it makes your pitch significantly stronger. 

Initiating Outreach with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

One of the most valuable tools for B2B salespeople is undoubtedly LinkedIn Sales Navigator. According to Brian Gerrard, this is the missing piece for many sales professionals.

LinkedIn reports that sellers using Sales Navigator create 15% more sales pipeline and 42% larger deal sizes. 

It’s also a great tool when implementing manual sales processes into your prospecting. 

Building account lists

Your first step with Sales Navigator is building the right account lists. To do this, identify a target company in Sales Navigator and pull out which functions you want to target at that company.

Ideally, you want to target decision-makers at the company in question, though perhaps you’ve identified managers as relevant B2B buyers for your market. 

Once you’ve got a list of target accounts, you can create a custom list.

Image Source: Brian Gerrard 

Effective nurturing 

If you’ve done your research right—into buyer intent signals, product fit, and the correct target accounts—then it should be enough to get you in the door. This is exactly what we mean by ‘warm prospecting never ends’: with enough research, your cold prospect becomes a warm lead in the middle of the sales process. 

And now that you’ve got your Sales Navigator list, it’s time to start the outreach.

Identifying outreach opportunities 

There are 875 million members on LinkedIn, but just 16% of US members are daily active users (DAU). To streamline your outreach, you want to target just those accounts in your customer leads list that have recently posted on LinkedIn. 

Within Sales Navigator, you’ll now have the option to open a recently posted update by any of your leads and interact with it. Or, go straight for a message. 

Image Source: Brian Gerrard

To manage this manual outreach, create custom tasks for your SDRs or AEs in your CRM based on each prospect. The aim of this is to make each interaction with the lead personalized according to their recent updates—not an auto-sequence that might just be personalized to a set of accounts at each organization. 

Long-term prospecting

When you’re aiming for high quality over high quantity, you’re naturally going to spend more time with each prospect. This allows you to really craft each touchpoint to be entirely personalized. 

But say you know you need to follow up with a lead. How do you know which channel to use? Ultimately, in a personalized sales prospecting process, you’re going to have to tailor every single interaction based on what you know about that prospect and your relationship with them. 

So, if someone hasn’t reached out in a while, don’t waste time with another unanswered email—go straight for a phone call. 

If they’ve been pretty responsive in the past, maybe you go for another LinkedIn DM.

Or—remember that one-page flow chart we made? Now could be the time to reach out over email and remind your prospect that you exist and you’re here to solve their problem. 

As Brian Gerrard notes, if that prospect is an MQL—they have the budget, and they have the intent—then hit them as much as you can, respectfully. 

And when you hit them, do it with personalization. A multi-step email sequence generator isn’t clever enough (yet) to gather information during the sequence—for example, if your target company has started a new project. Only you can reach out with a “Hope it’s going well with [X]!” 

High-Quality Leads + Effective Manual Outreach = Long-Term Success

In this era of changing B2B buyer behavior and the influx in social selling, you can’t expect a fully-automated sales prospecting plan to get results. Today, buyers want more independence in the decision-making process. Bluntly, they’re fed up with cold calls.

At the same time, there is a place for automation in your sales process. When you want to A/B test at the top of the funnel, hitting 100 people rather than 10 people in the same amount of time is preferable. 

But when it comes to those bigger accounts—the ones you really want to be closing deals with—personalized interactions can easily make a difference. 

Combine high-quality visitor and intent data with a targeted and personalized sales strategy, and you’ve got yourself a strategy that will optimize your entire sales prospecting process.

How Warmly Can Help You Identify The Right Sales Prospects

While quantity has its place in sales, it’s the quality that truly matters. So, a successful sales prospecting process depends on finding the right balance—knowing when to focus on quantity and when to shift the focus to quality.

Unfortunately, high-quality leads are only as good as the data you’re collecting. If you can’t get accurate data, the chance of converting leads is slim. 

Using a signal-based revenue orchestration platform like Warmly can help consolidate your sales process. Find the right accounts (with intent) more quickly, and get notifications when a human AE needs to be looped into the sales process for personalization.

Figuring out what kind of marketing motion you’re going to invest in can be tricky.

There are a ton of different terms, strategies, and approaches, many of which share overlapping boundaries.

Some even sound the same. Demand generation, demand creation, and demand capture all sound pretty similar, right?

While they do share a lot in common — they are intimately connected — they aren’t synonyms.

In this article, we’re going to shed light on the differences. We’ll explain exactly how demand creation differs from demand capture and what the two have to do with the overarching idea of demand gen.

Demand Creation vs. Demand Capture: A quick overview 

Demand creation and demand capture are the two components of demand generation, a marketing approach that focuses on educating out-of-market buyers and capturing in-market buyers.

Demand Creation is the first part of the puzzle.

It focuses on raising awareness for a given problem and creating demand for a solution to that problem.

Demand Capture is the second half.

It focuses on capitalizing on the 5% or so of your target market who have demonstrated a need and interest in your product category and converting them into customers.

As such, the question of “demand creation vs. demand capture” is kind of a moot point.

You can’t capture demand if it isn’t first created, and creating demand without a mechanism for turning it into revenue is pretty pointless.

What is Demand Creation? 

Demand creation is a marketing strategy that seeks to connect with and educate out-of-market buyers.

Here’s the idea:

95% of your total addressable market isn’t ready to buy. Many of them not only don’t know about your product, they probably aren’t even aware of the problems that your product solves.

That’s the big problem that demand creation seeks to solve.

It's about getting in front of potential buyers and raising awareness about the problem, how serious it is, and the consequences they’re facing as a result.

That conversion naturally leads to one about solutions:

Okay, so here’s this problem. Here’s how you solve it.

This means that the second part of demand creation is about getting your target audience passionate enough about solving the problem (that you’ve educated them about) to build demand for a solution.

That’s where demand creation ends, and demand capture takes over.

What value does Demand Creation provide? 

The big win that comes from demand creation activities is that you are literally creating your own market.

Rather than waiting for the 95% of your market to (maybe) identify the problem on their own and then hopefully hear about your solution, you’re bringing both to them.

And since you’re the one helping them learn about the problem and the available solutions, you’re already top of mind once that demand is built and ready to be captured.

Great demand creation efforts also help paint your organization as a trusted brand and industry expert.

For example, in creating content related to the challenge in question, you may also provide some helpful advice and even resources for solving it, such as a free template.

Of course, your actual product does a much better job of solving the issue, which is something that your demand capture efforts will demonstrate.

How do you Create Demand? 

For most companies, content creation and distribution make up the bulk of demand creation strategies.

This can include content types as diverse as SEO-focused blog posts, webinars, ebooks, guides, podcasts, and social media marketing campaigns.

What matters is the context of the content.

You’re not pushing out a sales pitch and explaining why your tool is the best in its category (I mean, you are, but you do that outside of your demand creation activities).

Instead, you’re helping prospective customers understand a given issue they didn’t realize they were facing.

This post on LinkedIn from our founder Max Greenwald, is the perfect example of a purely educational piece of demand creation content:

What is Demand Capture? 

The demand capture process is all about attracting people in the 5% of the market that are ready to buy and converting them into sales prospects.

This can be considered an alternative to the traditional lead generation approach, though there is a huge amount of similarity here, and the two could easily be considered synonyms.

Demand capture is ambivalent to who created the demand.

Yes, your demand creation campaigns ideally flow into demand capture tactics, as the portion of the market that you’ve educated moves down the marketing funnel and gets closer to buying.

But you’re not exactly going to say no to an opportunity who learned about the problem and solution at hand from a competitor, are you?

In fact, some demand capture campaigns even go as far as poaching the demand that competitors have created, such as “X vs Y” comparison-type blog posts.

What value does Demand Capture provide? 

Demand capture isn’t really a “should we or shouldn’t we” situation.

If you’re not capturing demand, you’re not capitalizing on the interest and trust you’ve built through demand gen activities, and you’re not bringing in fresh warm leads to your sales team.

But beyond that simple answer, focusing on demand creation as a practice (vs. a traditional lead generation approach or just patiently and passively waiting for some inbound leads to arrive) is beneficial because:

• It allows you to specifically target audience segments 
• You’re capitalizing on the brand affinity and recognition you specifically and purposefully built with demand creation efforts
• It’s highly measurable, which means you can continuously optimize your campaigns 

How do you Capture Demand?

Demand capture is all about attracting potential customers and bringing them into a marketing and sales funnel.

There are plenty of ways to do this.

Lead generation content like ebooks and guides that prospects have to exchange an email for are common methods.

Often, however, these aren’t particularly intent-focused. You don’t necessarily know, for example, how close to buying someone who signed up for your webinar is.

There are a few other options, however.

One such method is to use conversational chatbot tools, like Warmly’s AI-powered warm chat feature.

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Using Warmly, you can deanonymize website visitors, pull in firmographic and intent data from best-in-class providers, and have our AI chat engage with website visitors you’ve attracted using educational content or email marketing campaigns.

Some other channels and tactics for capturing demand include:

• Free trials or freemium product tiers
• Warm referrals from your partner network
• Customer referral programs
• Paid search (PPC)
• Social media and display advertising 
• Review sites like Capterra and G2

Demand creation and Demand Capture: How they work together 

Now that we’ve established that it isn’t really a question of demand creation or demand capture but rather that the two are both important components of demand generation, the question remains:

How do the two work together?

Here’s a brief overview of what that process might look like:

• Top-of-funnel marketing efforts, such as blog posts and webinars, educate not-in-market customers about the perils and consequences of a specific problem they’re facing.
• As buyers become problem-aware (they now know about the problem at hand and what it means to them), they start thinking about solutions.
• Middle-of-funnel marketing efforts, such as retargeting ads and email marketing campaigns, guide customers through the process of weeding out potential solutions.
• As solution-aware customers (they know what kind of solution could solve their problem) work through this journey, they learn more about your product and become product-aware.
• Demand creation is complete. You’ve educated the person about the problem and raised demand for a solution. Now, demand capture can take over.
• Bottom-of-funnel marketing efforts (those aimed at attracting and converting purchase-ready buyers) help potential customers understand why your product is the best fit for their needs. 
• A demand capture device closes the deal, and the sales process proper can begin.

That demand capture device might be a free trial activation, a personalized demo sign-up, or a customer interaction with an AI-led chat tool that engages the buyer, pre-qualifies them, integrates buying intent data, and ultimately ropes in a sales rep to close the deal via a live video call.

That’s exactly what Warmly, our signal-based revenue orchestration platform, is designed to do, by the way.

Getting started with demand generation

So, where to from here?

A successful demand generation campaign rests on a solid foundation of both software tools and processes.

Let’s start with the prior:

Check out our guide: Our Top 13 Demand Generation Tools For 2024.

Sales teams run on leads.

But just like a performance vehicle, a high-performing sales team needs quality gas (leads) to do their best.

This means that as you set up to run your next lead generation campaign, the focus shouldn’t be on the quantity of leads as much as the quality of leads.

Quality, in the context of sales, being a proxy for how well they match your ICP (ideal company profile).

In this article, we’re going to guide you through the process of generating qualified warm leads that allow your sales team to perform at their optimum.

We’ll discuss how to best set yourself up for success in a lead gen campaign before diving into six powerful tactics for generating better leads. Finally, we’ll sign off with a discussion on how to get the most out of your leads once you’ve got them in your CRM.

What is a Lead Generation Campaign? 

A lead generation campaign is a marketing endeavor designed with the express goal of generating leads.

A lead in this context is any person who has expressed interest in your company, product, or brand and has handed over their context details (generally an email address but sometimes a phone number) in exchange for value such as:

• An ebook
• A free trial
• A webinar
• A free interactive tool

Is Lead Generation a Variable Strategy?

Lead generation gets a lot of bad press in marketing circles.

That’s because lead gen campaigns are often measured exclusively on the number of leads they generate. More leads equals a more successful lead generation campaign.

This sets up some bad incentives, mainly that marketing ends up being too focused on pushing more leads through to sales, regardless of how much of a fit they are for the product in question or the degree of purchase intent shown.

Take, for example, this ebook about lead gen from HubSpot.

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If I download this guide as part of my research for writing this blog post, I could be considered a lead.

But in reality, HubSpot knows nothing about my potential fit for their product, and I haven’t shown an iota of purchase intent.

For this reason, lead gen is often thought of as an example of bad marketing focused on vanity metrics.

And it can be. But it doesn’t have to be.

If, instead, you:

1. Set out clear expectations as to what defines a qualified lead and when they’re fit for sales interactions
2. Focus on building lead generation devices that actually demonstrate purchase intent
3. Use lead generation as a device for capturing demand built as part of a demand generation campaign

Then lead gen can actually be a super viable strategy for fueling sales teams with high-quality, high-intent leads that they truly have a chance of closing.

To achieve that, you’ve got to do a bit of pre-work.

Let me explain.

How to Get Set up For a Lead Generation Campaign 

Before you start running ads, producing a content plan, or marketing a free trial in order to attract more leads, there are a couple of things you’ll want to have nailed down.

Taking your time to clarify expectations, build an efficient software stack, and align sales and marketing on what a lead even is, will help ensure you see a solid ROI.

Make sure you’re clear on your audience 

First step is to get super clear on who it is you are targeting.

Frameworks like ICP and customer personas are a good move here, but you need to do more than just create static documents.

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Work to create alignment between all GTM (go to market) teams on who your target audience really is.

Then, only prospects that truly fit your key ICP criteria can go through to sales as a “lead.”

Determine how you’re going to categorize leads 

Not all leads are equal, even if they fit your targeting criteria.

Some leads will be in the early stages of the customer journey. Others will be poised to buy. Some will barely scrape past the minimum company size outlined in your ICP, while others will far exceed it.

To distinguish between different lead types — allowing your sales team to prioritize outreach and your tech stack to accurately route leads to the right sales rep — you’ll need to set up some lead categorization guidelines.

Cold/warm/hot is a reasonable framework where you can set up lead scoring rules based on engagement criteria to determine how hot a lead is.

Others use the “qualification” framework to categorize leads:

• IQL (information qualified lead): The lead is just trying to find an answer to a question.
• MQL (marketing qualified lead): These are warm leads that are more familiar with your brand and product.
• PQL (product qualified lead): You’ve established that the prospective customer is a good fit for your product and perhaps vice versa,
• SQL (sales qualified lead): The lead has expressed an active interest in your product or service and is fit for a salesperson interaction.

By the way, we’ll cover lead routing and scoring a bit later on in our discussion on what to do post-lead gen.

Decide on your marketing channels 

Next step is to decide on the marketing channels you’re going to rely upon to get in front of new eyeballs, drum up interest, and ultimately convert people into leads.

Here are your main options:

• Social media platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, etc.)
• Email
• SMS
• SEO content (your blog and other search-optimized website pages)
• Content marketing efforts (webinars, ebooks, guides, podcasts, etc.)
• Affiliate marketing
• Influencers
• UGC (user-generated content), reviews, and referrals 

Pretty much all of these are going to be used to drive traffic back to your website, where you’ll use a dedicated landing page and some form of lead capture device — a downloadable ebook, entrance to a webinar, a free trial, etc. — to convert that visitor into a lead.

As such, your website and the landing pages you host within it aren’t really channels per se. They’re kind of a non-negotiable as part of your lead gen campaign.

Get your tech stack set up 

Finally, you’ll want to make sure you’re set up on the tech level.

To a certain degree, you won’t be able to nail this all in one go. 

You’ll learn as your lead gen campaign progresses about what specific features and functions you need, and you will be constantly updating and reintegrating your SaaS stack.

