By redesigning core sales knowledge processes and using Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) to surface previously unknown sales opportunities, both in isolation and relative to competitor and market behaviour.

Our proprietary solution combines an innovative sales process and AI/ML technology to generate new critical insights and highly relevant sales opportunities that enable your sales teams to engage in context driven sales conversations, leading to higher sales and margins.

Because we combine supervised learning and innovative business development processes that pinpoints the “global minimum” where the most accurate prospects reside.

Our solution classifies and consolidates client specific but traditionally disparate customer related first and third party data into a flexible ontology that continually identifies brand new targets and missed sales opportunities.

Our algorithms then amplify and continuously improve these data assets to generate and feed new insights back into your business that uncovers new targets, increases your conversions, predicts customer churn and reduces your sales costs.

Current customer sales cycles use generic, outdated business development techniques prioritising historical behaviours, limited relevant industry knowledge and painfully slow, largely ineffective relationship building processes.

Even worse, inefficient customer acquisition tools that do little to maximise the efficiencies of salesforce sales cycles are exacerbated by global economic crises, Brexit, ESG requirements and COVID-19 pandemic impacts.

Adroll, ZoomInfo, LeadIQ and other mainstream competitors use commercial email addresses, phone numbers and contact lists while accessing large business databases that match results with specific searches, search keywords, API and CRM integration, some sales prospect automation and typically a dependency on web traffic data to customer websites in order to generate leads.

LeadIQ (a filtered database) uses a sales navigator bolt-on to access LinkedIn and does not contain all listed companies’ information.

Low conversion rates result in a push for numbers of calls rather than a higher quality of call with no systematic way for collective learning to increase the chances of a better sales outcome.

Many current lead generation approaches use stagnant marketing (PPC and paid search) resulting in sales insights that don’t identify prospects’ needs accurately and are unnecessarily complex and difficult to translate into viable customers.

There’s usually a strong possibility that your target market isn’t large enough for the product or service you’re attempting to sell.

And since there are only so many prospective possibilities out there, it’s critical to locate them all. But sales teams get mixed results from existing analytics and don’t trust the data.

Experienced sales experts feel their own experience and expertise are either ignored or not reflected in the analytics.

An out of date focus on face to face interactions at the expense of digital or remote in person engagements. Most post pandemic companies are not effectively harnessing online chat and video conferencing, which are increasingly crucial in customer decision making and transform the buyer seller interaction beyond the transactional process.

Customers are unaware of the latest products and services on offer because sales teams are unable to connect with the right leads with the right recommendations.

Customers are quoted prices that are out of line with the market because the sales teams don’t have the most accurate market pricing insights.

Smaller clients in a company’s portfolio tend to be served less efficiently as sales teams focus on the largest opportunities.

The sales and post sales support miss future opportunities because many vendors don’t proactively track installations of their products / services and know when to check in with their customers.

Unless the entire organisation has aligned goals relating to sales and fulfilment, with clear targets and best in class customer experiences, the lack of buy in means that digital transformations involving AI are likely to lose momentum and fail.

Already, many companies who have invested millions of dollars in new digital platforms only achieve mediocre results because their salespeople are not on board and stick to their old ways.

It turns out that having data is not enough to generate leads or sales. MarketingSherpa says that only 56% of B2B companies verify the business leads before passing them to the sales team.

Unverified data is of no use to your sales team and eventually increases the workload for no good reason.

The data dependency on outdated business development practices and data sets creates biased data, weakening effectiveness.

Our analysis demonstrates that none of our competitors have matching functionality or the ability for user feedback capability to improve targeting and are therefore forced to focus on prospects rather than conversions.

Low conversion rates also contribute towards a competitive environment where domain knowledge is very valuable and less likely to be shared, exacerbated by the inability to pool industry domain knowledge.

1. The critical domain knowledge required for sales conversions resides in less than 20% of sales teams and the remaining long tail consists of ineffective sales activity with few conversions.
2. Domain knowledge leaks out of the company with any sales force departure and has to be reconstructed again with new hires, creating a spiralling downward feedback loop of lower morale, staff turnover, and lower profits from lower conversions.
3. The lack of domain knowledge pooling leads to a tendency to go with what has always worked, so finding new markets and customers becomes random or high risk.

As sales organisations shift to digital models with smarter processes, data and analytics across “boundaryless” structures, they need new capabilities.

At the same time, new verticals and segments may become more important. Investing time up front in anticipating key post pandemic capabilities can help sales organisations adapt more quickly.

Driving sales growth today requires fundamentally new ways of working as well as outstanding execution across large, decentralised sales teams and channel partners. While many sales leaders accept this reality in principle, not enough focus goes into driving this level of change.

Advances in the right machine learning and analytics mean that sales leaders can now drive and scale meaningful changes that pay off today and tomorrow, with companies who get this right typically seeing 5 to 10 percent revenue growth with the same or improved margins, often within a few months.

