Adding an AI-Powered Sales Assistant to Optimize Your Touch Cycle Plan

Any optimization of your Sales and outreach strategies takes a lot of introspection—you need to look at what’s working and what needs to be tweaked to better engage your prospects. Business-to-business (B2B) organizations wanting to unlock more opportunities from their lead outreach need to closely examine factors like method of outreach, the role of each lead and their intent to roll up into a touch cycle plan.

Let’s examine what factors to include in a touch cycle plan as well as how to leverage AI to further optimize outreach.

Who Is Your Audience?

The first step to setting up a touch cycle plan is to assess your audience. B2B research group SiriusDecisions lists five audience attributes to consider at this stage:

• Account type. Not all accounts are created equally. An existing customer account, for example, will likely require fewer attempts to connect when compared to reaching new prospects. Determine which account type you are targeting in order to develop your touch cycle plan.
• Location. Where your targets live can affect how they preferred to be touched or whether the prospect is even relevant to your offerings.
• Role. The role of incoming leads should be taken into consideration for two reasons. The first is that your company has preferred targets who would be most interested in your products and services. The second reason is that executives are notoriously difficult to get a hold of when compared to mid-level employees, thus the former requires a greater number of attempts to get a hold of.
• Inbound vs. outbound. It’s tougher to find a hot lead through cold calling than it is to identify someone who has downloaded your marketing materials. Know that inbound and outbound leads require different strategies.
• Buying groups. When it comes to making purchase decisions for a company or a team, decisions are rarely made by a single person. Rather, buying groups determine the best ways to spend budget on products and services. It’s wise to determine who is inspecting your marketing materials and how many people are potentially interested.

Once you’ve assessed your audience based on the above criteria, you are ready to move on to the components of your touch cycle plan.

The Details of Your Touch Cycle Plan

Touch cycle plans need to consider how to best match opportunities to returns. This includes when, how often, and how to touch your leads. Components include:

• Punctuality. Conversica finds that the best time to follow up with a lead is within the first five minutes after he or she completes a form to access your marketing materials.
• Duration. Duration refers to the length of the touch cycle. While this varies widely based on the length of your Sales funnel or customer journey, SiriusDecisons recommends at least 21 business days in length as a best practice.
• Frequency. Figure out how often you want to attempt to contact your lead. The key is to find a happy medium between pestering the prospect and ignoring them. Generally speaking, it’s best to plan to touch your leads every three to five days.
• Touch type. Touch types include call attempts, voicemails, emails, social media outreach and SMS text messages. The optimal touch type depends on the audience attributes you determined above as well as the contact information you have on hand.
• Finding the right mix. Not every type of outreach works the same for every audience. Mixing it up gives you the best chance of delivering something that works.

Conversica finds that the optimal number of attempts to turn a lead into an opportunity is between seven and twelve. Unfortunately, many Sales and Business Development teams only make one or two attempts before moving on. And who can blame them? It doesn’t make sense to continuously follow up with a prospect who simply won’t engage.

However, erring on the side of too few attempts can turn many folks who would engage if given enough attention into wasted opportunities.

Adding an AI-Powered Sales Assistant to Optimize Your Touch Cycle

Even the most perfectly crafted touch cycle plan will encounter challenges. One of the most common is too many accounts and leads for overstretched Sales reps. What do you do when your Sales and BDR teams are overwhelmed with work? The solution may be to hire a Revenue Digital Assistant™ for Sales.

These AI-powered assistants, sometimes also known as intelligent virtual assistants, are built on a proven and patented Conversational AI platform using Generative AI and brand-specific knowledge to autonomously engage contacts in revenue-influencing conversations across the lifecycle. Revenue Digital Assistants for Sales offer another touch-type for Sales teams.

This AI-powered technology is easily scalable, meaning your digital sales assistant can take on thousands of leads, only passing on the hottest leads to your Sales team. Revenue Digital Assistants also take the time to nurture leads who aren’t yet ready to talk to Sales or Customer Success reps, follow up with dormant leads or customers and continue multiple attempts until interest is gauged.

So, if you want to optimize your touch cycle plan, introducing Revenue Digital Assistants is an excellent way to introduce unlimited conversational capacity to your Sales and BDR teams, freeing them to focus on building relationships and closing deals.