However, a good starting point would be to have something in each of these categories ticked off:

• A CRM to act as the hub for your lead gen campaign and to store customer contact details
• Advertising solutions to drive traffic to your site
• A landing page builder to design campaign-specific landing pages on our site 
• Lead capture tools like forms
• A chatbot tool to engage visitors on your site and convert them into sales leads
• Webinar hosting solutions 
• A lead routing solution to ensure the right prospects reach the right sales reps in a timely manner
• Email and maybe SMS marketing software 
• A meeting scheduler tool so prospects can book time on a sales rep’s calendar 

6 Powerful Lead Generation Tactics 

Okay, now we get to the good stuff:

How to actually bring in all those hot prospects.

A quick note first. This is not the be-all and end-all list of lead gen tactics. There are dozens of options available to you, and any one of them might work well for you.

What these are, however, are some of the most commonly used and highly effective strategies for pulling in warm leads.

1. Build a media brand 

Content is very often the backbone of lead generation campaigns.

Typically, this takes the form of gated content like ebooks, reports containing original research, or webinars — all of which require potential customers to fork over their email addresses in order to access. 

In our opinion, you’re much better off thinking of content as something your company produces as a media brand rather than a lead generation device per se.

Let’s take a look at HockeyStack, a GTM analytics tool, as an example.

They’ve gone as far as creating an entirely different brand, naming their media empire The Flow.

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The Flow is kind of like a B2B Netflix. 

One of many series available on The Flow is “Can You Dashboard It?” where their GTM team member Nate Branscome shows how real marketers use the product to track key metrics.

And the lead gen?

To access the content available on The Flow, you’ve got to subscribe, using, of course, an email address.

2. Tap into your partner network 

One of the best ways to generate leads is to get warm referrals from brands you’re working closely with.

These brands should be in your general vertical but not direct competitors.

For us, those are companies like Salesflow, Sendspark, and Letterdrop. They’re all broadly in the GTM space, but aren’t an overlapping tool competitor for the same share of wallet.

We collaborate with these brands mainly on content, like this webinar with Bethany Stachenfeld of Sendspark.

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That’s a great way to expand the reach of your demand generation content, but we can get a little more direct when it comes to chasing leads.

One of my favorite tools for tapping into the power of a partner network is Reveal.

Reveal syncs partner data into your CRM, automatically mapping over account details and helping you identify new opportunities.

It can tell you, for example, the gaps between the accounts in your CRM and the active accounts a partner has. 

We could identify, for instance, an account that Sendspark recently closed but that we don’t have in our sales pipeline. 

If we feel that they’re a fit for Warmly’s ICP, we could reach out to the account manager and ask for a warm referral (which will be a much more effective way into a conversation than a cold email).

3. Ask for referrals from existing customers 

Speaking of referrals, asking for an introduction to potential customers from existing users is a great one-two combo.

Not only does it deliver quality leads that already trust your brand (because they’ve been referred by someone they know and trust to give good recommendations), but it also provides an opportunity to interact with current paying customers.

A good way to incentivize this behavior is with a simple referral offer like a discount on their next invoice or even a direct payment.

Woodpecker, for example, pays you 20% of the recurring revenue on closed deals as part of their referral program.

4. Go freemium or offer a free trial 

Lead generation is all about offering something for free in exchange for contact details.

Why stop at content, though? 

What better way to capture interest (and customer data) than by actually giving prospects a taste of your tool?

There are two ways to go about this.

A free trial is a common approach, where the user gets full access to your platform for a set length of time (14 days seems to be the norm), after which they need to whip out their credit card. 

This is generally the point when a sales rep reaches out to try and close a deal.

A better alternative here, though, is to:

1. Give them at least 30 days (more time in the platform means they’re more likely to embed it in their workflows and be compelled to continue paying).
2. Have sales (or a customer success agent) engage early on, helping them to get the most out of the tool from the outset and encouraging adoption.

Freemium is an alternative structure where you offer a simplified version of your product entirely free of charge.

It needs to actually be usable, however. Otherwise, it's just a free trial under a different.

At Warmly, we have a free option available, and many of our customers get value out of it every day.

On our pricing page, prospects can see exactly what the difference is between the free and paid plans in terms of seat, lead enrichment, and feature limitations. 

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Both are viable options for generating leads. Generally speaking, though, free trials are better as part of a startup sales motion, as earlier-stage companies haven’t yet validated their ability to convert free users to paid plans.

5. Create an interactive tool 

An alternative to the freemium or free trial models is to break out a simple feature into a free interactive tool.

Take SEO research tools Ahrefs.

They offer a selection of free tools, such as a keyword generator or a broken link checker.

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These tools give potential customers a taste of what Ahrefs can offer. Of course, it's just an appetizer (though it's still usable). The mains are available only in the paid plan, and Ahrefs smoothly directs buyers over to the pricing menu.

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6. Drive engagement with an AI chatbot 

One of our favorite ways to turn traffic into leads is by engaging website visitors with an AI chatbot.

This works best when you’ve got a visitor identification software platform set up on your website. 

This way, you can deanonymize the visitor, sync third-party buying intent and customer data, and have your AI chat tool craft personalized messages that go beyond “What brought you here today?’

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Warmly takes care of all of the above, but a unique feature is the ability to engage customers in an instant live video call.

Here’s how it works:

Once our AI chatbot identifies a level of purchase intent that requires a sales rep interaction, a Slack notification is sent to the account owner or sales team.

Then, sales can take over the chat, offer a live video call, and even close the deal right there.

That’s how brands like Pump use Warmly to drive revenue fast.

Get the case study: How Pump $20,000 closed in the first week using Warmly.

What’s next? Post-lead gen steps 

So, you’ve successfully generated some high-quality leads.

Where to from here?

Lead Scoring 

The first step here is to score and categorize your leads based on the categories you created back in the prep stage.

In short, you award points to leads based on activities they complete. A form fill for an ebook might be worth 5 points, a webinar attendance might be worth 12, and so on.

Then, you determine the thresholds they need to pass in order to reach certain categories. For example, you might determine that a lead that hits 80 points tips over into the SQL category or is categorized as a warm lead.

You can also set override functions here to consider high-intent actions. For example, if a prospect reviews the pricing page more than three times, they might get upgraded to an SQL regardless of how many points they have.

Inbound marketing tools like Outfunnel are helpful here for automating lead scoring.

Routing 

Next comes routing.

This is essentially the process of determining the appropriate sales rep to send a lead to based on factors such as prospect industry, rep availability, or territory distribution, and then mapping those leads over to an account in your CRM and routing them to the right salesperson.

Chili Piper is a solid tool here, and Warmly also has automated qualification and routing workflows built in.

Use lead routing to send urgent, hot leads right through to sales reps, as well as to route scored and categorized leads to an appropriate inbound SDR.

Sales Process Orchestration 

Once your leads are scored and routed, its time for your sales process to kick off.

What these steps actually look like depends on your exact sales motion.

You might go straight to a phone call, put a prospect into an email nurturing campaign, or run an omnichannel playbook with personalized and targeted ads, LinkedIn outreach, and dynamic video email.

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Your specific tactics and channels will depend on what your data says works best, but there is one piece of general advice that we can give here:

Automate.

Use modern sales orchestration tools to automate as much of your sales motion as reasonable while using AI to maintain a degree of personalization.

This approach will help you nail speed to lead — the early bird really does get the worm in the sales game — while reducing your total overhead by reducing the number of human reps you’ll need.

Consider this workflow in Warmly:

1. A prospect lands on your website after discovering the insightful and educational content you’ve been publishing.
2. The person is anonymized, matched to an account in your CRM, and enriched with best-in-class contact, behavioral, and intent data.
3. An AI chatbot delivers personalized messaging, engages the visitor, and captures more intent information.
4. A synchronized outreach campaign is triggered across LinkedIn and email, synced to your sales tech stack.
5. The outreach campaign drives the visitor back to your pricing page, and the prospect signs up for a free trial.
6. The prospect is categorized as a high-intent lead and routed to the right sales rep, who receives a notification via Slack to engage. 
7. The rep schedules a customized demo and consultation call with the customer to help them get the most out of their free trial.
8. At the end of the trial period, the rep leverages user behavioral data to connect with the prospects’ buying needs and motivations and closes a paid deal.

Seven of the eight steps listed above happen automatically, without the need for manual sales team intervention, thanks to Warmly’s deeply integrated architecture and automated sales orchestration.

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Making the most of your lead generation campaign with Warmly

Warmly, our signal-based revenue orchestration platform, is the perfect partner for your next lead gen campaign.

You can capture leads with our automated meeting booker, enrich account information with best-in-class data sources, and run AI-powered outreach sequences across a variety of channels.

It’s how companies like Namecoach turn traffic into revenue.

Get the case study: Discover how Namecoach booked 26 meetings in 6 months using Warmly.

B2B Influencer marketing is everywhere.

The global market for influencer advertising was worth $21 billion dollars in 2023, and is predicted to grow to $52 billion by 2028.

When you think of influencer marketing, you may think of internet celebrities making sponsored posts on Instagram to sell perfume sunglasses. However, B2B is a much bigger market. The global B2B eCommerce market alone is worth 5X that of the B2C market.

B2B influencer marketing is a strategy of partnering with influential figures in the industry to boost your brand's reach and credibility. The most common benefits to influencer marketing is brand visibility, high ROI, warmer leads and more engagement.

75% of the B2B companies already use influencers according to a 2023 Ogilvy report, and 93% planned to use them more in the coming year. If your B2B marketing strategy does not include influencers, you are missing a powerful tool for reaching new audiences.

Understanding B2B Influencer Marketing

Having a B2B influencer marketing strategy is absolutely essential in 2024. While folks might happily gamble $20 on a pair of sunglasses they saw on TikTok, B2B deals are worth many (million) times more, and require more stakeholders to sign off. B2B sales are also made based on trust and relationships.

How B2B brands partner with influencers can vary enormously, from direct endorsements to co-authored content. The most effective strategy is putting your brand in the orbit of influential people with the same focus, growth trajectory, and target audience. Ideally, companies build long-term partnerships with like-minded influencers, and grow both brands in tandem.

Benefits of B2B Influencer Marketing

Effective B2B influencer marketing leverages the oldest and most powerful marketing strategy we have: word-of-mouth, particularly the mouths of industry experts.

And if you want to get it right, you need to build relationships with the right people before your competitors.

Amplifying Brand Reach

When you partner with influencers, you are not just tapping into their networks. You are leveraging the influence of both sides of the partnership to grow. Almost 60% of brands say that building more interest in their product or service is their top priority for influencer marketing.

LinkedIn algorithms are designed specifically to prevent posts from "going viral." The platform looks at engagement signals to figure out what posts to show to more people, even those who don't follow you or the influencer. Having a top contributor commenting on your company's LinkedIn posts extends your reach not only to their followers, but to other users asking questions or engaging on posts in the B2B space.

Algorithms for search engines, social networks, and marketplaces work the same way. The more people who engage with your content, the more other people will get to see the content. Influence begets influence.

Boosting Brand Visibility

Research shows that parasocial influence is a powerful driver on "brand credibility and purchase attention" according to a recent study published in Nature. Leverage influencers' expertise and authority in your industry by asking them to help you create helpful, hilarious, or otherwise value-adding content—and then amplify it across all your and their networks.

Who are the B2B influencers?

While anybody with clout can be a tastemaker, B2B marketers are typically established thought leaders and experts who have:

• employees, customers, journalists, policy makers, or industry leaders with credible expertise
• talented content creators
• been recognized in their field
• are subject-matter experts
• have dedicated followings
• are some of the most relevant and trustworthy sources of information and advice in their field

The place to look is often among people who are already fans of your product. Find existing customers, business partners, and employees who are already talking up your brand, and explore how you can grow those influencer relationships.

‎If they're mentioning you on social media, it's usually either customers, or folks who are brand-aligned in another way. These existing influencers will naturally be more receptive for you to reach out and ask for a 15-minute call where you can:

• Jam about how to create content together, amplify each other’s posts, swap engagement, or push your brand.
• If your long-term goals are aligned, offer them equity so they’re bought in.
• Add them to the affiliate program, so anyone they refer get 20% of ACV.
• Bring them onto a podcast to give them a platform. You can then cut that content into clips and amplify it across your socials.
• If they’re a customer, turn their testimony into a case study.

Building Your Influencer Strategy

According to a study by TopRank Marketing, the most effective B2B influencer campaigns:

• Use consistent, ongoing or "always-on" campaigns with professional influencers and niche experts
• Compensate influencers with payment, product, equity, or more.
• Measure and track performance.
• Leverage technology and AI
• Get outside help from an influencer marketing agency or influencer marketing platform.

Establishing goals and objectives for your influencer marketing campaign

Is your goal to build brand awareness, generate reviews, or drive more leads to your pipeline? Social listening tools like Brandwatch and Sprout Social can help you figure out where your brand stands now, and the delta from that to where you want to be.

Use the information you gather make SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive) goals about what you want to accomplish with your influencer marketing efforts.

Goals and KPIs

Increase Brand Awareness

• Potential KPIs: Followers, impressions, total engagement, web traffic

Reach

• Potential KPIs: Reach, engagement, new followers, web traffic, use of promo codes and trackable links

Drive Pipeline

• Potential KPIs: SQLs/SQOs, calls booked, sales

Increase User Generated Content

• Potential KPIs: Product reviews, testimonials, social media posts, hashtag, usage, influencers/brand advocates

Creating Detailed Buyer Personas

The first step of any marketing campaign is creating detailed buyer personas. That will help you figure out what influencers hold clout in the spaces you want to—well, influence.

If you're doing account-based selling, you will already have an idea of specific businesses you're targeting and what they're doing online. Who are the people your stakeholders engage with the most?

Many people who are targeting the B2B space will immediately think of LinkedIn. Surprisingly, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are more common influences on B2B purchasing decisions according to a 2023 study by Gartner. An omnichannel approach will expand the body of people who might be able to help grow your brand.

Unlike B2C influencer marketing, B2B tastemakers are not just great content creators. They are subject matter experts that provide real value to their followers. The most influential marketers narrow their content in on one subject they know well and become known for that niche.

Becoming an influencer yourself (by posting original, helpful content on your specialty) is an organic way to find and attract the types of people that align with you in value.

Selecting the Right B2B Influencers for Your Brand

Influencers don't need to be mega-brands that will command high fees for a sponsored post, but have no real commitment to your business. B2B transactions are built on trust. A clear advertisement without overall alignment can easily backfire. Brands looking to leverage influencers need to find people that align on long-term goals for the same audience.

56% of CMOs interviewed believe that the best way to optimize use of B2B influencer marketing campaigns is to "build long-term relationships that show true brand advocacy."

The right influencers are not necessarily the ones with the most followers, but who are most attuned to your goals. As they build their own brand and narratives, your brand's influence will grow organically alongside them. Smaller influencers (sometimes called micro-influencers, or even nano-influencers) may also have higher personal engagement—and therefore more direct influence on purchasing decisions.

Collaborating with Influencers

More than half of B2B purchases are influenced by word-out-mouth, according to Forbes in 2018. Since 2020, B2B buyers increasingly reach out to peers and do their own research before reaching out to a sales team. That means most of the work of convincing the prospect will usually be done by the time they talk to a sales rep.

The content you put out should therefore enhance brand loyalty and trust, prove use case and effectiveness through testimonials, and expand reach.

Building Relationships with B2B Influencers

As with any other relationship, approaching B2B influencers is about building trust. While you may need to cut a check, a influencer partnership should always create mutual value.