Best-in-class sales organisations place an enormous emphasis on building frontline capabilities during a transformation; this applies to their own sales force and channel partners. They recognize that otherwise there is no hope of any new tool or new approach delivering results.

Successful sales transformation programs rely on a deep understanding of the needs of your customer, the salespeople and a willingness to work back from there to deliver insights that actually help reps sell better. The best sales organisations use data to understand the effect of all the steps in sales, from what matters most in driving a sales opportunity forward to where reps struggle or miss opportunities.

They then package those insights and send them to sales reps. Actively involving sales reps in the process empowers the sales force and greatly increases the chances of providing relevant and easy-to-use solutions.

As part of a sales transformation focusing on pricing and growth, a chemicals company used analytical tools that gave the field sales force transparency on the overall business, which encouraged and enabled them to create their own strategies and implementation plans.

They could create their own projects on the platform, which of course could be tracked by managers, and the impact was impressive: within just a few weeks of implementation, churn was down and pricing was up, and within a year, it contributed an additional $50 million to EBITDA.

The magic was the combination of getting insights to the front line in a simple, easy-to-digest way while allowing reps the freedom to explore some of the underlying input, which let them develop their own ideas.

Source: Mckinsey 2021.

Lack of coordination among sales teams makes it hard for your company to align coverage, and limited data and knowledge sharing mean reps lack timely information and insights to inform their sales approaches.

ML gives you the ability to identify customer specific pain points at scale and uses the information to give sales reps the ability to share best practices, access valuable customer insights, and expedite sales processes that can make a meaningful difference to their bookings.

Innovative ML technology gives companies customer acquisition capability via the ability to extract, collate and convert relevant sales signals into ML algorithms to predict where the best customers are

ML capability with the right B2B database software provides a prioritised view of different types of leads and can guide you to balance quality leads and prospects to drive revenues.

Create hyper personalised experiences – 85% of buyers say they expect brands to personalise the first touchpoint. It’s impossible to create a truly personalised experience without help from machine learning.

Although content and research are important, without machine learning to deliver the content via a hyper-personalised experience, it won’t work.

The buyer’s journey is not linear, and buyers only spend about 17% of it meeting with any potential suppliers and the 56% of millennials working in B2B, familiar with technology, expect a modern and accommodating experience from your B2B website.

They don’t want to pick up a phone just to get a question answered – they expect to get all the answers from your website.

Lian is a new market entrant with a technical/sales process that’s a disruptive advancement to existing sales methodologies and offers a unique solution that increases sales results while simultaneously improving sales productivity efforts.

Lian’s Machine Learning (ML) capabilities works collaboratively with a new people based sales process designed specifically for your company that results in the identification of a prioritised and tailored list of prospects that substantially increases sales opportunity conversions.

Lian transforms companies’ customer acquisition capability via its ability to extract, collate and convert relevant sales signals into a format our ML algorithms use to sum the knowledge of all an organisation’s salespeople and sales/customer requirements to predict where its best customers are. It is a robot addition to the sales team that runs 24/7, 365 days a year using quality data.

Combining our innovative ML capability with the right B2B database software will provide a prioritised view of different types of leads and can guide you to balance quality leads and prospects to drive revenues.

We standardise and analyse sales related data and then systematically capture the online and offline interactions between individual reps and customers. We then tailor our proprietary algorithms and datasets to surface prospect / customer insights as well as sales rep performance and efficiencies.

By using the knowledge of all a company’s salespeople, specially curated proprietary databases and public data to find exactly the right customers, Lian learns to pool the specific domain knowledge of a client and that IP remains in the company when salespeople leave. The absence of human biases enables pooled knowledge to be used more efficiently to predict and identify previously unknown target markets.

Lian’s innovation combines technical and commercial processes and this combination’s data output is used to direct the other in a feedback loop of iterations.

The innovation lies in the creation of an automated reinforcing loop using a machine learning algorithm with mind-mapped features converted to vectors, both positive (+ive) and negative (-ive) as input. The output is actionable B2B prospect information (from a database of curated B2B companies sourced independently).

A mind mapping solution that captures the client’s sales related issues, key criteria for successful sales and end user requirements to provide data input into the classification algorithms. This becomes a vital client input as feedback from the successful and unsuccessful customer engagements enables the algorithms to learn and perform better for specific target markets.

A visualisation of the results from the algorithms using a Tableau dashboard that can easily be integrated into a client’s CRM (e.g.Salesforce, Hubspot or Microsoft Dynamics) that enables the segmentation and dissection of the results to enable the client to prioritise sales activity, review salesforce effectiveness, track pipeline build and identify new prospects and cross sell opportunities across multiple verticals.

Lian’s innovative AI/ML technology and consultant led sales process transformation accurately identifies prospects to enable our clients to increase sales.

As Lian starts to understand your market and sales teams, your sales team achieves higher productivity and bookings within the 1st year, while simultaneously becoming the heart of your sales insights engine,responsible for capability-building programs, performance and incentive plans, and sales plays to support the sales forces.

