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Groundswell x Sales Engagement Platforms

by Brendan Short
Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Groundswell gives salespeople at PLG companies superpowers to intelligently prioritize outreach and create automated workflows.

One of our main goals is to meet reps where they’re at. We believe that sellers have enough on their plate — they should not be required to learn yet-another tool. This also means that RevOps Teams don’t have to manage a duplicative tool and Enablement Teams/Sales and SDR Managers don’t have to train reps on a new workflow.

GTM Reps (SDRs, AEs, CSMs/AMs) spend most of their time in the CRM and Sales Engagement Platforms (SEPs) — products like Apollo, SalesLoft, and Outreach. We already have a CRM integration. And today, we’re excited to announce that we now fully support three of the top Sales Engagement Platforms that our customers use:

  • Apollo
  • SalesLoft
  • Outreach

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Data

The top PLG companies are combining product usage data with company fit data (eg: firmographic, demographic, technographic) to get the most out of their Sales Engagement Platform, to run the most effective, personalized plays, at scale. This is exactly what Groundswell enables in a simple no-code (or SQL) interface.

Content

Getting the most out of your SEP is hard. When I was at Zoom, there were over 10,000 Sequences in Outreach (yes, you read that right). Content gets outdated quickly — messaging, product-lines, even personas change over time. This pain is magnified at PLG (product-led growth) companies. And your sequences have to be highly relevant and personalized to stand-out in today’s market.

Before, reps at PLG companies had to sift through hundreds of lines in the CRM and/or a BI tool like Tableau/Looker/Domo, to try and figure out the best company and people to reach out to, and then figure out which email sequence/cadence to add them into.

Now—with the release of Groundswell x Sales Engagement Platforms—you can ensure your most important prospects never slip through the cracks.

PQL → Intelligently Add to SEP

There are a few actions that you want to automatically happen when a person becomes qualified.

  • First, you want to make sure that person works at a company that is a good fit for your business.
  • Second, if they are a good fit, you want to make sure they’re in your CRM.
  • Third, you want to route this person to the right rep (the “account owner” or “territory owner”).
  • And finally, you want to suggest the “next best action” for the rep - in many cases, this means automatically adding the person into a personalized email sequence for that rep.

Groundswell can help with each of these four steps. In today's post, we’re focusing on the fourth step, which is where Sales Engagement Platforms come into play.

Groundswell Workflows (aka “Plays”)

Let’s say you work at an electronic document signing company. You have several stages of the funnel that you want to engage with your prospects/customers. For simplicity, we’ll say: “Sign-up”, “Activation”, “AHA”, “Conversion”, “Retention/Renewal”, “Up-sell/Cross-sell”. The other axis is whether it’s on the person or the company. In PLG-world, this is the difference between a PQL (product-qualified lead) and PQA (product-qualified account).

Let’s say they want to define a mid-market (50-250 employees) PQL as anyone who has sent 3 or more documents to be signed in the last 30 days. Groundswell will automatically analyze your data and route any relevant PQLs based on this criteria. So in this example, there may be 13 people who have reached this threshold of 3 documents sent in the last 30 days (and the other firmagraphic criteria). Groundswell will intelligently route these 13 people into the most relevant email sequence, based on the actions they took (in this case it’s sending 3 documents, in another case it might be inviting other users or being the 5th user at a company, etc.). In your SEP, you will need an email sequence that talks to this action. Email #1 in the sequence may be set to “Manual” for the account owner (SDR or AE) to review before having the email send. The first email of this sequence/cadence may look something like this:

Below is the logic sitting behind this Sales Play — specifically, a play that contains multiple branches of logic and multiple actions):

You can add "Filters" within a Workflow, such as the customer Segment, pulling data from your CRM if it exists, or number of Employees, pulling data from Groundswell's enrichment service.

Here is how you would configure that Sales Play (what we call, “Workflow”) within Groundswell:

Again, the example above is for an electronic document signing company. But you can imagine what actions your business cares about and how you can operationalize and automate actions to help save your GTM Team time, and better leverage your Sales Engagement Platform to better serve your prospects and customers.

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Reach out to us if you want to start a free trial and we will help you get your Sales Engagement Platform integrated!