If you or other employees are budding influencers , it will be easy to sell the mutual benefits of co-creating and cross-sharing content. Sharing equity is another way of long-term alignment on co-growing your brand.

When you partner with an influencer, their brand is essentially "picking a side" in your industry. Warmly's influencer partnerships include advisors like Josh Norris. When someone in his circle is looking for a revenue orchestration platform, he already has a brand that he uses, loves and trusts to recommend. Influence can also grow like a tree. Other influencers will see what side your brand partners have picked and reach out to work with you, too.

Create Compelling Content with B2B Influencers

There are limitless ways to leverage an influencer partnership:

• Co-creating engaging and authentic content.
• Cross-amplifying content across both your networks to increase engagement
• Having them engage with your brand's social media posts to increase reach and engagement with their followers
• Guest blog posts
• Podcast interviews
• Co-hosting webinars
• Attending industry events as an ambassador
• Endorsements

Content can be product-based, narrative-based, or build "top-of-mind awareness." For example, Warmly's goal is to establish ourselves as the number one media go-to-market in our space. We post (and cross-post) authentic content about the technology we're building, so when people think "revenue orchestration platform," Warmly automatically comes to mind.

Successful B2B Influencer Marketing Examples

There is nothing that says B2B influencer marketing has to be staid. ‎The people you're targeting are professionals, but they're also people. A great B2B influencer marketing campaign will entertain as it sells. For example, HockeyStack's The Flow—including their popular comedic "The Worst Marketer in the World" series—and Lavender's Lavender Land channel are the "B2B-equivalent-of-HBO-and-Netflix."

Obaid Durrani and ToddClouser are the masterminds behind the Easy Mode Framework that helps brands build media empires. Their success implementing the framework with Lavender and HockeyStack have put them on the map as master B2B influencers.

Common Pitfalls in B2B Influencer Marketing

PR Disaster

Working with influencers is not all upside. There are risks associated with co-branding, like Disney's famously disastrous partnership with PewDiePie. That's why it's more important to find influencers who have a similar long-term brand trajectory, than to hire the biggest megaphone you can find to amplify your brand.

Misattributing Results

With long lead times and buying cycles, it can be hard to tell which part of the marketing puzzle to credit. Unlike B2C, B2B influencer marketing is less about a direct line from influencer-to-deal, but staking out your part of the market and partnering with brands in that space that will grow with yours. Overfocusing on content that drives sales directly similarly misses the point.

Controlling Influencer Content

When you partner with an influencer, you ideally trust them as masters of their brand. Trying to control the type of content can backfire, as can paid branded content. "69% of consumers trust influencers, friends and family over information coming directly from a brand," according to agency Matter Communications.

Conclusion

The ROI on B2B influencer marketing is staggering. Companies report a return of $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing in 2022.

Influence is the new currency. It's no longer enough to just buy ads to promote yourself, because anybody can do that. Ads also don't have the same credibility as seeing the face and presence of a recommendation by, say, Scott Leese.

The best way forward for B2B brands to boost brand reach and credibility is to find the right B2B influencers and gather as many of them as possible into your company's orbit. Then build long-lasting, mutually beneficial brand partnerships.

All you need are 60 comments to go viral on LinkedIn. The more people you get talking about you, the farther your message will reach. It quickly becomes a virtuous cycle, or an influence flywheel.

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Salesloft, one of the industry leading sales engagement platforms, has acquired Drift, the industry leader of conversational marketing (aka website chatbots). No financial terms were disclosed.

The merger combines Salesloft's AI revenue orchestration platform, including Salesloft Cadence, with Drift's premier AI chatbot. It's a move that - according to the official press release - will result in a powerful end-to-end AI revenue orchestration platform servicing the entire buying journey.

But what does this merger mean for the wider sales technology market? And what does it mean for B2B buyers?

What's our take on the Salesloft Drift acquisition?

Firstly, it's a sign from the market (and their investors) that individually they could not meet projected valuations and revenue outcomes, but when combined together, the synergies might stand a better chance. As Salesloft CEO David Obrand puts it, the acquisition "introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform."

Except they weren't the first. The category of AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform had already been claimed.

For years, other companies like 6sense and Demandbase had been building around the idea of combining the sales technology and the marketing tool stack into an all-in-one solution to automate workflows on top of. Similar to Drift, 6sense and Demandbase primarily focused on the enterprise.

Warmly was the first AI powered revenue orchestration platform purpose built for the SMB. And it does so by giving you the option to plug in your existing tech stack.

SMBs typically require more automation because they don't have the same access to marketing teams, sales people, and resources as enterprises do. So we adapted to that need.

We call it signal-based revenue orchestration.

Trends in Sales and Marketing Tech Stack Consolidation

The Salesloft Drift acquisition seemingly follows an ongoing trend of sales and marketing tech stack consolidation, where market leaders are trying to become the all-in-one unified go-to-market solution.

Here's what we mean.

SaaS Mergers: Improving Sales Development?

ZoomInfo acquired Chorus back in July 2021 for $575 million, allowing them to compete with Gong.io, the industry leader in call recording and intelligence. But it's part of their larger acquisition strategy to increase net retention revenue outcomes year over year by upselling existing customers on new offerings that keep them sticky to ZoomInfo's platform.

Apollo.io took a different approach of natively unifying the sales tech stack by building everything in-house. The company started as a B2B contact database, then combined that with email sequencing, and recently raised $100MM in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures in August 2023 to create the full-stack sales technology platform. 60% of the funds are invested into product development. They have a PLG sales motion which has saved them from having to invest as heavily into a large salesforce.

Hubspot, the SMB CRM of choice, went the reverse of Apollo and started as marketing automation software that then added CRM capabilities later. And in November 2023 Hubspot acquired Clearbit, one of the top B2B data providers. For the first time, CRM, B2B contact data, buyer intent signals, and workflow all came under one roof.

As Whitney Sorson, CTO of Hubspot, puts it, "Picture having complete data on over 20 million companies right inside HubSpot. All with over 100 rich data points about the companies and their decision-makers. Then imagine being able to easily find high-fit prospects natively within your CRM. Finally, imagine that once those companies and contacts are in HubSpot, being alerted when those companies are showing buying intent."

With the rise of AI and ChatGPT, you can start to see sales technology giants leaning into consolidating the tech stack not only to improve the entire customer experience, but also because it breaks down data siloes to seamlessly integrate data across systems.

Entering the Era of Revenue Orchestration

Data is the new oil. It's the lifeblood of the orchestration. But data alone is not enough to accelerate pipeline conversion rates.

It needs to be combined with action.

As we combine sales workflow, data, and AI and automation, we move into the new era of revenue orchestration. And that means an ongoing arms race to reach B2B buyers.

Drift and Salesloft: A Tale of Two Giants

Let's zoom into the Salesloft Drift acquisition for a second, because there's a deeper story here.

Back in in 2021, Vista Equity acquired a majority stake in Drift, which valued the buyer engagement platform at $1 billion. In 2022 Vista paid an estimated 23x multiple for Salesloft, which valued it at around $2.3 billion.

These were during the good times of SaaS. But SaaS has taken a turn for the worse as we headed into 2023.

Drift: The Hero of SaaS

There was a time when Drift was the darling of B2B sales technology. Initially, it was Intercom that started the real push of website chat, especially in B2B. But while intercom pushed more into support, Drift moved into marketing.

The eventually created the category and movement around conversational marketing and got chatbots to appear on all the websites. Their key pillar of its growth was B2B buyers from the SMB market.

Anybody could add a script tag to their site and you'd see the iconic Drift chatbot icon on the bottom right hand corner.

The Drift sales development team grew revenue quickly by doing one-call closes using their own product.

The sales team would chat directly to website visitors, post a Zoom Link in the chat, and close a $6,000 to $8,000 a year deal right on the website.

Drift grew from $6 million in revenue to $47 million in revenue in 2 years. It was insanity. It was around this period that that Vista Equity stepped in.

Enter Private Equity

After Vista Equity entered the proverbial chat, Drift was forced to move upmarket and stopped caring about SMB/the lower-middle market B2B buyers. SMB just isn't seen as a place to stay for an aggressive PE firm that wants predictable revenue outcomes. Small companies churned too quickly.

Plus, companies with high website traffic typically received the most value out of Drift, which by and large is a marketing tool designed to capture leads passively visiting the site. The more site visitors, the more leads.

Consequently, it was easier to prove ROI and justify a higher price tag. PE saw enterprise revenue as more stable, which meant a higher multiple could be attached to the conversational AI company.

Drift initially did have a vision to expand outside of its conversational marketing wedge and help service the entire customer experience from top of funnel marketing to bottom of funnel sales, as well engaging customer experiences post-sales .

But ever since Vista took over, Drift shut down all expansion and focused product development on enterprise features and sticking to the marketing use case.

Remember the days when you could add a Drift chatbot to your site for a couple hundred a month? Those are gone.

Today, Drift's lowest tier is $2,500/month ($30,000/year), which is ironically desc "For Small Businesses."

$2,500/month: Small Business?

For Drift's Advanced and Enterprise tiers, we've heard our customers being quoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to upwards of millions a year. For Drift, the economics of the lower end of the market didn't make sense.

This showed in the product and buyer experiences as well. Complicated workflows, long implementation sessions, high price tags. It became a best-in-class point solution instead of an end-to-end platform, which put a ceiling on its growth.

There was a point where Drift wasn't even integrated in the CRM, a gap that Qualified exploited by building natively on top of the CRM to streamline the sales use case.

But moving up-market proved to be more difficult for Drift. Growth started to slow. And at the bottom, new entrants started popping up everywhere.

Chatbot software listed on G2

At this time, sales technology company valuations dramatically decreased; many investors were told not to deploy capital and to hold; and B2B buyers stopped buying. And as a result, churn and downgrades increased across the board.

It's no surprise that Drift had layoffs, releasing 159 employees in 2023. Case in point: Drift's employee growth rate has regressed 20% in the last 2 years.

Drift's Employee Count For the Past Two Years

Drift and Salesloft: A Merger of Equals

It made sense for Vista to combine Drift with Salesloft, two complimentary market leaders in sales development and customer engagement that are struggling to keep their dominance and justify their valuation multiples individually.

Salesloft has similarly come up against stiff competition from entrants like Outreach.io, Instantly.ai, Gong.io, Hubspot, ZoomInfo, and Apollo, all of which have their own sales prospecting capabilities that rival Salesloft's.

Tack on the fact that 93% of outbound emails these days are automated, with response rates generally reaching less than 2%, and it's obvious: the category of email sequencing is reaching a point of diminishing returns for its buyers.

Salesloft's acquisition of Drift, which we see more as a merger, is an opportunity for both companies to decrease costs, improve revenue outcomes, and leverage new synergies, especially fulfilling both company's initial visions of expanding beyond their own stage of buyer journey.

Salesloft CEO David Obrand posted on LinkedIn “[The acquisition] introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform that serves the entire buying journey. By closing the gap between sales and marketing, which has long been a major pain point in the revenue motion, go-to-market teams can now orchestrate a hyper-personalized, omnichannel buyer journey at scale.”

Typically, marketing tools don't cross over into sales, outside of ABX platforms like 6sense and Demandbase, so this would be one of the first acquisitions of its kind.

Naturally, it will take time to fully integrate the two sales technology platforms to create the AI-powered revenue orchestration experience that David Obrand has promised. And it won't be cheap: the point of consolidation is also to upsell offerings, especially if you're aiming at improving the entire buying journey.

What would that look like?

Sales reps could do things like sequence prospects via Salesloft, then continue the conversation with the prospect when they visit the website using Drift.

Drift can cookie and track session activity for all website visitors, and once a target company is identified, teams can use Salesloft to multithread the conversation with all key stakeholders in that target account by adding them all to sequences.

All of this orchestrated by Conductor AI of course.

Salesloft and Drift: Legacy Software Under Fire

As Salesloft and Drift are sorting through the acquisition, there will be a window of opportunity for new entrants to claim the AI revenue orchestration category for themselves by adapting to the changing landscape of how companies successfully go-to-market. We predict that these companies will move quickly to establish themselves.

There will be companies like Apollo.io who will opt to build the unified go-to-market solution natively in-house. This is better than the acquisition approach because data can move seamlessly across all their sub products.

And there will be other companies that will keep themselves platform-agnostic and act as the unified API layer that stitches together the sales and marketing tech stack, resulting in the entire customer experience becoming more coherent. Call it go-to-market middleware.

It's difficult for a single platform to be #1 at every use case. There will always be niche use cases that are better served by specific tools.

In this scenario, you would be able to plug in your favorite tools that you're already using.

Maybe you like ZoomInfo data better than Apollo's, Outreach more than Salesloft, 6sense more than Demandbase. It would give you the opportunity to mix and mash the best-in-class point solutions for your specific market and revenue outcomes.

I think Zach Howland, a sales tech stack expert who has implemented multiple CRM and sales tools across various companies, said it best.

"Flexibility is enhanced utility. The market needs to be more nimble for the coming scramble to modernize sales technology as AI becomes more robust."

Warmly, the Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform

Hi! We're Warmly, the signal-based revenue orchestration platform, purpose built for the SMB market that Salesloft and Drift are neglecting.

Instead of building everything natively or consolidating, we give you the flexibility to plug in your favorite sales and marketing tools.

We then infuse your tech stack with the best-in-class intent and enrichment data from 6sense, Clearbit, and Bombora to automatically orchestrate the right sales workflows at the right time.

We're AI powered. We're free to get started. And you can be fully setup in minutes.

And you can save yourself the $30,000/year because we built a Drift competitor chatbot natively into our platform as well.

Find out how D2DExperts closed $80,000 in revenue from Warmly in the first 12 days of use.

From content creation and distribution to LinkedIn sequencing to customer advocacy, demand generation is a broad and varied practice.

This isn’t your classic sales playbook that just needs a mobile phone and email address.

We’re talking complex tech stacks, deep integrations, and the ability to run across sales, marketing, support, and success.

In short, to really succeed with demand generation, you need some powerful tools in your tool belt.

And let’s be honest. It’s not as if you’re short on options.

In fact, the bigger problem is wading through the huge demand gen software market and figuring out what software platforms are worth your time and money.

In this article, we’re going to help you with that.

We’re going to discuss 13 of our favorite demand generation tools, across varied disciplines such as podcast recording, lead routing, and B2B advertising.

1. Warmly

Warmly (that’s us) offers the best demand generation tool on the market in 2025 with our signal-based revenue orchestration platform that provides a wide range of features designed to:

• Capture warm leads that visited your website (first-party data).
• Identify the hottest prospects from those visitors.
• Automatically engage and nurture them, helping your sales reps to successfully convert them.

Let’s get a closer look at the functionality that makes Warmly an attractive option for sales teams looking for a complete demand generation solution: 👇

Feature #1: Identify Your Website Visitors

Warmly identifies companies and individuals visiting your website in real-time.

Since your website is one of the most important parts of your lead generation funnel, capturing and engaging all leads it generates is of pivotal importance if you’re looking to build a steady pipeline of warm leads.

All it takes is adding a snippet of Warmly’s code to your website to start revealing warm leads visiting it.

You can monitor your leads’ web sessions in real-time to see exactly how they interact with your website.

➡️ This can help you pinpoint whether your website is optimized for conversions or if it needs improvements.

But that’s not everything.

Every identified visitor will be enriched with granular B2B data, providing your sales team with all the information they need to:

• Pinpoint leads that best fit your ICP.
• Tailor their outreach to each lead for optimal results.