Sales managers can then use the insights and advanced intelligence to better align sales reps to the right sales opportunities, pulling the right people in at the right stage of a deal, assembling teams with the necessary skills to innovate and design products and services that customers want, and providing insights that help close opportunities.

Apparently not. According to McKinsey, two thirds of corporate customers intentionally reach for digital or remote in person engagement when given a choice and they’re doing this throughout their purchasing journey via video conferencing. What does this mean for you, the sales leaders?

For the leading B2B companies, this one element is crucial to customer decision making and lifts the buyer-seller interaction beyond the transactional.

Furthermore, recent analysis of sales behaviour during COVID-19 reveals that 12 percent of companies are also comfortable closing deals of $500,000 to $1 million without face-to-face interactions, while 15 percent of companies feel that way about deals worth more than $1 million.

Why is this important? In the new post pandemic world, this is critical for sales efficiency – it means your sales reps should not spend unnecessary time and energy on smaller deals.

If your business has a range of deal sizes, using our new sales process and Lian ensures your reps are differentiating their interactions.

Again, the evidence says otherwise.

While buyers are willingly engaging in an omnichannel approach, many sales organisations haven’t kept pace.
Many buyers are willing to spend big on a single transaction using a remote or self-service model. Again, research indicates 71% of buyers are willing to spend more than $50,000 in a single transaction, and 27% percent would spend $500,000 or more.

When asked what they wanted most from their sales rep, one executive told us, “Please stop asking to meet with me in person. I’m busy enough as it is”.

Other executives like the fast and easy access to their suppliers’ product and subject matter experts that remote engagement allows.

As one executive commented, “I no longer have to wait three months for a date when everyone can travel to the same spot at the same time. I can speak with experts more often and on shorter notice.”

The long tail of COVID-19 continues to make the logistics of meeting in person challenging.

Since the start of the pandemic, companies have publicly announced office-space reductions of 20 to 50 percent and have indefinitely extended full- or part-time work-from-home arrangements for their employees, making remote meetings easier and more practical for buyers in many instances.

Sales teams are also growing more comfortable with a remote-first model. While some teams are eager to dust off their travel gear, many are in no hurry to resume road-warrior lifestyles. Digital engagement works just as well, they feel, largely due to better technology connectivity.

Many sales organisations face significant challenges in guiding teams dispersed across large territories. This limits the ability of sales reps to access valuable customer insights, share best practices, and expedite sales processes that can make a meaningful difference to their bookings.

When cultivating new customers, Lian Solutions makes outreach both simpler and less expensive. It will be particularly helpful with large accounts where your sales teams have had difficulty in identifying customers’ pain points, finding information and comparing options, especially where there is a lack of internal expertise on important components.

Using our machine learning system to mine behavioural data from sales and marketing, you can survey large numbers of individual deals and sales rep interactions (external data, competitor activity, emails, meetings, and phone calls, for example) to find patterns in completed deals and to generate insights on which behaviours can help win deals and boost customer satisfaction scores. These data-driven insights can then help sales leaders to steer and coach their sales force in a way that will drive both top-and bottom-line growth.

You can also simultaneously use data and analytics to identify accounts that currently generate little revenue but have the potential for strong growth and Lian will help your sales and marketing efforts to target these groups in a more cost effective and precise way compared to expensive, widespread, unfocused campaigns.

Effective sales operations focus on concentrating reps’ time and attention on the handful of metrics that disproportionately matter – the size of the pipeline, conversion rate, and incentives consistent with the company’s overall sales vision.

Embedding weekly routines and daily expectations of activities reinforces the ultimate goal of driving sales growth. Therefore, sales leaders need to focus on digital and analytics capabilities that deliver on these needs.

Using digital tools is vital to scale solutions across the sales organisation. This includes creating tailored dashboards for all sales personnel as well as decision support metrics and tools to help reps in the field make better decisions.

These don’t need to be overly complex; even quick and dirty solutions can deliver profitable results without waiting for more sophisticated IT investment and development.

Example business issue

A technology company had limited data on sales, margins, and no performance management systems for products sold at the rep level. When it attempted a large transformation that involved capturing new growth, realigning coverage to match opportunities, building frontline capabilities, and redesigning compensation structures, results were slow to arrive and quarterly target pressure did not let up.

Worse, the sales force was so fragmented and dispersed that it was hard for the customer to know whom to call for help. There were more than two dozen sales roles within the function, from account managers to software architects, and the company realised that the right people were seldomly working on the right deals.

