How Data Can Help Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing Teams Manage SMB Accounts

Since the beginning of the year, the Enigma team interviewed over 50 sales and marketing leaders at financial services, merchant services, and verticalized SaaS companies. In these engagements, we explored their workflows and challenges, and asked what their ideal solutions might look like. It became clear that there is a big gap between desired capabilities for using data in sales and marketing and what the market currently offers. This served as inspiration for our subsequent product roadmap.

In Part One we discussed inbound and outbound marketing workflows and challenges, but in this piece we’ll focus on the challenges that sales associates and marketers face in small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) account management as well as some solutions that can help.

SMB Account Management

For most financial services sales and marketing teams interviewed by Enigma, account management –  the practice of growing an existing customer base with upsells and cross-sells and renewals – followed a similar flow:

• Customer success (CS) or sales representatives met with SMB clients quarterly or monthly
• CS teams collected usage data and anecdotal informations from these meetings
• CS teams created a customer health score
• CS teams designed interventions to increase health of customers
• CS teams renewed contracts, up-sold, or cross-sold

However, across each step of this journey, CS, Sales and Marketing teams reported challenges. Even with regular calls, Customer Success and Sales Leaders mentioned customers that churned with little notice. These leaders wanted more ability to set expectations that someone might be churning, get reasons as to why clients’ budgets were decreasing, and identify which clients were actually slowing down and which weren’t.

When creating a customer health score, CS representatives often had to rely more on the anecdotes of the customers themselves or a gut feeling, rather than data-driven evidence of these customers’ performances.

When attempting to cross-sell or up-sell, sales teams needed more data on expansion opportunities. For many payments and payment services companies, getting accurate revenues and share of wallet is critical. Figuring out whether they remain the dominant payment service or card processor is an early signal of their competitiveness in the market.

Enigma’s team worked to understand potential solutions like:

• Third party objective view of SMBs’ performances: A look into the entire SMB landscape with more detail on full-economic performance across industries and revenue bands
• Understanding individual SMBs’ revenues over time: An objective look at health and performance over time to arm sales and customer success teams with the data needed to up-sell and cross-sell

The Role of Data

With the learnings over the last year of interviews, Enigma started to build a sales and data platform for financial services, merchant services, and vertical SaaS. This platform provides a third party objective view on the size, growth, and financial health of all businesses and near-real-time intelligence on contacts and technographics.

We started to zero in on the data features that would supercharge sales and marketing teams efforts across specific use cases. For every use case, having ML-powered analytics to help build lead scores for prioritizing leads, churn scores for detecting churn risk, and finding lookalike populations was key.

We will give more information when we unveil our full solution set and how to use it. In the meantime, we suggest you check out Part 1 for information on the challenges and solutions facing inbound and outbound marketers targeting SMBs today.