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The B2B prospect data Warmly reveals includes:

• Company data (company name, location, size, etc.).
• Technographics (software tools and technology the company predominantly uses).
• Demographics (individual names, email addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, job roles, etc.).
• CRM data (past interactions with your reps, former champions within that account, etc.). 

Feature #2: Reveal Buyer Intent 

While knowing who visits your website and gaining insight into relevant B2B information gives you a nice competitive advantage, I believe that it’s still not enough to ensure the best possible results from your sales efforts.

This is why Warmly tracks and captures buyer intent data, in addition to basic B2B data, enabling your sales reps to find which of your leads is most likely to convert now.

Warmly collects several types of intent signals:

1. First-party intent: This includes intent signals leads left in your owned channels, such as website visits, the specific pages they visited, time spent on high-intent pages, recurring visits, etc.
2. Second-party signals: These come from monitoring LinkedIn for things like job changes and openings, new funding rounds, etc.
3. Third-party intent: This includes the intent signals your leads left across the web, such as web searches that include keywords relevant to your product, visits to competitors’ websites or interactions with their ads, etc.

Warmly provides a granular and comprehensive view of your leads’ buyer intent, enabling you to:

• Score and qualify leads with greater precision.
• Identify the highest-value leads among them.
• Engage leads precisely when they’re most likely to convert, boosting your chances of success.

Feature #3: Automate Your Sales Process

In addition to helping your SDRs identify high-quality leads from the get-go, Warmly lets you leverage the intent signals it picks up to create comprehensive sales workflows.

It has several automation tools that let you set things like LinkedIn and email outreach or lead routing on autopilot.

Firstly, there’s the Orchestrator, which enables you to streamline LinkedIn and email outreach.

Here’s how it works:

• Set up the action that triggers the automated sequence (e.g., a visitor matching your ICP lands on your website).
• Define the criteria the prospects need to meet to be targeted (e.g., company size, industry, individual job role).
• Specify the frequency at which you want the workflows to run and the maximum number of people targeted in a single account.
• Decide what action you want the Orchestrator to take (e.g., sending a contextual email, personalized LinkedIn DM, or connection request).

The Orchestrator will then ensure that all the leads matching the criteria you defined are adequately engaged, taking notice that every email or message is personalized and contextual.

Learn more about how it works:

Secondly, there’s the AI Chat, Warmly’s AI-powered chatbot that engages with your prospects in real-time.

Warmly’s AI Chat can handle a wide range of actions, including:

• Automatically engaging and qualifying leads.
• Offering relevant collaterals.
• Answering questions.
• Booking meetings, etc.

The chatbot is powered by our tool’s generative AI, which can be trained to maintain a consistent brand tone across chats while ensuring that every interaction with each lead is contextual, relevant, and human-like. 

Finally, Warmly lets you automate lead routing, as your sales reps will be notified in Slack the second a high-intent lead or visitor matching your ICP lands on your website.

This significantly reduces the time to lead, improving your chances of converting them.

Feature #4: Live Engagement With Warm Video Chatting

Having the option to engage leads while their interest in your product is at its highest could be the make or break between converting them and losing them for good.

Warmly’s live video chat option was designed with this in mind, allowing sales reps to engage leads in live, one-to-one meetings while they’re still on your website.

When you go to the “Warm Call” section of Warmly’s dashboard, you’ll see a detailed overview of all your website visitors right now, with the option of monitoring each prospect’s website session and uncovering intent insights simply by clicking on their name.

Check it out here:

Once your sales reps assess that the time is right based on website session insights and other intent signals, they can easily initiate a call and do what they do best.

Feature #5: A Daily-Updated B2B Prospect Database: Coldly

Warmly lets you access Coldly, which is a database with 200M+ accounts and contacts that gives your sales team an excellent starting point for prospecting.

Coldly includes all the B2B data your sales reps need to make initial contact, including:

• Validated emails.
• Phone numbers.
• LinkedIn profiles.

Our database also provides 25+ B2B filters and customizable data filters that you can set up, enabling your sales team to build highly targeted prospect lists in a few seconds.

Coldly also has a browser extension that lets you scrape essential B2B contact data from any source on the web, including LinkedIn profiles, company websites, etc.

This way, your team will have both accurate contact data at their fingertips and the right tools to pick up buyer intent signals and set up workflows on top of them.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly offers a freemium plan.

On it, you can:

• Reveal up to 500 companies and individuals visiting your website (in addition to essential and accurate data on each lead).
• Set up ICP filters to quickly identify high-quality leads. 
• Automate basic lead routing.

If you need more, there are four paid plans to choose from:

1. Micro: Starts at $333/month when billed annually and adds unlimited seats, 5,000 monthly visitors revealed, first-party intent signals, alerts, and access to Warmly’s extensive database of B2B contact data.
2. Starter: Starts at $12,000/year, everything in Micro, plus 10,000 monthly visitors, third-party signals, AI Chat, and CRM syncs.
3. Business: Starts at $19,000/year for up to 10,000 visitors or $28,000/year for up to 75,000 visitors, everything in Starter, plus second-party signals, sales orchestration, and lead routing.
4. Enterprise: Starts at $30,000/year, lets you identify a custom number of visitors, includes everything in Business, plus custom signals and warm calling.

Pros & Cons

✅ Accurate website visitor identification at both company and individual levels.

✅ Reveals who your hottest leads are right now.

✅ Personalized lead generation and outreach workflows.

✅ Real-time monitoring of visitors’ web sessions with options to engage them via an AI chat or video call.

✅ Transparent pricing model – even at the Business plan level.

✅ Good range of integrations.

❌ You'd have to be on the Enterprise plan to access Warm Calling.

2. Positional 

And to succeed in this arena, you’ve got to make sure your SEO content is properly optimized. For that, we use Positional.

Positional is an AI-powered toolset for SEO and content teams.

The platform is centered around a content optimization solution, which is what we primarily use it for. 

Positional helps you ensure that each piece of blog content you create covers key themes, includes important terms and keywords, and meets user experience requirements, such as the inclusion of images and subheaders.

Positional also has a bunch of other great content production features built-in, such as:

• Content planning and keyword clustering capabilities
• Keyword tracking (powered by Semrush data)
• Internal link optimization
• On-page content analytics like bounce rates, in-depth page scoring, and heatmapping
• Auto-detection of AI-written content (ideal for when you grow content operations to include external contractors)

Positional Pricing

Positional is still in private beta, so you’ll have to book a demo with their Co-founder Nate to find out more.

3. Letterdrop

Letterdrop is another content-related tool that we at Warmly use as part of our demand generation strategy.

This one is all about increasing the reach of the content you publish.

We use Letterdrop to publish directly to our website (on Webflow’s CMS), and automatically post on social media platforms like LinkedIn to expand our reach.

We also take advantage of Letterdrop’s LinkedIn social selling automation. Whenever someone from our company posts on LinkedIn, we can program the post to be liked and even shared automatically by other Warmly team members.

Letterdrop has a few features that overlap with Positional, such as internal linking and SEO monitoring.

One cool unique feature of Letterdrop, though, is their integration with Gong.

You can pull insights from Gong’s sales call recording feature to understand pain points and objections and use them to power blog and sales enablement content ideation.

Letterdrop Pricing

Letterdrop has a useable free option, and costs $995 a month for their Growth plan.

4. OpusClip 

When it comes to content formats to fuel a demand generation campaign, video is perhaps the ultimate option.

We use video for podcasting, webinars, explainer videos, and case studies, which we house on our media page.

For all of these video formats, we use OpusClip to create shareable videos.

OpusClip is an AI video editor. You give it a long video, and its AI engine scours the recording for the best parts that it can turn into viral clips.

It has a GPT-enabled portal, so you can make requests in plain English, like “Give me a 30-second clip from the first hour of the video.”

You can also add contextually-relevant B-roll to longer videos or cut between two cameras with active speaker detection.

OpusClip Pricing

OpusClip has a free option, with paid plans starting at $9 a month.

5. Capcut 

Capcut is another video editing tool that we use as part of our demand gen content creation tech stack.

Where OpusClip is more of a unique tool that couldn’t do what it does without AI, Capcut is closer to a traditional video editing suite, but with AI built on top.

It has video editing and creation features like text to speech and animations, AI editing tools like video upscaling or auto video generation, and even some photo editing tools for visual content creation.

It also has a handy mobile app, which is cool for editing content on the go from a tablet or phone.

Capcut Pricing

Capcut doesn’t appear to advertise pricing, but sources say you’ll pay in the range of $8 a month for the most basic plan.

6. Canva 

When it comes to demand gen tools, few companies have been as disruptive as Canva.

Canva is an online graphic design tool.

It offers a ton of great templates, hundreds of fonts to use, and an easy-to-understand drag-and-drop editor.

But perhaps the best thing about Canva is that it's free.

Well, there are paid plans available (it's a freemium tool), of course, but the free version is seriously usable.

If you’re looking for the right demand generation tools for visual content creation, Canva should be at the top of your list. 

Canva Pricing

As mentioned, Canva has a seriously functional free plan.

For more advanced content creation features, though, you’ll want to upgrade to a paid plan, starting at $15 a month.

7. Metadata 

Metadata is one of the few exclusively B2B demand generation software solutions on this list.

Metadata came up on the back of a great B2B advertising toolset, catering specifically to an audience running account-based marketing campaigns.

That’s still definitely where they excel. Metadata has fantastic ad automation functionality, a deep reporting and analytics suite, and some powerful audience targeting features.

Now, Metadata is expanding its offer, positioning itself as a B2B marketing OS. The idea here is that Metadata sits at the center of your demand generation marketing tech stack and helps orchestrate and automate demand generation campaigns.

As such, the solution now offers features and developments like:

• A huge range of integrations with marketing automation tools like Salesforce Pardot
• Website personalization functionality
• Lead data enrichment 

Metadata Pricing

Metadata costs $60,000 a year, with a $540,000 annual ad spend limit.

If you want to spend more than that on ads, you’ll need to chat directly with the sales team to organize a custom deal.

8. Riverside 

Riverside is one of the best demand generation tools for anyone using podcasts as a content format.

We use Riverside primarily for recording remote podcasts, where the hosts and attendees are recorded using the webcam or phone.

Beyond that, Riverside has a tonne of great features that make it a seriously powerful inbound marketing tool, such as:

• AI-powered show notes
• Captions and transcriptions in over 100 languages
• A teleprompter and media board to enhance your hosting abilities
• Video editing capabilities 
• Bite-sized clip generation powered by artificial intelligence 

Riverside Pricing

Riverside comes in at $15 or $24 a month, depending on the plan you choose.

There is also a free plan, though it comes with limitations on content length.

9. Outgrow 

Outgrow is somewhat unique in the demand generation software space, serving the need to create interactive website content like quizzes, calculators, and forms.

Outgrow has a bunch of different use cases.

You can use it to enhance on-page engagement, gather critical insights about customer buying preferences, or simply as a lead capture tool.

To help you get started quickly, Outgrow offers a number of helpful templates across formats like polls, surveys, and assessments.

Outgrow Pricing

Outgrow pricing starts at $14 a month, scaling up to $600 a month depending on the features you require.

10. The.com 

The.com is an interesting tool. It uses AI to spin up web pages very quickly to target long-tail keywords.

It is ideal for demand gen efforts toward the bottom of the funnel, such as creating a bunch of “competitor vs. competitor” pages to increase your organic traffic.

The.com is more about AI-generated landing pages and programmatic website content than it is about SEO blog posts. For that, we still use human writers.

But you can use The.com for things like localized landing pages to hit local SEO requirements and to automatically generate personalized web pages that speak to the exact user on your site.

The.com Pricing

The.com doesn’t advertise pricing. You’ll have to speak with a sales rep.

11. Hotjar 

Hotjar is a behavioral analytics tool centered primarily around a web page heat mapping solution.

With this heat mapping tool, you can see exactly how users interact with content on your website: what draws eyeballs, what promotes conversions, and what causes users to leave.

You can view heatmap data based on movements like scrolling or clicks or even record full user sessions and watch how they navigate your site in real time.

Beyond the heatmapping functionality, Hotjar has a few cool features to understand the impact of your demand generation efforts, such as:

• Customer surveys and questions for real-time and contextual user feedback
• 1-on-1 customer interview functionality
• The ability to compare how user behavior changes depending on the device used 

Hotjar Pricing

Hotjar pricing is a little complex. You pick and choose the modules you want based on the features you require.

You’ll pay a minimum of $32 a month for the most basic heat mapping functionality.

12. Lead Routing - Chili Piper 

Chili Piper is more or less considered the defacto lead routing tool.

On the back of a successful demand generation campaign, new leads enter the sales funnel, and Chili Piper helps you route that prospect to an appropriate inbound sales rep.

You set the routing rules so that leads get distributed based on factors that you choose, such as rep availability, territory assignment, or customer segment.

Chili Piper naturally integrates with popular lead generation tools such as Formstack and ClickFunnels, and they also offer a one-click scheduling tool to make it easy for prospects to schedule a demo or meeting directly with a salesperson.

Chili Piper Pricing

Chili Piper pricing starts at $15 per user per month.

13. Deeto 

Deeto is something unique in this space, billing itself as a “prospect empowerment platform.”

The idea here is that Deeto connects prospects in your sales pipeline to real-life customers who are currently using your tool.

That way, prospects don’t need to rely on tools like reviews and case studies (which, let’s face it, are often a little doctored). Instead, they can get the info they need right from the source.

There’s a smart-matching algorithm that uses factors like role and company size to help prospects find the right person to speak to, or they can browse a database of customers and schedule a discussion.

Check out our podcast episode Golan Raz, the Founder & COO of Deeto: Scaling Customer Advocacy.

Deeto Pricing

Deeto doesn’t advertise pricing.

Capitalizing on demand with Warmly 

If there’s one goal that all effective demand generation strategies share, it's building up enough demand for your product to produce quality leads that your sales team can actually close.

So, what happens when those warm leads come through?

Speed to lead is the name of the game here, so you need a robust solution that can help you jump on hot prospects immediately.

Warmly, our AI-powered account-based orchestration platform can help you deanonymize site traffic, funnel prospects into automated email and social outreach campaigns, and provide third-party buying intent insights to help you understand exactly when a sales rep should get involved.

But unlike other solutions, Warmly doesn’t need months of extensive onboarding, integration, and training sessions to start seeing results.

Many of our users see a positive ROI in a matter of days.

Check out Kandji booked two meetings with qualified leads in just eight minutes using Warmly.

Read More

• Warmly vs. ZoomInfo: A direct comparison of Warmly and ZoomInfo to help you find the best platform for your needs.
• ZoomInfo vs. 6sense: Find out what are the strengths and weaknesses of ZoomInfo and 6sense in this comparison guide.
• ZoomInfo vs. LeadIQ: Learn more about ZoomInfo and LeadIQ and see our direct comparison and analysis of the 2 sales tools.
• Best B2B Data Providers: Find the optimal B2B data platform for your use case.
• Best Lead Intelligence Software: Find the best platform for gaining critical insight into your leads.
• Best GTM Tools: Optimize your GTM strategy with some of the best GTM software on the market today.
• Best Sales Intelligence Tools: Look beyond popular options like Apollo and Zoominfo to find the optimal solution for your use case.

One of the biggest challenges for B2B SaaS sellers is lead generation. Whether you choose to prioritize outbound or inbound leads, you’ll have to dedicate a lot of time and patience to nurturing prospects before they buy. 

Before digital tools transformed the sales funnel, outbound sales was the top dog. You’d build a team of salespeople whose job was cold calling and cold emailing in huge numbers until they hit on the right person who wanted to buy from you. 