The solution

Using a solution like Lian enabled the company to transform their sales operations processes and use analytics and automated report systems to create dashboards personalised for each salesperson:

• The sales operation process redesign resulted in a digital tool within their CRM system that gave sales reps the precise names of the right people to call for any particular deal based on their specific experiences.
• This tool also scrapes email and calendar data to understand what patterns of sales staff interactions are most highly correlated with strong performance – frequency of interactions at each stage of the deal and the specific combinations of people who work well to close and support a deal.
• The personalised dashboards gave reps their top opportunities on a daily basis which helped to prioritise their follow up actions
• The dashboards also introduced transparency from a performance management perspective, allowing managers all the way to Board level to identify the best performing reps, what opportunities they had closed and where reps needed coaching. Reps could also flag where they needed help, which also ensured that priority opportunities got the right level of attention.
• The dashboards and new sales support processes were also used to help sales support staff build capability to drive the most efficient selling process, with experts such as pricing specialists flagging where the hottest opportunities were and also identifying opportunities to cross sell their customers.

This decision to make information available at the individual level – the combination of dashboards and reporting, sales enablement and coaching delivered an enormous impact very quickly: a $55 million uplift in revenues for that quarter using “quick and dirty” tools effectively rather than making enormous investments.

Identifying the actions that separate top performers from the rest can help managers refocus sales efforts and simultaneously identify skills that need upgrading.

Irrespective of whatever business you’re in and no matter which metric you use, the top 30 percent of reps will outperform the bottom 30 by as much as a factor of four.

Closing this gap by helping weaker performers to operate more like high performers is a surefire way to drive additional revenue growth.

Lian precisely identifies that the top sales reps do differently and identifies overall best practices that all sales reps should follow within their verticals / accounts to increase sales and improve efficiency.

By personalising analytics to identify the traits and skills of top performers, you can use Lian to discover where everyone’s gaps are. Then digital tools can be deployed alongside more traditional learning mechanisms to effectively roll out coaching to large and widely distributed sales forces.

According to McKinsey, up to 30 percent of sales activities can be automated, including lead generation activities. Here’s a small example:

● Lian’s analytics can identify leads with the best conversion potential.
● The client uses Chatbots to reach out to them over text or email, using artificial intelligence to understand the contact’s response and assess the conversion potential.
● This enables sales reps to contact only those leads where there is clear buying interest, saving time, reducing cost, and improving conversion rates

Companies that refine their sales strategies based on personalised sales behaviour insights are seeing an average improvement in sales productivity of 20 percent. The combination of our new sales process working alongside Lian’s algorithms makes the most of the abundance of data and draws the right insights to drive bookings based on highly targeted and relevant prospects.

Sales leaders then personalise the delivery of tailored insights and sales plays to individual reps, continually operating a feedback loop to improve the search results,

From a personal development perspective, this approach enables better performance tracking, provides coaching based on what’s working in the field and enables day-to-day efficiencies that eliminate waste.

Additionally, sales managers benefit by getting new reps up to speed faster

In the average company, for example, reps spend only about 16% of their day in front of customers, virtually or in person but reps in the best performing sales organisations spend 40 to 50 % of their time in front of the customer.

Research shows that top reps spend just as much time on unappealing internal tasks as low performers, but they take the important step of putting in additional time to connect with customers, whether by email, phone, or in person.

But how much more?

Most sales organisations don’t quantify this additional effort, but using Lian’s analytics to do so can give managers to improve performance by:

(1) Changing how low-performing reps should adjust their behaviour and

(2) Encouraging additional customer contact by minimising the administrative and internal tasks.

❖ Identify the real value of acquired customers for your business (rapidly assess the average value of converting a new customer vs. the incremental revenue created from selling more to existing customers) by analysing and predicting purchase order rates, repeat and frequency rates.

❖ Use Lian’s insights to identify at scale (1) your customer’s pain points and (2) new product and sales opportunities tailored to your individual customer to unlock new revenue and margin streams

❖ Use Lian’s analytics in lead generation to identify leads with the best conversion potential by using critical sales insights and even chatbots to qualify customers’ responses in assessing conversion potential before giving the sales reps better leads.

❖ Streamline the bid process by using Lian’s individual prospect information and robotic process automation to save time by using pre designed proposals that automatically populate with internal data. Early adopters of sales automation consistently report increases in customer satisfaction, efficiency improvements of 10 to 15 percent, and meaningful sales uplifts.

❖ Use Lian’s insights and advanced intelligence to better align sales reps to the right sales opportunities, pulling the right people in at the right stage of a deal, assembling teams with the necessary skills to innovate and design products and services that customers want, and providing insights that help close opportunities.

❖ Balance the growth of your buyer base (usage per customer is finite) – e.g. you may find that certain small customers love hearing about new products, struggle to meet minimum order requirements, or experience frequent stock shortages. With insights from Lian, you can develop targeted marketing campaigns and solutions by individually matching pain points with digital solutions that can improve the end-to-end customer journey

❖ Use the power of our highly visual 3D mind mapping to enhance the ability of your sales reps to access valuable customer insights, share best practices, and expedite sales processes that can make a meaningful difference to their bookings.

❖ Generate extra sales capacity from your teams by giving them tailored actionable insights at scale and make their business development and client acquisition process more efficient.

