Multithreading for sales refers to connecting with multiple decision makers in a company while pitching your product to them to make a sale.
The idea behind multithreading is to cultivate multiple champions within the company because working closely with many stakeholders, if not all the key decision makers, can increase chances of deal closure.
Multithreading is valuable, especially in large companies with complex buying committees and long sales cycles. It also creates future upsell opportunities.
There are several benefits of multithreading, and it is gradually becoming the norm as it has proven to be the best way to close deals faster, especially with large enterprises and high deal sizes.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on making multithreading a part of your go-to-market strategy and using multithreading to drive B2B sales and scale your business.
Step 1: Identify your target audience
The first step is to identify the companies you want to target. Define your ideal customer profile (ICP). While an ICP is typically broad, you need to ensure that it is clear and sharp. Be sure to chart out the ICP for both the companies and the people or personas. You start off on a shaky footing and the entire sales process gets derailed.
Step 2: Segment your leads
Once you have your entire list of contacts, you need to segment them. This could be based on the industry, company size, the stage of the sales pipeline they’re in, intent data, or any other such category you can use to group your leads. Segmentation is crucial because it lets you customize your messaging and engagement style for each group. By tailoring your outreach, you increase the chances that your contacts will actually pay attention and engage with what you're saying.
Step 3: Identify your hidden buying committees
Multithreading in sales only works if you reach the right people in the account you’re targeting. Once you’re clear on what kind of people in a company you want to speak to, ie., your ICP, it is time to find the relevant contacts from the company you’re targeting. Highperformr helps you identify hidden buying committees in target accounts, find all ICP contacts from an account, and enrich every contact with real-time buying signals so you can personalize outreach.
Step 4: Develop a multithreaded sales strategy
The next step involves crafting a multithreading game plan that charts out how team members should connect with various stakeholders within the same organization. This requires a clear understanding of not just the prospects but also your sales teams’ strengths. You need to understand how each SDR in your team works, and figure out who reached out to which contact in the target account.
For instance, an SDR could connect with one decision-maker and your team lead could connect with a senior influencer so all the efforts come together to make the deal happen. By aligning the right SDR with the right stakeholder, you can build stronger relationships and increase the chances of conversion. This strategy should be tailored to the specific needs of each target account, and intent signals can be extremely useful here. Using tools like Highperformr to analyze and understand every lead will help you take into consideration every small nuance, and make the most of every outreach conversation.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re developing a multithreaded sales strategy:
- Emphasize on personalization. Customized and personalized outreach is far more likely to bring you responses and engagement. Make sure you have all the tools and insight you need to ensure every conversation with every stakeholder is personalized.
- Put signals at the centre of your strategy. Constantly monitor your leads and watch for signals that you can use as hooks for outreach. For example, if someone from the buying committee has just received a promotion, take immediate action on that signal, send them a congratulatory message, and use that as an opportunity to show them how your product could assist them in their new role.
- Ensure that there is transparency with all communication, and there are no silos, so there is no repetition, contradiction, or any other issue in the broader message that the target account receives.
Step 5: Use CRM tools for tracking
Having a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool is essential for facilitating interactions across multiple threads. But just having a CRM won’t be enough. It is critical to keep the CRM updated so the sales team can reach out to the leads based on recent and relevant contact information. With a clean and enriched CRM, you can maintain a centralized database of interactions, allowing your team to stay aligned and respond promptly to any relevant signals from leads.
Step 6: Train your sales team on multithreading techniques
While sales is typically an individual activity with each sales person handling their leads and trying to close the most deals, multithreading is a team sport. It requires multiple sales folks and those outside the sales team as well to play their part in bringing the deal home. And this requires conscious effort and training. This training should focus on building skills related to relationship management, persistence, and adaptability. The training should emphasize the importance of personalization, understanding the different leads/stakeholders, and using signals to take immediate action.
Importance of effective communication for multithreading sales
A solid multithreaded sales strategy hinges on the communication strategy you have. And effective communication is not just about conveying your sales pitch to the right people. It needs to be seamless and impactful without being aggressive. Here are a few things you can do:
Take swift action on signals
We live in a market where most deals go to the first responders, so it is critical to act swiftly on any signals received from leads. Whether it's a direct request for information, signals such as job changes, or other activities that indicate intent to buy, responding quickly is important to show your commitment to closing the deal.
Identify the best channels for outreach
Just like personalizing outreach messages, you also need to customize communication preferences and channels. Some may be highly active on LinkedIn, while others prefer the formality of email. Here’s where tools like Highperformr come into play:
- Highperformr can help identify the most effective channels for each lead. By analyzing engagement patterns and preferences, you can tailor your outreach strategy to maximize response rates.
- Personalizing your communication based on the lead's preferred platform enhances the likelihood of a positive response. It shows that you've taken the time to understand their preferences and are willing to adapt your approach.
Engaging and nurturing leads
Only a small fraction of your leads are ready to buy at any given time. However, engaging with the remaining 95% is just as important. Nurturing these leads builds strong relationships that can pay off when they eventually enter the buying cycle.
Regular engagement helps establish trust and credibility, positioning your brand as a reliable partner. By maintaining a consistent presence, you ensure that your brand remains top of mind when leads are ready to make a purchase. Providing relevant, valuable content tailored to their interests keeps leads engaged and informed about your offerings.
Ensure clear and transparent communication
When sales, marketing, and other customer-making teams are aligned, they can provide a cohesive and consistent message to leads. This establishes credibility.Breaking silos also helps in identifying and addressing potential issues promptly, preventing misunderstandings that could affect deals.
Tools that enhance multithreading efforts
AI has made it a lot easier to multithread sales. You have tools to identify buying committees, understand the best channels for multithreading, personalize messages, and track outreach, so as to make multithreading sales effective.
AI-native sales intelligence tools and data enrichment tools help sales teams identify ICP leads, enrich contacts, and get signals about contacts so they are able to have multiple conversations in parallel efficiently.
To learn more about the different features and capabilities of Highperformr, and how you can use it for multithreading sales at your company, schedule a demo with our GTM engineer today!
Monitor engagement and adjust multithreading sales strategies
As you start multithreading accounts, it is important to keep track of engagements so you can see if the efforts are having an impact on your sales pipeline.
Track different sales pipeline metrics to see if your multithreading efforts are making a difference.
For instance, the entire point of multithreading is to move the deal through the pipeline faster. So closely watch your pipeline velocity. Similarly, keep track of engagement rates to see what kind of conversations work and what don’t.
Be sure to experiment with different things, and regularly review your engagement data, so you can identify areas for improvement and refine your multithreading sales strategy.
Start multithreading sales with Highperformr
Highperformr has been built to make multithreading easy and efficient. You can use Highperformr to identify the hidden buying committees in your target accounts, enrich leads with contact information and AI insight, get real-time buying signals to enable timely outreach, and craft personalized conversation starters for every stakeholder you want to reach.
Highperformr keeps your CRM up to date and enriched with the latest intent data and social signals, enabling you to keep your conversations relevant.
Highperformr also helps automate GTM workflows. For example, you can use Highperformr to configure workflows to get alerts each time a contact changes jobs or when the buying committee changes because of a new hire, a promotion, or a job change.
To learn more about the different features and capabilities of Highperformr, and how you can use it for your multithreading sales strategy, schedule a demo with our GTM engineer today!