Or, you’d send a few of your top salespeople to every annual SaaS conference in the United States, hoping they would contact your ideal customer. 

Today, however, SaaS brands recognize that this isn’t the savviest way to sell. Outbound marketing might get you airtime with potential customers immediately, but when only 5% of your market is ready to buy at any given time, you’re wasting your time more often than not.

Enter inbound sales. 

(Image Source) 

Inbound sales focuses on understanding customer needs and consistently building brand awareness. This way, you can get your ICPs to come to you rather than wasting time reaching out to them, resulting in a cost per lead that is considerably cheaper than outbound leads. 

But how do you get the most out of your inbound sales strategy? That’s where an inbound sales representative comes in. 

At Warmly, we distinguish between our sales development representatives (SDRs) and our inbound sales representatives (ISRs). While both focus on identifying potential leads and closing deals, ISRs are uniquely positioned in the sales process. 

Understanding the Traditional Inbound Sales Funnel

In contrast with outbound sales, inbound sales are all about your customer: the pain points, goals, and sticking points they’re experiencing. 

As a result, because inbound is less about outreach, an effective inbound sales strategy relies on the strength of your brand awareness. Your ICP can’t connect with you unless they know you’re out there, providing them with the answer to their problems. 

Essentially, an inbound sales team aims to build an ample supply of ToFu leads—those who learn about you through social media, podcasts, and blogs—so that when they’re ready to buy, they instinctively come to you.

Research into buyer journeys and demographics of your ICP helps you identify the right MQL to pass on to your sales team, who begin converting ToFu prospects into MoFu and BoFu leads and, finally, new customers. 

Of course, if your sales strategy is based on account-based marketing, you’ll want to think of the funnel slightly differently. In both cases, the quality of the lead generation you accomplish is critical. 

(Image Source)

But inbound sales strategy also relies on effective sales reps. Distanced from traditional sales strategies like cold calling, your inbound sales representative must be far more agile.

Research from Gartner shows that B2B buyers spend 27% of their time researching solutions independently online and just 17% meeting with potential suppliers. Your ICPs will likely not reach out until they’re ready—in fact, 41% of B2B buyers view 3-5 pieces of content online before communicating with your sales team. 

With your marketing team focused on increasing brand awareness and your sales team intent on closing deals with those they’ve identified as SQOs, there’s a gap where your inbound prospects may be slipping through the cracks. 

Where Does an Inbound Sales Representative Fit?

Inbound sales representatives are sometimes called business development representatives (BDRs) or sales development representatives (SDRs). However, at Warmly, we consider inbound sales representative jobs to be crucial roles independent of other members of inside sales or marketing.

The traditional inbound sales funnel clearly distinguishes between marketing efforts and sales efforts. Inbound marketing brings leads into the funnel; sales focuses on conversion. 

In the current B2B buyer landscape, the line between marketing and sales is more blurred. With prospects increasingly taking a non-linear path through the sales funnel, marketing and sales teams must work collaboratively to nurture leads and get them ready to buy. 

Your inbound sales representative sits at this cusp between marketing and sales. With extensive product knowledge and traditional sales skills like objection handling, inbound sales representatives are the ideal people to nurture warm leads before passing them on to an AE. 

(Image Source) 

At Warmly, inbound sales reps are an intermediary step between an SDR and an AE. ISRs are responsible for a combination of SDR tasks like prospecting and closing smaller deals as an AE would. 

For this reason, introducing ISRs into your sales funnel can speed up the sales path for junior team members, turning them into competent AEs far quicker than if they spent additional time as an SDR. 

Alternatively, the ISR role can be more of an inbound sales development rep: a permanent position that speeds up the process of qualifying leads and passing them onto AEs. 

Whichever strategy you choose for your inbound sales representative, implementing this position in your team accomplishes two things:

• Speeds up the process of identifying SQOs.
• Enables AEs to spend more time on potential customers with a higher ARPA.

The Role of an ISR: Nurturing, Booking, Closing

Inbound sales representatives are responsible for the three main types of lead during the sales process.

Unqualified Inbound

Leads that aren’t likely to fit the definition of an SQO. They may not have the resources to make a purchasing decision or simply aren’t ready to buy. 

Big Inbound

‘Whale’ leads that are usually the responsibility of an AE. 92% of B2B buyers report being likely to schedule meetings with a company they might buy from, so getting whales in front of an AE is critical.

Just Right Inbound (‘Goldilocks’ deals)

Smaller than whales, but still viable opportunities for revenue. These are the optimal leads for an inbound sales representative to cover from prospecting to closing. 

Consequently, we can categorize an inbound sales rep’s role comprising the following three primary responsibilities: 

Nurturing 

For those unqualified inbound leads, ISRs take the lead in asking challenger questions and direct leads to the free product tier if relevant. 

For leads where the SDR has indicated a higher likelihood of conversion, the ISR can conduct more extensive nurturing tasks using a combination of manual communication (emails or live chat) and automated tools. Traditional sales skills like active listening and negotiation skills, plus product knowledge, will come into play here.

Booking

It’s vital that the most lucrative of warm leads actually get in front of a talented AE. The inbound sales representative is responsible for filtering leads to ensure that only the most worthwhile leads are sent to the AE, reducing the likelihood of wasted calls. 

However, inbound sales representatives can also book calls with those ‘goldilocks’ leads, who are too small for AEs but have been qualified as solid prospects by the SDR. 

Closing 

In general, ISRs are only responsible for closing deals with ‘goldilocks’ leads. However, the extent of these more minor yet still viable leads means ISRs quickly get a feel for pitching and general sales strategy. 

Crucially, inbound sales representatives have a broad remit as far as sales development goes. But their role is more than just closing those smaller deals; they also allow SDRs to focus on discovering quality leads and AEs on closing deals.

And when B2B companies face a landing page visitor conversion rate of just 9.5%, it’s even more important to have a sales team in place that can get leads through the funnel as efficiently as possible.

KPIs for an Inbound Sales Representative

The performance of an SDR or an AE hinges on clear sales targets:

• SDR = Total # SQOs generated
• AE = Total # Closed Won deals 

In Warmly’s case, as they sit between the SDR and the AE, we measure inbound sales representative KPIs according to a mix of the above. 

Closed Won deals are worth twice as much as SQOs. So, a typical monthly KPI for an ISR may look like: 

• 6 Closed Won deals
• 6 SQO + 3 Closed Won deals
• 12 SQOs 

As outlined above, ISRs aren’t responsible for the largest ARPA deals. These go straight to AEs. However, an inbound sales representative can cover those all-important goldilocks leads—the prospects we know are in the right mindset at the right time and are just small enough to work as a training ground for ISRs. 

Because inbound sales reps are in-training for senior AE positions, we look for ISRs to be quickly improve their sales metrics. This might look like: 

• Q1: 9-12 SQOs and 1-3 Closed Won deals
• Q2: 3-6 SQOs and 2-4 Closed Won deals

Important Factors Affecting the Success of Inbound Sales Representatives

Quality of MQLs

Unfortunately, if your inbound sales representative isn’t being fed accurate leads from your SDR or marketing team, they’ll find converting much more challenging. 

While identifying MQLs will be the responsibility of the marketing team, to improve the quality of MQLs, your marketing and sales team should be completely aligned on the kinds of prospects you’re primarily seeking. 

This is one reason why many B2B companies are turning to account-based selling and account-based marketing, as it’s a strategy that considerably reduces the risk of imperfect data being passed between marketing and sales teams.  

Robust Understanding of Your ICP

If your inbound sales representative doesn’t understand your ICP, their sales metrics will suffer. 

Any leads that don’t align with your ICP will inevitably be a waste of time, whether that’s through conversations that don’t progress or prospects not bothering to attend booked meetings at all. 

To give inbound sales representatives the best chance of closing deals, they should only spend time with leads that match your ICP. 

Timing of Engagement 

In his observations on a month of working on inbound leads, Ernest Teh notes that “capturing all the demand” was one of his biggest learnings. ISRs must react quickly to every lead that qualifies, requiring integrated CRM software to alert inbound sales reps to opportunities. 

Research shows that sales reps who respond to leads within five minutes are 21x more likely to see conversion. The SQOs driven to your inbound sales representative might match your ICP exactly, but if your inbound sales representative doesn’t have the bandwidth to respond, you’re throwing away good prospects.

The Future of the Inbound Sales Representative 

We predict that inbound sales representative jobs will only grow in an increasingly automated B2B sales landscape. In a world of increasing SaaS competition and an emphasis on personalized experiences, inbound sales representatives are ideal to ensure consistent collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. 

For inbound sales representatives to work at their best, they need the correct data and resources. Intent is an essential factor in B2B buying decisions, and for inbound sales representatives to take advantage of every prospect they’re given, they must have the right tools to track and identify leads.

Conclusion

At Warmly, we consider inbound sales representative jobs pivotal to our inbound sales team. 

An inbound sales representative is an ideal stepping-stone position between an SDR and an AE. It’s a six-month boot camp in inbound sales, priming staff for more senior responsibilities in account management. 

Ultimately, we’re seeing two benefits to implementing ISRs within our inbound sales team: reducing the time between salespeople moving from SDR to AE and optimizing salespeople, so they’re ready for the challenge of account management from day one.

Inbound marketing has come a long way since HubSpot’s CEO coined the term back in 2005.

Today, in many circles, inbound marketing is not even called “inbound marketing.”

It’s just marketing.

Yes, traditional and outbound techniques are still used, but few highly successful organizations today are using them extensively. They are almost always combined with an inbound play.

Since inbound marketing is so broad and all-encompassing, it’s little surprise that the world of inbound marketing tools is a little overwhelming, to say the least.

I mean, we researched this article to bring you the best of the best, and we still came up with a “brief” list of 27 tools.

To help you choose the best software solutions for your tech stack, we’ve divided up our list into different categories, starting with content production, the backbone of most inbound marketing campaigns.

Inbound Marketing Tools For Website Engagement 

Many inbound marketing efforts, from social media engagement to blog content, are designed to drive potential customers over to your website.

What happens then?

You use one of these four website engagement solutions to capture attention, start a conversation, answer customer questions and objections, and capture a warm lead (or close a deal directly!)

1. Warmly 

Warmly—that’s us, by the way—offers the best inbound marketing tool with our account-based orchestration platform.

Revenue orchestration is all about surround-sounding prospects with timely, personalized, intent-based content and communications across all channels, from website chat to email to LinkedIn.

Our platform provides you with the most accurate, real-time, person-level de-anonymization data and signal tracking to help you identify your warmest leads and reach out to them immediately.

Here are the features that make Warmly the best inbound marketing tool on the market in 2025:

Streamline Sales Engagement Processes

Warmly’s automation features are by far one of the things most customers love about the platform.

Our platform uses intent signals it picks up to build complex workflows on top of them, enabling you to reach out to all the right leads at the best possible time.

It provides several automation features, including:

Orchestrator, which lets you automate email and LinkedIn outreach. The Orchestrator is highly configurable, meaning you can set up all the important parameters as you see fit, including:

• The action that triggers the workflow (lead matching your ICP lands on your website or a website visitor comes back to your pricing page).
• Filters that define which companies and individuals should be included in the workflow (these include everything from company size and industry to job position and seniority, etc.).
• The course that the workflow should take (send a contextual email, a personalized LinkedIn DM, or a LinkedIn connection request).

This capability improves time-to-lead, while SDRs can take over ones that respond and provide a personalized experience.

The AI-powered prospector prevents quality leads from falling through the cracks simply because you didn’t have a sales rep on hand.

Try it yourself 👇or watch it in action. 

💡Note: You will need to be on one of Warmly’s paid plans to gain access to AI Prospector. For ARC, the ROI was 200% over 6 months. 

AI Chat, which is an AI-driven chatbot that can be trained to:

• Qualify leads.
• Answer their questions.
• Book meetings.
• Offer relevant collaterals.
• Engage leads.

We've thrown our hat in the ring amongst three other website engagement solutions (Drift, Zommo, and Intercom) because we, too, offer conversational website chat.

Lead routing, which lets you set up real-time Slack notifications that will alert the adequate sales rep whenever a lead matching certain criteria lands on your website or takes a high-intent action.

The combination of these automation features ensures that:

• Every high-value lead will be engaged.
• Your sales reps will have more time to focus on things that matter than most rather than act as surveillance guards on your website 24/7.

Live Video Chat

Engaging your leads while they’re still hot can make the difference between a successfully closed deal and an opportunity that is forever lost.

With Warmly, you won’t have to worry about that, as its Live Video Chat feature lets you engage leads while they’re still visiting your website.

In the “Warm Calls” section of Warmly’s dashboard, your sales team can see who’s visiting your website right now and monitor their session in real-time.

Once you detect a high-intent lead based on Warmly’s insights or a visitor matching your ICP, you can engage them in a video chat immediately.

Alternatively, you can rely on automated lead routing to notify reps whenever a high-value lead ends on your website. 

This allows you to monitor their website interactions and hop on a call when they assess the time is right.

Try it out here:

But here’s where our solution is different:

Our chat is human-led and AI-augmented, meaning your prospects aren’t engaging with a simple “if-then” chat workflow. 

The AI engine knows exactly who it’s talking to (because the prospect is deanonymized and their data enriched through Warmly) and what level of interest they have expressed (via third-party intent data from Bombora).

The chatbot then caters the conversation to those exact needs.

And, once it's time for a rep to take over—because the prospect has demonstrated a given level of intent—the salesperson gets an automated notification via Slack and can jump into the chat live. They can even turn it into a live video call without having the prospect leave the site.

Pricing

Warmly offers a free forever plan that allows you to identify up to 500 companies and individuals visiting your website per month.

In addition to that, you can set up ICP filters to quickly identify high-quality leads and automate basic lead routing.

There are three paid tiers to choose from to access the AI sales agent:

1. Data Only: Starts at $333/mo when billed annually or $499/month when billed monthly, and includes unlimited seats, 5,000 monthly visitors revealed, first-party intent signals, alerts, and access to Warmly’s prospecting database.
2. Business: Starts at $19,000/year for up to 10,000 visitors or $45,000/year for up to 75,000 visitors, which includes second-party signals, sales orchestration, and lead routing.
3. Enterprise: Custom pricing, which lets you identify a custom number of visitors, includes everything in Business plus custom signals and warm calling.

Pros & Cons

✅ Identifies companies and individuals visiting your website.

✅ Enriches each identified lead with detailed B2B intelligence and reveals intent data.

✅ Live sales engagement capabilities.

✅ Reveals who your hottest leads are right now.

❌ You’d have to be on the paid plans to access Warmly’s AI chat.

2. Drift 

Drift is one of the most widely used chat solutions for lead generation. What Drift does in comparison to its many competitors is play the numbers game.

The tool is a pre-programmed chatbot, and they’ve started implementing a few AI features, too. 

It's not a human-led tool. It's much more about high-volume traffic plays, where a small percentage of the traffic you pull to your site can be enough to feed your sales team.

At that, though, it's really good.

It also provides sales teams with engagement history and lead scores so they know who to prioritize and provides insight into audience makeups.

3. Intercom 

Intercom is similar to Drift in that it offers a chat solution.

But while Drift hits the marketing use case, Intercom is much more focused on customer support service.

For that reason, you’ll also find features like:

• A unified inbox for managing helpdesk tickets
• An AI summary of long customer complaints
• A self-serve content repository for helping clients resolve their own issues 
• Automated workflows for support ticket management 

4. Kommo

Kommo is a messenger-based CRM that offers an interactive website chat button. Equipped with an AI chatbot that responds to messages automatically, it gives customers a conversational experience. 