By redesigning core sales knowledge processes and using Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) to surface previously unknown sales opportunities, both in isolation and relative to competitor and market behaviour.

Our proprietary solution combines an innovative sales process and AI/ML technology to generate new critical insights and highly relevant sales opportunities that enable your sales teams to engage in context driven sales conversations, leading to higher sales and margins.

Because we combine supervised learning and innovative business development processes that pinpoints the “global minimum” where the most accurate prospects reside.

Our solution classifies and consolidates client specific but traditionally disparate customer related first and third party data into a flexible ontology that continually identifies brand new targets and missed sales opportunities.

Our algorithms then amplify and continuously improve these data assets to generate and feed new insights back into your business that uncovers new targets, increases your conversions, predicts customer churn and reduces your sales costs.

Current customer sales cycles use generic, outdated business development techniques prioritising historical behaviours, limited relevant industry knowledge and painfully slow, largely ineffective relationship building processes.

Even worse, inefficient customer acquisition tools that do little to maximise the efficiencies of salesforce sales cycles are exacerbated by global economic crises, Brexit, ESG requirements and COVID-19 pandemic impacts.

Adroll, ZoomInfo, LeadIQ and other mainstream competitors use commercial email addresses, phone numbers and contact lists while accessing large business databases that match results with specific searches, search keywords, API and CRM integration, some sales prospect automation and typically a dependency on web traffic data to customer websites in order to generate leads.

LeadIQ (a filtered database) uses a sales navigator bolt-on to access LinkedIn and does not contain all listed companies’ information.

Low conversion rates result in a push for numbers of calls rather than a higher quality of call with no systematic way for collective learning to increase the chances of a better sales outcome.

Many current lead generation approaches use stagnant marketing (PPC and paid search) resulting in sales insights that don’t identify prospects’ needs accurately and are unnecessarily complex and difficult to translate into viable customers.

There’s usually a strong possibility that your target market isn’t large enough for the product or service you’re attempting to sell.

And since there are only so many prospective possibilities out there, it’s critical to locate them all. But sales teams get mixed results from existing analytics and don’t trust the data.

Experienced sales experts feel their own experience and expertise are either ignored or not reflected in the analytics.

An out of date focus on face to face interactions at the expense of digital or remote in person engagements. Most post pandemic companies are not effectively harnessing online chat and video conferencing, which are increasingly crucial in customer decision making and transform the buyer seller interaction beyond the transactional process.

Customers are unaware of the latest products and services on offer because sales teams are unable to connect with the right leads with the right recommendations.

Customers are quoted prices that are out of line with the market because the sales teams don’t have the most accurate market pricing insights.

Smaller clients in a company’s portfolio tend to be served less efficiently as sales teams focus on the largest opportunities.

The sales and post sales support miss future opportunities because many vendors don’t proactively track installations of their products / services and know when to check in with their customers.

Unless the entire organisation has aligned goals relating to sales and fulfilment, with clear targets and best in class customer experiences, the lack of buy in means that digital transformations involving AI are likely to lose momentum and fail.

Already, many companies who have invested millions of dollars in new digital platforms only achieve mediocre results because their salespeople are not on board and stick to their old ways.

It turns out that having data is not enough to generate leads or sales. MarketingSherpa says that only 56% of B2B companies verify the business leads before passing them to the sales team.

Unverified data is of no use to your sales team and eventually increases the workload for no good reason.

The data dependency on outdated business development practices and data sets creates biased data, weakening effectiveness.

Our analysis demonstrates that none of our competitors have matching functionality or the ability for user feedback capability to improve targeting and are therefore forced to focus on prospects rather than conversions.

Low conversion rates also contribute towards a competitive environment where domain knowledge is very valuable and less likely to be shared, exacerbated by the inability to pool industry domain knowledge.

1. The critical domain knowledge required for sales conversions resides in less than 20% of sales teams and the remaining long tail consists of ineffective sales activity with few conversions.
2. Domain knowledge leaks out of the company with any sales force departure and has to be reconstructed again with new hires, creating a spiralling downward feedback loop of lower morale, staff turnover, and lower profits from lower conversions.
3. The lack of domain knowledge pooling leads to a tendency to go with what has always worked, so finding new markets and customers becomes random or high risk.

As sales organisations shift to digital models with smarter processes, data and analytics across “boundaryless” structures, they need new capabilities.

At the same time, new verticals and segments may become more important. Investing time up front in anticipating key post pandemic capabilities can help sales organisations adapt more quickly.

Driving sales growth today requires fundamentally new ways of working as well as outstanding execution across large, decentralised sales teams and channel partners. While many sales leaders accept this reality in principle, not enough focus goes into driving this level of change.

Advances in the right machine learning and analytics mean that sales leaders can now drive and scale meaningful changes that pay off today and tomorrow, with companies who get this right typically seeing 5 to 10 percent revenue growth with the same or improved margins, often within a few months.

