Introducing the Connected and Empowered Enterprise
There is a crisis in B2B revenue generation. Salespeople are relentlessly, fruitlessly pursuing buyers, and the consequences are tipping from mild irritation to irrefutable brand damage. Almost 50% of the emails a professional receives each year are spam. It’s a deluge, and many have started to turn off the tap—blacklisting those companies for good.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Today’s spray-and-pray approach to selling isn’t the only option. The Connected and Empowered Enterprise is a credible and scalable alternative way to sell that prioritizes the buyer experience and leverages a powerful resource that is underused in many organizations: relationships.
What is the Connected and Empowered Enterprise
Every organization, regardless of size, has an abundance of relationship capital. Employees represent the immediate human capital a company has at its disposal. But beyond this, every employee brings with them hundreds of potentially valuable relationships—from who they’ve worked with or met at events, to family, friends, and old classmates.
If it can be harnessed, the potential of all this relationship capital is enormous. The Connected and Empowered Enterprise is one that leverages networks to drive revenue forward.
The Connected and Empowered Enterprise at work
Consider a typical sales motion involving a buyer and a seller. In most B2B organizations, that buyer is a group of up to 20 people playing different roles in the evaluation and decision process.
The salesperson’s first challenge is identifying who these people are in each prospective company. That’s easy compared to the next challenge: Starting conversations with them. Sellers must somehow cut through the noise of a barrage of similarly generic calls, emails, and LinkedIn connection requests.
This version of the buyer experience is disastrous, especially when sellers are encouraged to think of their task as a numbers game. After all, how many tables must they sit at in order to close one deal?
The Connected and Empowered Enterprise turns this sales motion on its head. Imagine a scenario where an organization is fully connected on LinkedIn—all 1,000 employees up and down the food chain. New hires connect with the people on their immediate team, as well as key organizational figures that include executive leadership, cross-functional partners, and leaders in each area.
Human relationships are at the heart of the Connected and Empowered Enterprise, but they’re operationalized with technology. New hires are assigned a LinkedIn Sales Navigator TeamLink Extend seat. This gives salespeople full visibility into the networks of their coworkers, meaning they can quickly surface any opportunities for introductions to the elusive buyers they’re trying to engage with.
Think about the impact this can have in a fully connected organization—the value of that relationship capital across all those employees, and how it maps to the company’s total addressable market.
This unlocks new ways to think about the sales process. The way accounts are assigned can change, with a salesperson’s patch determined by the relationships available to be leveraged through their extended network. Sellers no longer have to resort to the knee-jerk reaction of picking up the phone, sending emails, assigning sequences, and other cold forms of outreach. Instead, they can use technology to identify and pursue new ways to connect through relationships.
This matters because 92% of buyers are more likely to trust a company if they are referred to it by someone they know. With numbers as stark as this, the future is clear. As more organizations adopt the principles of the Connected and Empowered Enterprise, those that don’t will be left in the dust.
The CRO in the Connected and Empowered Enterprise
Most B2B organizations have a list of their top 100 customers. Assume that each contains a buying committee of around 20 people ranging from the economic buyer to the champion, coaches, technology buyers, and legal and procurement.
“92% of buyers are more likely to trust a company if they are referred to it by someone they know.”
In the Connected and Empowered Enterprise the CRO takes that list and acts on it. That means programmatically connecting with each of these people on LinkedIn and sharing a message that thanks them for being a customer and expresses gratitude for the opportunity to be in their network.
The effect won’t be felt overnight. Even when outsourced to an assistant who can get through 50 of these in a day, it’s still work that must be done for a few months. But the eventual lift to the sales organization is enormous. Sellers can see connections via the CRO and start leveraging those relationships to get introductions and meetings.
The benefits of the Connected and Empowered Enterprise aren’t limited to the sales organization and their insatiable need to secure meetings. Let’s look at how it encompasses the broader company’s role in driving toward business goals.
How the Connected and Empowered Enterprise reduces the burden on marketing
Even in an economic downturn, marketing is responsible for a big budget. It takes money to secure the digital advertising and events that get the brand in front of people who will eventually buy.
There’s a better way. The Connected and Empowered Enterprise educates every employee on their role in the organization’s revenue objectives. Once they understand that they can support the sales team by facilitating introductions through relationships, the pressure is off marketing to deliver high-quality leads via cold and ineffective outreach tactics.
Instead, they can focus on strategy and creative that draws in new buyers—and which is distributed authentically by people throughout the company.
Using the Connected and Empowered Enterprise for recruitment and employee experience
Posting online also helps brand awareness to attract top talent to the company. It’s an uncertain market right now for employees, but they can support their current employer by promoting the company brand and helping to source the talent needed to steer it towards growth.
It can be tempting to say that this happens already. Just look at your LinkedIn feed—the company swag photos, the copy-paste posts about upcoming events, or pieces of content shared without context. Companies are “doing” social, but rarely is it done programmatically: a full 1,000-person-strong organization pushing out content, shouting from the rooftops about culture, with incredible LinkedIn profiles that humanize each individual while teaching readers about the company they represent.
Revenue Forward
Numentum is a buyer experience consultancy that helps B2B organizations go to market faster, bigger, and more effectively without the need for an expensive and time-consuming overhaul of existing processes and systems. We partner with CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and CHROs to develop customized training programs that integrate brand, sales, and marketing to deliver accelerated revenue momentum.
By efficiently focusing on the buyer experience, we advance the skills, information, and interactions sales professionals must deploy to engage with today’s hyper-informed buyers effectively. Our approach aligns sales with marketing to maximize the utility of brand investments, content, and digital channels—dramatically improving pipelines, shortening buying cycles, and increasing conversion rates.
Learn more about our approach with this introduction to the Connected and Empowered Enterprise, and follow us on LinkedIn for more strategies and tactics that drive revenue forward.