This tool is a good option for leading customers to direct messages such as Live Chat and WhatsApp, especially when customers feel personally unconnected with the business.

With a website chat button, customers no longer juggle between communication channels to get virtual assistance. Along with it, Kommo provides features like: 

• A unified box for managing messages from a lot of communication channels.
• Lead cards to give information about customers.
• Templates to make engaging personalized messages.
• Sales pipeline for organizing lead cards.

Inbound Marketing Tools For Content Production 

Content marketing and inbound marketing are so deeply intertwined they might as well be synonyms.

They aren’t, but here’s the thing:

Inbound doesn’t really work without content. 

You need content for social media posts, email marketing campaigns, webinars, and even to attract visitors to your site via SEO.

Naturally, the list of content-related inbound marketing software solutions is longer than all others. We’ve got 10 for you.

5. ClickUp 

ClickUp is a project management software solution.

It’s where you'll orchestrate all of your content workflows, communicate and collaborate with freelance content creators, and maintain and manage content calendars.

In part three of our “Building A Content Factory” series, Developing Content Operations, we dove into blog writing workflows and how to use a solution like ClickUp—or an alternative like monday.com, Asana, or Trello—to manage content creation.

Automation is a standout feature for ClickUp.

You can automate tasks like the creation of task checklists, program routing rules, and create automatic notifications when a given action takes place.

6. Positional 

Positional is a toolset for SEO and content teams.

It's similar to alternatives like Surfer and Clearscope in that you can use it to optimize content for search engines.

We use Positional for that exact purpose (it's probably part of why you found this article), but it also has a few other cool features, such as keyword research and clustering functionality, as well as an AI content detector.

One of our favorite features is Positional’s Content Analytics. This allows you to see user heatmaps to understand where readers are navigating away from your content, as well as core metrics like bounce rates.

7. Semrush 

Semrush is another SEO suite, though it's more commonly used for the research and competitive monitoring aspects of SEO content creation.

It's one of the big three in this space, sharing the limelight with Ahrefs and Moz.

We like Semrush because of its Keyword Magic Tool.

You plug in a keyword idea and it spits out a bunch of related keywords that people are actually searching for, along with data on monthly traffic and keyword ranking difficulty.

This is a solid feature for finding new keywords to add to your SEO content calendar.

8. Canva 

Canva is an online graphic design tool.

This was a real game-changer a few years back. Before Canva, you had to shell out hundreds of dollars for something like Photoshop.

Canva is much more usable and way more affordable—they even have a solid and genuinely usable free version.

You—or your content creators—can use Canva to create custom images, graphs, cover images, and infographics, either for your written content like blogs or for social media posts.

Canva also has a bunch of pre-designed templates, taking design work off of your plate and making it easy to create professional-looking images without having a professional designer on board.

9. Grammarly 

Grammarly is the most well-known of all spelling and grammar checkers.

What a lot of people don’t know, however, is that Grammarly is much more powerful than that.

Yes, it will tell you if you spelled something from or formulated a sentence with bad grammar. But it can also provide recommendations for making content more concise or otherwise more readable.

It can identify tone of voice, mood, and attitude, helping you stay in line with brand guidelines.

Grammarly also has a ton of integrations, so you can use it directly within content creation tools like Google Docs or Notion or on social media platforms like X and Facebook.

10. Letterdrop 

Letterdrop is another tool we use for our own inbound marketing efforts. We use it for two things:

1. Content management
2. Social amplification 

In Letterdrop, you can draft a new piece of content (or copy it in from Google Docs), do some search optimization and internal linking, and publish it directly to your CMS (if you’re on Webflow).

Where things get really cool is Letterdrop’s automated social amplification feature.

Every piece of content we publish gets automatically shared on LinkedIn, and we can also have our team like and comment on posts without having to actually jump on the social media platform.

11. Riverside

Riverside is a remote podcast recording tool.

We use it to capture video and podcast content when we’re speaking with subject matter experts over video.

Riverside offers really high-quality audio and video recording functionality, as well as some cool additional features like:

• AI social clip creation
• Transcriptions
• Captions
• Show notes

It also has a built-in editing suite, though we use Capcut for video editing.

12. Capcut  

Capcut is our preferred all-in-one video editor.

Once we’ve recorded a podcast or webinar with Riverside, we upload it into Capcut for fast and free video editing.

Capcut has a ton of AI editing features such as video upscaling, to improve detail and resolution in your video content.

Then, there’s the standard functionality like filters, transitions, and auto-captions.

13. Vidyo.ai  

Vidyo.ai is a super helpful AI-powered solution for turning long-form videos into shorter-form clips for repurposing across social.

For example, we use it to throw in a podcast episode or webinar, then ask it to spit out clips that we can use to accompany a post on LinkedIn promoting the full video.

Vidyo.ai has a few other cool features to help amplify your video marketing, as well:

• SEO optimized captions
• Direct posting to social
• Animated subtitles
• Virality prediction score 

14. Wistia 

Wistia is a video hosting platform.

It allows you to host videos on your own site rather than having to use a third-party solution like YouTube or Vimeo.

Those platforms have their own benefit in that they can help your videos get found. But you’re also at the mercy of their algorithms and community guidelines.

For that reason, we post on both YouTube and host videos on our own website using Wistia.

Some of the other unique features that Wistia offers include:

• SEO optimization functionality
• The ability to add CTAs to videos and sync that to your CRM
• Interactivity tools like annotated links
• A dedicated content management system for storing, searching, and finding video content 

Inbound Marketing Tools For Social Media Marketing 

Beyond the creation of the actual content you’ll publish on social media—be it video, imagery, written word, or a combination thereof—you'll need some form of software to manage the whole campaign.

This includes aspects of social media management such as audience creation, topic ideation, and reporting and analytics.

Here are our three favorite inbound social media tools.

15. Buffer 

Buffer bills itself as a social media toolkit for small businesses.

It’s priced accordingly—you can get started for just $6 a month—and offers a decent selection of features that SMBs and even mid-market organizations can use to make social a part of their inbound marketing strategy.

Some of our favorite Buffer features include:

• A content publishing calendar
• AI post generation
• Automatic video content distribution to multiple channels 
• Deep social media reporting and analytics suite 
• Customized landing pages with pre-built templates 

16. Hootsuite 

Hootsuite is another social media scheduling and marketing suite.

What makes Hootsuite a better option (particularly for larger companies) is:

• A single inbox for answering all social media questions and queries 
• A larger range of integrations with other inbound marketing tools
• Advertising capabilities across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
• An AI-powered hashtag generator  

17. BuzzSumo 

BuzzSumo is a unique tool in the social media space.

It's a social media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions across various media channels, handle crises, respond to customers quickly, and reshare UGC (user-generated content).

Beyond that, BuzzSumo can be used to find unique new ideas for inbound marketing campaigns.

You can dig into what’s trending across different platforms and demographics, find real questions to answer in your social and blog content, get tips on how to promote and distribute your content for maximum engagement and dive into competitor activities.

BuzzSumo also has an influencer marketing suite, so you can find the right influencer for your next campaign based on real performance results.

Inbound Marketing Tools For Email Marketing 

Email is a key channel for inbound marketing campaigns.

Many inbound lead generation efforts—things like gated webinars, ebooks, and guides—funnel prospects into an email cadence.

Here are our two favorite inbound marketing software tools for managing email campaigns that convert.

18. Mailchimp 

Mailchimp is pretty much the name in email marketing.

Yes, there are a ton of other great email marketing tools, but Mailchimp has been around for a while now and has expanded beyond simple email marketing automation.

They’re now offering features like:

• Branded content creation
• Customizable website landing pages
• Social media publishing and engagement
• Audience management and segmentation 

19. ActiveCampaign 

ActiveCampaign, like Mailchimp, used to just be an email automation platform.

That’s still their core competency, but ActiveCampaign has a number of other cool features for inbound marketing.

They’ve got sales automation (like lead scoring and routing), a CRM, website visitor and event tracking, and even e-commerce integrations and features like:

• Cross-selling emails and automated abandoned cart reminders
• Personalized coupons and discounts
• An e-commerce reporting and analytics suite 

Inbound Marketing Tools For Reporting, Analytics, and Optimization 

Without solid analytics tools to report on the effectiveness of your campaigns, you won’t know what to invest more in, and you’ll probably just be spinning your wheels.

These three reporting tools, whether used separately or as an analytics tech stack, will be your perfect partner for optimizing inbound marketing efforts.

20. Google Analytics  

Google Analytics is the defacto analytics tool.

The biggest win is that it's entirely free (though there is a more advanced paid version called Google Analytics 360).

Also, being Google, it obviously has great data related to organic search and PPC ad performance and integrates perfectly with other Google tools like Google Search Console (GSC).

With Google Analytics, you can map user journeys on your site, understand what’s driving traffic and what content is converting, and build automated marketing reports.

21. Hotjar 

Hotjar is a website heat mapping and behavioral analytics solution.

Bit of a mouthful, but what this really means is that Hotjar helps you see what people are doing on your website so you can further optimize.

Heatmaps show you how people navigate and click on your web pages—helpful for UX and design improvements—and screen recordings allow you to actually see how users interact with specific pages, even if they aren’t clicking on anything.

Hotjar also has some survey and interview tools for gathering explicit feedback from users and a ton of useful integrations with the likes of Jira, HubSpot, and Unbounce. 

22. Optimizely

Optimizely is a website optimization solution.

This is built primarily around A/B testing, so you can try out different approaches and see what converts best.

However, Optimizely is a lot more complex than that, offering features like:

• Website personalization (ideal for account-based marketing campaigns)
• AI-generated content recommendations
• Content distribution functionality 

Inbound Marketing Tools For Marketing Automation 

Inbound marketing campaigns generally work best at scale, and scale brings with it repetition.

To take some (or a lot) of that draining and repetitive manual work off of your plate, you’ll want to add a marketing automation tool to your inbound marketing tech stack.

23. HubSpot 

HubSpot is the granddaddy of inbound marketing tools. 

The brand pretty much invented the term inbound marketing, and having been around for years now, it’s little surprise that they run the whole gamut from a free CRM to a deep suite for customer service and support.

Where HubSpot really excels, though, is in marketing automation for the SMB.

You can get in for free or on a relatively cheap monthly plan and start automating emails, website chat, sales playbooks, and more.  It can also be integrated with revenue intelligence platforms for better sales insights and related forecasts.

You can even build and run your site on HubSpot for a single-supplier solution.

24. Pardot 

Pardot is somewhat of a legacy tool, dating back to 2007, but it's still super widely used.

This is in part because Pardot got acquired by Salesforce back in 2013, making it the de facto marketing automation solution for Salesforce-centric teams.

Aside from the obviously tight integration with Salesforce, Pardot boasts features like:

• Multi-channel marketing campaigns
• Email marketing
• Audience segmentation
• Forms for capturing warm leads 

25. AdRoll 

AdRoll is an ad-focused digital marketing automation solution.

While ads themselves aren’t typically considered an inbound marketing tactic, they are often used to supplement inbound campaigns, particularly when retargeting prospects who’ve already landed on your site. So we’ll allow it here.

AdRolls offers ad buying and automation across display, video, and social media. It can run brand-focused ads or acquisition-focused retargeting ads and integrates neatly with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce.

Inbound Marketing Tools For Lead Routing 

All of those inbound efforts have to lead somewhere.

For most companies, the output of inbound marketing campaigns is to generate leads—prospects who’ve expressed some level of interest in your brand, product, or service.

To make those warm inbound leads make it to the right sales rep, install one of these two lead routing solutions.

26. Chili Piper

Chili Piper is the defacto inbound lead routing tool.

Essentially, once a new lead comes in from one of your various inbound marketing activities, Chili Piper figures out which salesperson the lead should go to based on the likes of territory mapping, availability, deal size, company vertical, or any other factor you plug into its automation recipes.

27. LeanData 

LeanData started off as a CRM orchestration too, primarily for Salesforce.

It allowed sales teams to plug in a bunch of “if this, then that” automation and to clean up their CRM, remove duplicate data, and refresh outdated account information.

Recently, they rebranded a little and expanded their offer.

Now, LeanData is more about CRM orchestration for the revenue team whose goal is to increase sales velocity.

So, we’re starting to see features come through like:

• Lead matching and routing
• Integrations with data providers like 6sense and sales enablement tools like Outreach
• Improved user access control

Warmly: The ultimate tool for reaping the fruits of inbound marketing campaigns 

We’ve just covered 27 of the best inbound marketing software tools you can use to deliver high-quality warm leads to your sales team.

All of them have one thing in common:

They’re just tools.

Tools are only as good as how you use them, meaning your processes and workflows need to be set up in a way that can leverage all of that hard work.

Many inbound marketing teams fall over at this part. They build great engines for generating demand but don’t really do any demand capture.

That’s where Warmly comes in, with features like:

• Website visitor deanonymization
• Data enrichment 
• AI-powered emails and LinkedIn outreach
• Live AI or human-led chat
• Routing and alerts  

Want to see just how big of an impact Warmly can make?

Learn how D2D Experts drove $80k in revenue in their first 12 days using Warmly.

For centuries, salespeople have cast a wide net, then worked to convince individuals to exchange money for goods and services. Unfortunately, the one-to-one model no longer works for B2B SaaS in 2024.

According to a 2023 report by Gartner, "the average enterprise B2B buying group consists of 5 to 11 stakeholders" representing "an average of 5 distinct business functions." That means instead of selling to one person, a sales rep has to convince half a dozen people to sign off.

Salespeople focused on closing specific leads are missing the forest for the trees. Account-based selling is both the opposite of—and the solution to—traditional sales strategies.

What is Account-Based Selling?

Account-based selling is inseparable from account based marketing. They both represent a shift from casting a wide net for any fish that will bite, to focusing on a few specific value accounts that require more specialized tools and strategies to capture. Marketing and sales teams need to work closely to identify the accounts and create a personalized experience for each of the stakeholders on the buying committee. Instead of one-to-one, it's team-to-team.

Key Differences Between Account-Based Selling and Traditional Sales Strategies

While the traditional sales strategy was finding a single lead who has sway over buying decisions, account-based selling takes a more holistic view of the entire purchasing committee. It's not about getting any prospective customer to 100%. Account-based sales teams suss out all the stakeholders involved and try to get everyone engaged and on board at the same time.

Benefits of Account-Based Selling for B2B Sales

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute estimates that only 5% of customers are "in the market" for new services at any given time. This estimate is based on corporations changing their bank or law firm every five years on average. i.e. 20% of customers are in market per year, or 5% a quarter. The figure is likely lower for B2B SaaS where the average contract length is shorter and churn rate is higher.

If most of your ICP isn't in the market right now, carpet-bombing all prospects indiscriminately is a waste of resources.

Account-based selling is about understanding where prospects are in the buyer's journey and positioning your product so you already have a foot in the door when the prospect goes to open it.

While it can increase customer acquisition costs, it often pays off in higher ROI, customer lifetime value and revenue potential. It also means that sales reps are not wasting time cold calling. Instead, they are investing their time in long-term customer relationships and increasing the conversion rate.

Implementing Account-Based Selling in B2B Sales

‎Account-based selling is inseparable from account based marketing. The entire revenue operation has to be aligned at every stage from identify to close. The ABS team works together to identify the ideal client profile and narrow down the target list. The marketing team gathers account intelligence and figures out where customers are in the buyer journey. Account-based sellers are ready to engage at the moment that prospects come in market. Customer success is also primed to give the prospect the same level of personalized attention at onboarding, ensuring a smooth sales cycle from start to finish.