Best-in-class sales organisations place an enormous emphasis on building frontline capabilities during a transformation; this applies to their own sales force and channel partners. They recognize that otherwise there is no hope of any new tool or new approach delivering results.

Successful sales transformation programs rely on a deep understanding of the needs of your customer, the salespeople and a willingness to work back from there to deliver insights that actually help reps sell better. The best sales organisations use data to understand the effect of all the steps in sales, from what matters most in driving a sales opportunity forward to where reps struggle or miss opportunities.

They then package those insights and send them to sales reps. Actively involving sales reps in the process empowers the sales force and greatly increases the chances of providing relevant and easy-to-use solutions.

As part of a sales transformation focusing on pricing and growth, a chemicals company used analytical tools that gave the field sales force transparency on the overall business, which encouraged and enabled them to create their own strategies and implementation plans.

They could create their own projects on the platform, which of course could be tracked by managers, and the impact was impressive: within just a few weeks of implementation, churn was down and pricing was up, and within a year, it contributed an additional $50 million to EBITDA.

The magic was the combination of getting insights to the front line in a simple, easy-to-digest way while allowing reps the freedom to explore some of the underlying input, which let them develop their own ideas.

Source: Mckinsey 2021.

Lack of coordination among sales teams makes it hard for your company to align coverage, and limited data and knowledge sharing mean reps lack timely information and insights to inform their sales approaches.

ML gives you the ability to identify customer specific pain points at scale and uses the information to give sales reps the ability to share best practices, access valuable customer insights, and expedite sales processes that can make a meaningful difference to their bookings.

Innovative ML technology gives companies customer acquisition capability via the ability to extract, collate and convert relevant sales signals into ML algorithms to predict where the best customers are

ML capability with the right B2B database software provides a prioritised view of different types of leads and can guide you to balance quality leads and prospects to drive revenues.

Create hyper personalised experiences – 85% of buyers say they expect brands to personalise the first touchpoint. It’s impossible to create a truly personalised experience without help from machine learning.

Although content and research are important, without machine learning to deliver the content via a hyper-personalised experience, it won’t work.

The buyer’s journey is not linear, and buyers only spend about 17% of it meeting with any potential suppliers and the 56% of millennials working in B2B, familiar with technology, expect a modern and accommodating experience from your B2B website.

They don’t want to pick up a phone just to get a question answered – they expect to get all the answers from your website.

Lian is a new market entrant with a technical/sales process that’s a disruptive advancement to existing sales methodologies and offers a unique solution that increases sales results while simultaneously improving sales productivity efforts.

Lian’s Machine Learning (ML) capabilities works collaboratively with a new people based sales process designed specifically for your company that results in the identification of a prioritised and tailored list of prospects that substantially increases sales opportunity conversions.

Lian transforms companies’ customer acquisition capability via its ability to extract, collate and convert relevant sales signals into a format our ML algorithms use to sum the knowledge of all an organisation’s salespeople and sales/customer requirements to predict where its best customers are. It is a robot addition to the sales team that runs 24/7, 365 days a year using quality data.

Combining our innovative ML capability with the right B2B database software will provide a prioritised view of different types of leads and can guide you to balance quality leads and prospects to drive revenues.

We standardise and analyse sales related data and then systematically capture the online and offline interactions between individual reps and customers. We then tailor our proprietary algorithms and datasets to surface prospect / customer insights as well as sales rep performance and efficiencies.

By using the knowledge of all a company’s salespeople, specially curated proprietary databases and public data to find exactly the right customers, Lian learns to pool the specific domain knowledge of a client and that IP remains in the company when salespeople leave. The absence of human biases enables pooled knowledge to be used more efficiently to predict and identify previously unknown target markets.

Lian’s innovation combines technical and commercial processes and this combination’s data output is used to direct the other in a feedback loop of iterations.

The innovation lies in the creation of an automated reinforcing loop using a machine learning algorithm with mind-mapped features converted to vectors, both positive (+ive) and negative (-ive) as input. The output is actionable B2B prospect information (from a database of curated B2B companies sourced independently).

A mind mapping solution that captures the client’s sales related issues, key criteria for successful sales and end user requirements to provide data input into the classification algorithms. This becomes a vital client input as feedback from the successful and unsuccessful customer engagements enables the algorithms to learn and perform better for specific target markets.

A visualisation of the results from the algorithms using a Tableau dashboard that can easily be integrated into a client’s CRM (e.g.Salesforce, Hubspot or Microsoft Dynamics) that enables the segmentation and dissection of the results to enable the client to prioritise sales activity, review salesforce effectiveness, track pipeline build and identify new prospects and cross sell opportunities across multiple verticals.

Lian’s innovative AI/ML technology and consultant led sales process transformation accurately identifies prospects to enable our clients to increase sales.

As Lian starts to understand your market and sales teams, your sales team achieves higher productivity and bookings within the 1st year, while simultaneously becoming the heart of your sales insights engine,responsible for capability-building programs, performance and incentive plans, and sales plays to support the sales forces.

Sales managers can then use the insights and advanced intelligence to better align sales reps to the right sales opportunities, pulling the right people in at the right stage of a deal, assembling teams with the necessary skills to innovate and design products and services that customers want, and providing insights that help close opportunities.

Apparently not. According to McKinsey, two thirds of corporate customers intentionally reach for digital or remote in person engagement when given a choice and they’re doing this throughout their purchasing journey via video conferencing. What does this mean for you, the sales leaders?

For the leading B2B companies, this one element is crucial to customer decision making and lifts the buyer-seller interaction beyond the transactional.

Furthermore, recent analysis of sales behaviour during COVID-19 reveals that 12 percent of companies are also comfortable closing deals of $500,000 to $1 million without face-to-face interactions, while 15 percent of companies feel that way about deals worth more than $1 million.

Why is this important? In the new post pandemic world, this is critical for sales efficiency – it means your sales reps should not spend unnecessary time and energy on smaller deals.

If your business has a range of deal sizes, using our new sales process and Lian ensures your reps are differentiating their interactions.

Again, the evidence says otherwise.

While buyers are willingly engaging in an omnichannel approach, many sales organisations haven’t kept pace.
Many buyers are willing to spend big on a single transaction using a remote or self-service model. Again, research indicates 71% of buyers are willing to spend more than $50,000 in a single transaction, and 27% percent would spend $500,000 or more.

When asked what they wanted most from their sales rep, one executive told us, “Please stop asking to meet with me in person. I’m busy enough as it is”.

Other executives like the fast and easy access to their suppliers’ product and subject matter experts that remote engagement allows.

As one executive commented, “I no longer have to wait three months for a date when everyone can travel to the same spot at the same time. I can speak with experts more often and on shorter notice.”

The long tail of COVID-19 continues to make the logistics of meeting in person challenging.

Since the start of the pandemic, companies have publicly announced office-space reductions of 20 to 50 percent and have indefinitely extended full- or part-time work-from-home arrangements for their employees, making remote meetings easier and more practical for buyers in many instances.

Sales teams are also growing more comfortable with a remote-first model. While some teams are eager to dust off their travel gear, many are in no hurry to resume road-warrior lifestyles. Digital engagement works just as well, they feel, largely due to better technology connectivity.

Many sales organisations face significant challenges in guiding teams dispersed across large territories. This limits the ability of sales reps to access valuable customer insights, share best practices, and expedite sales processes that can make a meaningful difference to their bookings.

When cultivating new customers, Lian Solutions makes outreach both simpler and less expensive. It will be particularly helpful with large accounts where your sales teams have had difficulty in identifying customers’ pain points, finding information and comparing options, especially where there is a lack of internal expertise on important components.

Using our machine learning system to mine behavioural data from sales and marketing, you can survey large numbers of individual deals and sales rep interactions (external data, competitor activity, emails, meetings, and phone calls, for example) to find patterns in completed deals and to generate insights on which behaviours can help win deals and boost customer satisfaction scores. These data-driven insights can then help sales leaders to steer and coach their sales force in a way that will drive both top-and bottom-line growth.

You can also simultaneously use data and analytics to identify accounts that currently generate little revenue but have the potential for strong growth and Lian will help your sales and marketing efforts to target these groups in a more cost effective and precise way compared to expensive, widespread, unfocused campaigns.

Effective sales operations focus on concentrating reps’ time and attention on the handful of metrics that disproportionately matter – the size of the pipeline, conversion rate, and incentives consistent with the company’s overall sales vision.

Embedding weekly routines and daily expectations of activities reinforces the ultimate goal of driving sales growth. Therefore, sales leaders need to focus on digital and analytics capabilities that deliver on these needs.

Using digital tools is vital to scale solutions across the sales organisation. This includes creating tailored dashboards for all sales personnel as well as decision support metrics and tools to help reps in the field make better decisions.

These don’t need to be overly complex; even quick and dirty solutions can deliver profitable results without waiting for more sophisticated IT investment and development.

Example business issue

A technology company had limited data on sales, margins, and no performance management systems for products sold at the rep level. When it attempted a large transformation that involved capturing new growth, realigning coverage to match opportunities, building frontline capabilities, and redesigning compensation structures, results were slow to arrive and quarterly target pressure did not let up.

Worse, the sales force was so fragmented and dispersed that it was hard for the customer to know whom to call for help. There were more than two dozen sales roles within the function, from account managers to software architects, and the company realised that the right people were seldomly working on the right deals.