A. Identifying High-Value Target Accounts and Key Stakeholders

There are a lot of ways to figure out an initial target account list. The first step of account selection is putting together an ideal client profile. Ideally, you will be looking for larger high-value accounts that will bring enough revenue to justify the high-touch focus.

You may also look at accounts that serve other company goals. Do you want to land a Fortune 500 company for the social proof? Are you looking to break into an industry, or work with a company that will allow you to expand to connected subsidiaries?

Putting together a target account list is part-art, part-science. You should use all the data at your disposal, including firmographics, technographics (what else is in your customer tech stack), behavioral data and intent signals for current customers and closed won deals. You can also analyze closed lost deals for what went wrong.

Once you have your target account list, you have to figure out how the target companies makes purchasing decisions, and who are the stakeholders involved. If you typically sell to the same customer profile, there's a good chance the buying committee will look roughly the same as your target companies. Reviewing past deals is one way to get a framework for all the stakeholders involved.

B. Creating Personalized and Targeted Marketing Campaigns

The idea of account-based selling is to surround-sound all the decision makers of an account with the right message, at the right time, through all the right channels.

That might mean:

• Publish personalized content on blogs, LinkedIn, and social media geared toward their unique needs.
• Putting together case studies from existing customers similar in size and business model to strategic accounts.
• Connecting a stakeholder at a prospect company with the person in the same role at a current customer account.
• Hosting webinars or workshops geared to your ideal customer profile or target audience.
• Individualized phone and email messaging for specific stakeholders.

It's important to define all the different buyer personas in your target accounts. A VP of Marketing will have different priorities, job objectives and KPIs to hit than the VP of Sales. The more you can tailor your content to the role, or the individual, the higher the chance your outreach will resonate. This alignment on messaging starts with marketing, all the way down to the AE and Customer Success.

‎The goal of account based marketing is making sure your product is in the running when the target company identifies a need your product can fill. The account-based selling team's job is then a multi-threaded, omni-channel approach to get all the stakeholders to buy in.

C. Leveraging Technology and Data for Effective Account-Based Selling

Once the target companies are funneled in with ABM, Warmly's sales teams uses third-party intent data to find out who is currently in market and reconciles that information with contact databases. Our SDRs then send personalized outreach and feeds stakeholders into automated email or LinkedIn sequences. The sequences drive prospects to the website, where our Warmly chat bot can engage users, and pull in human salespeople for the warmest leads.

The success of account-based selling hinges on putting all the technological puzzle pieces together to get an accurate image of the target company, then using what you learn to close the sale.

For example, Warmly might find out from a conversation with one of our "champions" at a prospect company that there is another stakeholder we haven't targeted—but who has veto power. That person is added to our account plans.

Warmly's software alerts our salespeople in real-time when someone on our VIP list is visiting our website. A sales rep can then engage with the target stakeholder at the moment they are thinking about us, and tailor their messaging based on what we know about them. If the software has identified that user as the CFO, we can offer testimony from the CFO of a customer company. The next time this stakeholder attends a round-table meeting about whether to buy our product, this highly tailored and impactful interaction will be top of mind.

StackOptmise put together a comprehensive list of the sales tech landscape.

D. Mutual Action Plan

With the ubiquity of account-based selling also comes specialized tools to make the process easier. Instead of closing deals on a massive email chain that includes every stakeholder, sellers can use a tool like Aligned to pull together collateral and documents in a single workplace. The platform offers full visibility, so buyers and sellers can see who has looked at what. It also informs sellers which stakeholders haven't engaged—i.e. what leads need to be warmed.

Transforming B2B Sales Strategies with Account-Based Selling

Evolution of Customer-led Growth

As a buyer, would you rather talk to a salesperson that may have their own agenda (e.g. to grow their commission), or an existing customer who is already using the product and has no incentive to lie?

At Warmly, we often let our customers speak for us through Deeto.ai. It helps our sales teams identify customers with similar firmographics to the target company and makes it easy to reach out for a referral. Having the prospect jump on a call with the customer is especially powerful. The prospect gets hyper-specific testimony from someone with a similar job title at a similar company—which really drives home your product's usefulness.

‎The Importance of Timing for Increasing Conversion Rates

The number one factor in ABS is figuring out everyone who needs to be sold on your product. The second is using all the tools in your arsenal to capitalize on opportunities to connect with those stakeholders. Timing and being able to respond quickly plays a huge part. Just being a subject matter expert in the right place at the right time can sometimes make the deal. Often, it is not about having the best product on the market, but creating a better, more personalized, seamless and timely experience for prospective customers. Another company may be able to solve their problem too, but you were able to get there first.

Building Long-Term Relationships with Key Accounts for Enhanced Customer Loyalty

Account-based selling does not end when the contract is signed. Everything you learned about the account can continue through ongoing customer relationship management. For example, if you know who the detractors were in the initial buying process, nurturing those contacts can help you get their business again at renewal time. Account-based feedback can also go back into developing other features and use cases that fit the account's needs—which can lead to upselling.

Overcoming Challenges in Account-Based Selling

Addressing Resource Limitations and Scalability Issues

Account-based selling works best for large contracts that justify the extended, high-touch sales cycle. It's also difficult to implement for early-stage companies that may not have achieved product-market fit, or don't have a clear picture of their ideal customers.

However, gathering as much account intelligence as possible helps minimize the risk your company will invest in a personalized sales approach for the wrong company.

Predictive analytics can help companies parse data for clues about what accounts to target.

You can also save yourself several steps by using a signal-based revenue orchestration platform like Warmly that brings together intent data, behavioral signals, analytics and visitor identification—along with automated chat/email/LinkedIn sequences.

Then once those leads have converted into calls, you can use tools like Fathom, Spiky.ai, Gong, or Attention to analyze call transcriptions to understand the health of your deals, where deals are being blocked, and how best to handle objections.

Managing Complex Sales Cycles and Multiple Stakeholders

The ABS strategy works well with complex sales cycles or product needs, because your revenue team is taking the time to really understand the account's unique needs and challenges. Having a well-rounded team is crucial to make this successful. An account planning team should include sales reps, sales development representatives, marketers, and customer support. This enables them to understand each of the buying personas, tailor their messaging to the individual, and give the prospect the best possible experience throughout the sales cycle.

Measuring and Tracking the Success of Account-Based Selling Efforts

Given the investment of resources that goes into each account, you ideally want to build long-term relationships that will pay off in revenue over time. Good metrics for gauging the value of account based selling are average contract value (ACV), customer lifetime value (LTV), average deal size and customer retention. Account engagement scores and progression rate can also help marketing teams gauge effectiveness.

Conclusion

At it's core, account-based selling is about giving all the stakeholders in the buying committee the best possible experience at the time that the company could be interested in buying. It's an extremely effective B2B sales strategy that focuses resources on key accounts when they are in market. However, it involves commitment and collaboration across the entire firm, from marketing to customer success and account management.

With the traditional, lead-focused sales process, deals can easily be scuttled if your main contact changes jobs or goes on leave—which is especially dangerous with a long sales cycle. For companies with an ICP that can sustain it, account based selling is a relatively low-risk selling strategy that can generate bigger deals, higher conversion rates, and long-lasting customer loyalty.

Traditional sales funnels simply aren’t effective anymore. Here’s why B2B sales must embrace the Account Based Marketing (ABM) funnel. 

The days of traditional B2B sales funnels are almost over. With so many more products on the market today than there were 10 years ago, selling has become a more complex process for sales and marketing teams—and buying more difficult for customers.

For years, it’s been about lead generation: casting a wide net for the maximum amount of potential leads, in the hope that at least a few of them will eventually convert. 

That doesn’t work anymore. Particularly not for B2B business selling.

We’re talking about a market where B2B buyers spend 50% of their time researching solutions independently, both online and offline—and just 17% of their time meeting with sales reps.

With more conversations happening offline, and more buyers influenced by external factors, it’s getting more and more challenging for B2B marketers and sales teams to be a part of the selling journey. 

And that’s where the Account Based Marketing funnel comes in. 

What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

Whereas lead generation focuses on building a huge base of potential leads, then refining them, ABM harnesses technology like a marketing automation platform and sales/marketing collaboration to target a specific account and increase the likelihood of conversion. 

Primarily, ABM relies on B2B sellers being able to strategically identify their target market and thus the corresponding key accounts that will be a focus for marketing and sales work.

ABM works because it instinctively acknowledges that buyers aren’t just visiting your company website to make a decision. According to a Gartner study, B2B buyers actually value third-party interactions—such as word-of-mouth advice, online reviews, and other third-party content—1.4x more than online supplier interactions. 

The Benefits of ABM

There’s no hiding it: ABM is a huge undertaking. Close collaboration between sales and marketing leaders might be alien to most companies, and without agreement on key accounts to target, your efforts at ABM can fall at the first hurdle.

However, there’s more than enough evidence to prove that tackling ABM is a worthwhile challenge. 

Focuses Resources On the Accounts That Matter

Traditional lead generation has no other expectation than to simply send a bunch of MQLs through to a sales team. Not only does this gives sales the difficult job of selling to people who really aren’t ready yet, but it’s also a tremendous waste of marketing resources. 

Meanwhile, an effective ABM strategy ensures that the accounts that your sales and marketing team focus on are really the ones that are going to buy in the end. 

It might be less of an impressive lead pay-off (what are one or two leads compared to thousands?) but with a target account list, your budget is inevitably going towards higher-quality leads.  

Develops Foundations for Stronger Customer Relationships

When does a lead become a customer? That’s not a trick question—but the answer is very different for lead gen versus ABM.

Within a traditional sales funnel, your lead stays a lead right up until the moment of purchase. Boom, they’ve graduated from lead to customer.

An ABM program, meanwhile, doesn’t make such a concrete distinction between leads and customers. Instead, every lead is named an account from the beginning. 

As a result, each account is treated as if they were a customer from the first moment of discovery, with personalized sales and marketing efforts designed to build a relationship before purchase. 

ABM Increases ROI

In the world of data-backed marketing, this is really the only benefit that matters. And maybe it’s against all logic: more leads should mean higher ROI, right? Not exactly. 

Research conducted by ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA found that 76% of marketers saw a higher ROI with an ABM marketing strategy than any other. 

In another study, almost 9 in 10 organizations reported that accounts supported by ABM achieved higher ROI than those without ABM support.

How Relevant Are Traditional Sales Funnels B2B Marketing Today?

The traditional image of the sales funnel as an upside-down triangle is a stubborn one. It’s one of the first things that beginner marketers and sales teams are introduced to—and yet, it doesn’t quite work today, particularly if you want to harness the benefits of an ABM campaign.

For starters, the traditional funnel assumes that the B2B buying journey is linear—as demonstrated by HubSpot’s diagram below. Customers are dragged into the top of the funnel using effective demand creation and inbound marketing strategies (building awareness through social media presence, videos, or blogs), and they progress down through each stage. Before you know it, they’re buyers.

(Image Source)

Unfortunately, this model doesn’t reflect the true reality of a B2B buyer’s journey, which is oftentimes far more non-linear and wayward. 

The traditional funnel would have you believe that you can guide a customer through distinct stages until they’re ready to buy. In reality, that’s no longer the case.

In today’s sales cycles, buyers might revisit each stage of the funnel more than once, and even interact with other suppliers simultaneously. It’s not a case of identifying a MQL and then passing them onto sales to bring home the sale; it’s far more unpredictable.  

(Image Source)

In fact, much of the B2B cycle happens without your company ever being involved at all. According to research from Harvard Business Review, B2B customers are on average 57% of the way through the buying process before they even engage with your sales reps. 

The offline nature of the B2B sales cycle also means that tracking customers is more difficult. It’s impossible to see the conversations that your customers are having at their workplace, at networking events, or informally on sites like Twitter or Reddit. 

All of this precipitates a new way of thinking about the traditional sales funnel, in light of changing B2B buyer cycles. 

How to Develop an Effective Account Based Marketing Funnel 

Fundamentally, the ABM funnel is:

• Non-linear,
• More difficult to track,
• Engaged with sales and marketing simultaneously.

With that in mind, we like to think of the ABM funnel as more of an incubator than a funnel. Rather than a 2D funnel, the ABM funnel is a complex, 3D system, in which multiple elements (for example, inbound and outbound marketing, content creation, field marketing) interact to produce the preferred outcome: conversion. 

Crucially, within the ABM funnel, marketing and sales strategies don’t work alone, but in tandem with each other (for this reason, many companies are abandoning sales and marketing departments altogether, in favor of a ‘go-to-market’ department or equivalent.)

To make this incubator work, though, you have to feed it the right energy. And that starts with your key account selection.

Creating the Right Target Accounts List 

39% of B2B marketers say that choosing which accounts to target is the biggest challenge of developing an effective ABM strategy. So many organizations ignore this step, or, even worse, do it badly.

The Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is the foundation of any effective ABM funnel. But you can’t just add anyone who’s ever visited your site or signed up to a sales demo to your SAM. 

An effective ABM funnel relies on those target accounts being the right fit for your company. 

Evaluating fit acco‎unts requires analysis of key variables including the demographics of your existing customers, a breakdown of how profitable they are (if you can get this data), and whether they are going to have the problem you're solving. 

To start evaluating fit, pull up your current customer list and filter to show only those customers with 100% net revenue retention. B2B expert Scott Martinis describes this segment as a 'retainable addressable market': the proportion of your existing market who is willing to buy from you again and again.

The most effective way of finding best fit accounts is to search for organizations similar to those in your retainable addressable market - people who want to continue buying from you. So, build a lookalike segment based on this portion of your existing customer list, and you've got a list of key accounts to start targeting.

As well as segmenting existing repeat customers and building a lookalike list, sales teams can look at closed won deals to find best fit accounts. Focus on the different variables that make up that customer: the size of the company, geography, what the team looks like, how many sales reps they have. 

Equally, closed lost deals can also provide insight into the companies who don’t need your product, which could be for reasons that you can capitalize on (for example, if they’ve recently closed with a competitor for a specific length contract.)

Once you’ve established the key accounts that you want to target with your ABM strategy, you have to pair fit with intent. 

Determining Intent

Sales teams are well aware that the B2B buying process takes time. There are multiple stages and often multiple key decision makers. But contrary to that, the buying window is actually very small. If you miss that window, you might not get another chance to sell. 

Intent is often more difficult to scope than fit, especially as it requires almost constant buying behavior tracking. But you don’t want to waste time on prospects that simply aren’t ready to convert. 

There are some crucial factors that will help you identify intent, most of which will require third-party data. For example, you can use ABM tools like 6sense and Bombora to explore key accounts’ recent keyword searches, ad engagement, and recent website visits. 

Integrating first-party data like website visits, email responses, webinar sign-ups, and sales rep engagement, can help you build a bigger picture of key account intent, and understand the right time for your sales teams to reach out. 

Building Brand Awareness 

Because the ABM funnel is non-linear, the process of creating your TAL and analyzing intent has to co-occur with brand awareness work. It’s all well and good identifying key accounts, but if they’re not aware of you, then you’re not going to be able to effectively sell to them anyway.

Demand generation is key if you want to get your company in front of your key accounts. By creating educational content around specific pain points and investing in personal branding for your key company leaders, you can ensure that you’re the company they think of when they need a solution. 

Remember, 60% of B2B buyers end up choosing the brand they thought of at the beginning of their search.

Your brand awareness must be both far-reaching and strategic. You want to build a general awareness among your market as well as target relevant content to the right people at the right time. 

Conducting Creative Campaigns

Your TAL, intent insights, and demand generation work all work together to create targeted campaigns with one goal: converting those accounts that are ready to buy. 