The solution

Using a solution like Lian enabled the company to transform their sales operations processes and use analytics and automated report systems to create dashboards personalised for each salesperson:

• The sales operation process redesign resulted in a digital tool within their CRM system that gave sales reps the precise names of the right people to call for any particular deal based on their specific experiences.
• This tool also scrapes email and calendar data to understand what patterns of sales staff interactions are most highly correlated with strong performance – frequency of interactions at each stage of the deal and the specific combinations of people who work well to close and support a deal.
• The personalised dashboards gave reps their top opportunities on a daily basis which helped to prioritise their follow up actions
• The dashboards also introduced transparency from a performance management perspective, allowing managers all the way to Board level to identify the best performing reps, what opportunities they had closed and where reps needed coaching. Reps could also flag where they needed help, which also ensured that priority opportunities got the right level of attention.
• The dashboards and new sales support processes were also used to help sales support staff build capability to drive the most efficient selling process, with experts such as pricing specialists flagging where the hottest opportunities were and also identifying opportunities to cross sell their customers.

This decision to make information available at the individual level – the combination of dashboards and reporting, sales enablement and coaching delivered an enormous impact very quickly: a $55 million uplift in revenues for that quarter using “quick and dirty” tools effectively rather than making enormous investments.

Identifying the actions that separate top performers from the rest can help managers refocus sales efforts and simultaneously identify skills that need upgrading.

Irrespective of whatever business you’re in and no matter which metric you use, the top 30 percent of reps will outperform the bottom 30 by as much as a factor of four.

Closing this gap by helping weaker performers to operate more like high performers is a surefire way to drive additional revenue growth.

Lian precisely identifies that the top sales reps do differently and identifies overall best practices that all sales reps should follow within their verticals / accounts to increase sales and improve efficiency.

By personalising analytics to identify the traits and skills of top performers, you can use Lian to discover where everyone’s gaps are. Then digital tools can be deployed alongside more traditional learning mechanisms to effectively roll out coaching to large and widely distributed sales forces.

According to McKinsey, up to 30 percent of sales activities can be automated, including lead generation activities. Here’s a small example:

● Lian’s analytics can identify leads with the best conversion potential.
● The client uses Chatbots to reach out to them over text or email, using artificial intelligence to understand the contact’s response and assess the conversion potential.
● This enables sales reps to contact only those leads where there is clear buying interest, saving time, reducing cost, and improving conversion rates

Companies that refine their sales strategies based on personalised sales behaviour insights are seeing an average improvement in sales productivity of 20 percent. The combination of our new sales process working alongside Lian’s algorithms makes the most of the abundance of data and draws the right insights to drive bookings based on highly targeted and relevant prospects.

Sales leaders then personalise the delivery of tailored insights and sales plays to individual reps, continually operating a feedback loop to improve the search results,

From a personal development perspective, this approach enables better performance tracking, provides coaching based on what’s working in the field and enables day-to-day efficiencies that eliminate waste.

Additionally, sales managers benefit by getting new reps up to speed faster

In the average company, for example, reps spend only about 16% of their day in front of customers, virtually or in person but reps in the best performing sales organisations spend 40 to 50 % of their time in front of the customer.

Research shows that top reps spend just as much time on unappealing internal tasks as low performers, but they take the important step of putting in additional time to connect with customers, whether by email, phone, or in person.

But how much more?

Most sales organisations don’t quantify this additional effort, but using Lian’s analytics to do so can give managers to improve performance by:

(1) Changing how low-performing reps should adjust their behaviour and

(2) Encouraging additional customer contact by minimising the administrative and internal tasks.

❖ Identify the real value of acquired customers for your business (rapidly assess the average value of converting a new customer vs. the incremental revenue created from selling more to existing customers) by analysing and predicting purchase order rates, repeat and frequency rates.

❖ Use Lian’s insights to identify at scale (1) your customer’s pain points and (2) new product and sales opportunities tailored to your individual customer to unlock new revenue and margin streams

❖ Use Lian’s analytics in lead generation to identify leads with the best conversion potential by using critical sales insights and even chatbots to qualify customers’ responses in assessing conversion potential before giving the sales reps better leads.

❖ Streamline the bid process by using Lian’s individual prospect information and robotic process automation to save time by using pre designed proposals that automatically populate with internal data. Early adopters of sales automation consistently report increases in customer satisfaction, efficiency improvements of 10 to 15 percent, and meaningful sales uplifts.

❖ Use Lian’s insights and advanced intelligence to better align sales reps to the right sales opportunities, pulling the right people in at the right stage of a deal, assembling teams with the necessary skills to innovate and design products and services that customers want, and providing insights that help close opportunities.

❖ Balance the growth of your buyer base (usage per customer is finite) – e.g. you may find that certain small customers love hearing about new products, struggle to meet minimum order requirements, or experience frequent stock shortages. With insights from Lian, you can develop targeted marketing campaigns and solutions by individually matching pain points with digital solutions that can improve the end-to-end customer journey

❖ Use the power of our highly visual 3D mind mapping to enhance the ability of your sales reps to access valuable customer insights, share best practices, and expedite sales processes that can make a meaningful difference to their bookings.

❖ Generate extra sales capacity from your teams by giving them tailored actionable insights at scale and make their business development and client acquisition process more efficient.