There’s really no limit to the kinds of campaigns you can run once you’ve identified a key account. To give one example, data cloud company Snowflake partners with Sendoso to build key account loyalty through gift programs. The organization also runs strategic, one-day events with key accounts to generate interest and build relationships. 

(Image Source)

But you don’t have to go that far if your budget doesn’t allow it. Targeted social content, referral programs, gifts, email campaigns: there are plenty of ways to develop your key accounts into customers, and your strategy will be informed by your brand.

TL;DR

• Create your TAL.
• Look for intent signals.
• Build brand awareness alongside.
• Create strategic campaigns that convert.  

Top Tips for Optimizing Your ABM Funnel

Now that you know how to build the foundations of an ABM funnel, it’s time to look at how to optimize. A great way of thinking about ABM is as precisely the opposite of a copy-and-paste marketing campaign. As Hillary Carpio, head of ABM at Snowflake says,

“The key to success in ABM is you have to build a program that suits the need of your business.” 

The strength of your resources and your unique goals will inform how you conduct an ABM strategy. 

1. Understand that demand capture and demand creation go hand-in-hand.

Educating key accounts doesn’t happen overnight. Building effective brand awareness requires long-term digital marketing campaigns, and a rejection of traditional cold sales tactics. 

At the same time, demand creation is useless without demand capture. Both of these elements must work together to warm up your key accounts, and that’s where ABM software comes in. 

Effective ABM software can reduce the risk of you making assumptions about accounts, resulting in relevant demand creation and personalized campaigns. 

2. Prevent data silos.

Coordinating a successful ABM strategy inevitably involves a lot of different software—intent tracking, email marketing, CRM, web analytics. And because your marketing and sales team are effectively working in tandem on your ABM, all of that data has to be available for multiple stakeholders to view.

Better decision making will happen when your entire team has access to the right data. If you’re not on the same page on your ABM strategy, you’re setting yourself up to fail. 

3. Find tools to help you react instantly. 

In an ideal world, you want to engage with your target account when you know their intent to buy is there. However, in the real world, that can be challenging. 

Using ABM tools like Warmly can help you react instantly when your key accounts are active on your website and showing intent, helping you convert faster. 

Our AI chatbot can proactively chat with target accounts when they’re on your website, educating them and even booking meetings. And when an account really needs a helping hand from a human SDR, Warmly AI can loop them into the conversation.

Warmly's success in social selling has played a crucial role in propelling our brand's growth and lead generation strategy. Focused mainly on LinkedIn, our social selling endeavors have proven highly effective, contributing significantly to both lead acquisition and scheduled meetings. Take a look at the lead volume that we bring in from LinkedIn alone: 

We’re not alone in our social selling success. The strategy:

• Gives sales professionals 45% more sales opportunities
• Makes sales professionals 51% more likely to hit their sales quotas
• Helps sales professionals outsell 78% of their peers

In today’s social media centric world, social selling isn't merely an option; it's a smart and increasingly necessary way for sales teams and marketing professionals to connect with customers via the platforms they use the most. Consider — over 5 billion people are using social media today, and that number is steadily rising. 

We are here to help you embrace the power of social selling for enhanced results in the digital era. We’re covering: 

• What Is Social Selling?
• Best Practices, Social Selling Tips, and Tricks
• What Is Social Selling the Inbound Way?

Let’s dive in. 

What is Social Selling? 

Diverging from traditional sales methods, social selling places a premium on dynamic and personalized interactions across social media profiles. This approach goes beyond transactional sales, which might feel pushy and forced. Instead, social selling strategy concentrates on meaningful relationships and understanding audience needs and preferences. The goal is to establish a robust online presence, foster trust, and cultivate genuine connections to enhance sales opportunities. 

Key Elements of Social Selling

While social selling tactics differ, they share fundamental commonalities: 

Dynamic Interactions

Engage with prospects through real-time conversations on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

Personalized Engagement

Tailor content and interactions to cater to the specific preferences and interests of your audience.

Audience Understanding

Utilize social media insights to comprehend the needs and behaviors of your target audience.

Building Trust

Establish credibility by sharing valuable insights, industry knowledge, and addressing customer queries.

Creating Connections

Actively connect with potential customers, industry influencers, and peers to expand your network.

The Growing Popularity of Social Selling

Social selling is already a linchpin strategy for top sales reps:

• Leveraging social selling streamlines the process of obtaining referrals within LinkedIn networks, a strategy employed by 74% of sales professionals for prospecting and acquiring new leads.
• The effectiveness of individuals in establishing a professional brand on LinkedIn is measured by the Social Selling Index (SSI). High-performing salespeople who leverage the SSI consistently outperform their peers who are less inclined to embrace social media in their sales strategies.
• Social media plays a pivotal role in the sales landscape, with high-performing salespeople being 12% more likely to incorporate these platforms into their strategies, showcasing the integral role of social selling in enhancing overall sales performance.
• Approximately 56% of sales professionals actively integrate social media platforms into their sales efforts, underscoring the crucial function of social media in identifying and engaging potential prospects.
• In 2022, a significant 31% of sellers successfully closed deals surpassing half a million dollars without relying on face-to-face meetings. Deals influenced by LinkedIn's Sales Navigator were notably 209% larger compared to those not impacted by this influential social selling tool.
• According to LinkedIn research, a remarkable 90% of top sales professionals actively embrace social selling tools, illustrating the widespread recognition and adoption of social selling practices among successful sales experts.

The Intersection with Marketing

It’s not just sales professionals leaning into social selling. There is also a notable upward trend in marketers embracing social platforms. In the US alone a whopping $72.3 billion was spent advertising on social media networks in 2023. As of January 2023, Facebook was the most utilized platform among marketers (ranked first amongst 89 percent of global marketers). Instagram and LinkedIn followed closely, while TikTok was utilized by one-quarter of marketers for advertising. 86 percent of industry professionals noted increased exposure as the primary benefit of leveraging social media in marketing, with 76 percent emphasizing the significance of enhanced traffic.

Best Practices, Social Selling Tips, and Tricks

Top-performing salespeople are social sellers, prioritizing cultivating quality connections over a high quantity of unknown leads. 76% of these high achievers consistently research their prospects before initiating contact, emphasizing the importance of a personalized and informed approach. So how do you emulate these kinds of tactics within your own sales team?

LinkedIn stands as a powerful platform for effective social selling strategies. Therefore, Understanding the intricacies of the LinkedIn algorithm and employing best practices that align with its dynamics is essential for successful social selling. The algorithm rewards content that sparks engagement and keeps users on the platform, making it crucial to create compelling and shareable posts:

Here are some of our favorite best practices, tips, and tricks for working with the algorithm to optimize your LinkedIn activity for social selling:

Improve your SSI

Enter the LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI). The SSI measures one's effectiveness in utilizing LinkedIn for social selling, assessing key factors such as establishing a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building strong relationships. A high SSI indicates a robust social selling presence, emphasizing the importance of crafting a compelling profile, connecting with relevant prospects, sharing valuable content, and actively engaging with the LinkedIn community.

• Optimize Your Profile: Ensure your LinkedIn profile is complete, highlighting your skills, experiences, and a professional photo as your profile picture. Craft a compelling headline and summary that showcase your expertise.
• Connect Strategically: Expand your network with relevant connections. Connect with colleagues, clients, and industry professionals to enhance your visibility and reach on the platform.
• Share Valuable Original Content: Regularly post and share content that aligns with your industry and interests. Providing insights, articles, and updates showcases your expertise and engages your network.
• Engage Actively: Comment on, like, and share posts from your network. Engaging with others' content demonstrates your interest and involvement in industry discussions.
• Request Recommendations: Seek recommendations from colleagues and clients to build credibility. Positive testimonials enhance your professional reputation and contribute to a higher SSI.

Be Strategic with your Posting Habits

Strategic posting on LinkedIn involves choosing the right time and creating a memorable personal brand. To optimize your posting habits, identify peak times when your audience is active. Aim for mornings or early afternoons when professionals often browse LinkedIn. 

Remember:

• Timing is everything: Leverage analytics tools to identify when your LinkedIn connections are most. Then, time your LinkedIn post to correspond with heavy online traffic.
• Consistency is key: Ensure consistent use of your chosen moniker across your LinkedIn profile, posts, and interactions.
• Be #strategic: Implement a tactical use of relevant hashtags to increase the discoverability of your posts within specific professional communities or trending topics.
• Lean into your network: Actively engage with your network by participating in discussions, responding to comments, and sharing insights. This builds rapport and strengthens your professional connections.

Craft Quality Content That Resonates with the Audience 

Crafting quality content is pivotal for effective social selling. Focus on delivering what your audience wants, whether it's humor, valuable insights, or revealing personal anecdotes. Incorporate storytelling techniques to make your content relatable and engaging, as people naturally connect with stories. 

Establish a regular posting schedule to maintain a strong online presence. Plan your content in advance, utilize scheduling tools, and stay attuned to trending topics to keep your posts relevant and compelling.

Try sharing:

• Industry Insights: Share your perspective on current trends, challenges, or emerging technologies within your industry.
• Expert Advice: Offer valuable tips, tricks, or insights related to your expertise. Position yourself as an authority in your field.
• Behind-the-Scenes: Provide a glimpse into your work life or company culture. Humanize your brand by sharing behind-the-scenes content.
• Interactive Content: Pose questions, conduct polls, or host quizzes to encourage audience interaction and gather feedback.
• Educational Content: Create informative content that educates your audience on relevant topics or addresses common industry misconceptions.
• Event Highlights: Share highlights from industry events, conferences, or webinars you've attended. This establishes you as an active participant in your field.
• Thought-Provoking Questions: Pose thought-provoking questions to stimulate discussions and engage your audience in meaningful, relevant conversations.

Be Memorable

Crafting a memorable moniker adds a distinctive touch to your personal brand. Create a title that reflects your personality or professional strengths. Memorable monikers, such as "Click Through King" or "Sales Khaleesi," create a unique and intriguing identity that lingers in the audience's memory. 

For example:

Or

This initial interest often leads to increased profile visits. Not only does this provide an opportunity to showcase expertise, build brand recognition, and establish connections within the professional community, but it also creates opportunities for profile visitors to become inbound leads by clicking through to your website (more on this later).

Lightning Strike Posts 

Lightning strike posts are impactful and attention-grabbing announcements or content shared on social platforms, particularly LinkedIn, with the goal of quickly generating widespread engagement. 

These posts have the potential to go viral, increasing visibility and driving profile visits. By leveraging the heightened exposure gained from such posts, individuals can channel the increased traffic towards their profiles, subsequently encouraging visits to their websites. 

Take a look at a lightning strike post from our CEO Maximus Greenwald about a Warmly milestone: 

To create effective lightning strike posts, individuals can consider:

• Series A funding announcements
• Major product launches
• Groundbreaking industry insights
• Recognition or awards received
• Top achievements or milestones
• Participation in influential events or collaborations
• Exclusive behind-the-scenes content
• Trending or controversial topics within the industry

Engage with Influencers 

Engaging with influencers can significantly amplify your social selling efforts. Influencers hold sway over a substantial audience, and their endorsement can enhance your visibility and credibility. To foster engagement with influencers:

• Identify Key Influencers: Research and identify influencers in your industry who align with your brand.
• Post Thoughtful Comments: Instead of generic comments, provide thoughtful and insightful contributions to the influencers' posts. 
• Engage in Personalized Outreach: Send personalized messages expressing appreciation for their content and highlighting specific aspects you find valuable.
• Audience-Centric Content: Tailor your content to address the interests and pain points of the influencer's audience.
• Collaborative Content: Propose collaboration ideas, such as co-authored articles, joint webinars, or interviews, to create content together.
• Tag Influencers: When relevant, tag influencers in your posts to increase the chances of them noticing and engaging with your content.
• Regular Engagement: Consistently engage with influencers' content by sharing, commenting, and reacting to their updates.
• Social Listening: Monitor their conversations, respond to their queries, and actively participate in discussions related to your industry.

Pro-tip: Comment early on viral posts

Engaging with influencer posts early on by commenting strategically positions your input at the top of the comment section, garnering increased visibility. When influencers' posts gain traction, your comment becomes more likely to be seen by a broader audience, contributing to heightened profile views. This visibility boost is crucial as users perusing popular posts are more inclined to explore your profile, thereby driving potential connections, increasing network reach, and enhancing overall profile visibility on LinkedIn.

What Is Social Selling the Inbound Way?

Social selling isn’t the only highly effective approach to the modern customer profile. In contrast to traditional sales methods, inbound selling is a customer-centric and less intrusive strategy. Inbound selling focuses on attracting and engaging potential customers through content and interactions that align with their interests and needs.

The similarities between the two strategies make them symbiotic, and there’s a natural path from social selling into inbound lead status.

Tactically, the transition from engagement via social selling into an inbound lead can look like this:

• Engagement on Social Media Profiles: Social sellers initiate personalized engagement on platforms like LinkedIn, responding to comments, messages, and participating in industry discussions.
• Compelling Content: By sharing valuable and tailored content, social sellers capture the lead's interest. This content addresses the lead's needs and concerns, making them more likely to explore further.
• Curiosity Sparked: The engaging interactions and compelling content pique the lead's curiosity, prompting them to seek more information about the brand and its offerings.
• Visit to LinkedIn Profiles: Intrigued by the social media engagement, the lead navigates to the LinkedIn profiles of the individuals involved, seeking insights into the people behind the brand.
• LinkedIn to Website Transition: Social sellers strategically guide the lead from LinkedIn profiles to the company's website, where they can find detailed information, product/service offerings, and additional resources.
• Conversion Opportunities: Once on the website, there is an opportunity for that person’s information to be captured, therefore converting them into an inbound lead.

Social Selling the Inbound Way with Warmly

Warmly provides a comprehensive set of features to help companies capture inbound leads driven to their website through social selling efforts. Here's how Warmly can contribute to this process:

Access The Best Data

Utilize native integrations or add your API key to de-anonymize and enrich visitor data.

Automatically reveal the stage of a visitor's buyer journey when they explore your website.

Contextually Aware

Connect your CRM to automatically gather and understand relevant context around the prospect. Enhance personalized conversations with inbound website visitors through automated context assimilation.

Autonomous Chat

Warmly's AI initiates personalized sales conversations on your rep's behalf with site visitors meeting segment filter conditions. Engage in real-time with potential leads, providing immediate assistance and information.

Automatic Follow Up

Automatically enroll high-intent inbound visitors into personalized follow-up sequences using popular platforms like Outreach, SalesLoft, or LinkedIn. Nuture leads on auto-pilot, ensuring consistent engagement with your brand.

Sync Data To CRM

Break down data siloes by centralizing data in your CRM. Automatically create or update CRM records with enriched information, engagement insights, and buyer intent data.

By integrating Warmly into your social selling strategy, companies can convert more qualified accounts visiting their site. The platform enables proactive engagement, efficient qualification, and seamless conversion of warm inbound leads. This streamlined process not only captures leads effectively but also enhances the overall efficiency of turning website visitors into meaningful connections.

Conclusion

In today's digital world, where more than 5 billion people use social media, the importance of social selling is clear. Whether you're in sales or marketing, adding social selling to your strategy isn't just a choice; it's a practical and necessary step.

As you start engaging in social sales, we encourage you to share your experiences, challenges, and successes. Social selling is a changing field that requires continuous learning. Join discussions, share your thoughts, and help shape the evolving world of social selling. Your input is crucial for collaborative exploration in the digital age of sales and marketing.

Cheers to building meaningful connections and unlocking business potential through the strategic use of social selling!