A connected apps ecosystem in key account management involves the integration of your digital key account planning tool with other tools in your sales tech and marketing tech stack. This includes contact discovery tools, sales intelligence or conversational intelligence tools, marketing automation tools, customer success tools and revenue intelligence tools. 

Role of a connected apps ecosystem in digital key account planning

A connected app ecosystem is critical to leverage every possible data point from the existing tech ecosystem to provide data-driven digital selling ability to sellers. When a lot of tools are used to keep track of your accounts, you will often operate in silos within your ecosystem. This leads to an increased chance of missed opportunities and ignored red flags, buyer intent to action and strategy. In turn, this affects customer retention and growth. 

How does sales enablement currently manage this data?

Sales enablement teams are often spending hours of their valuable time collating data and processing it further for reporting. Making sense of this data and feeding it to the users on a periodic basis is time-consuming. Over time, the sales tech and marketing tech landscape for most B2B organizations becomes crowded. 

For a salesperson, each of these apps delivers value – sales intelligence tools, sales forecasting tools, customer success tools, marketing automation tools, Account-Based Marketing tools, and lead generation tools. Companies today have dozens of SaaS apps to solve many point problems in every department. As technological solutions become more easily accessible, the number of apps being utilized will only increase. How do you keep track of all of this data? Does it become overwhelming for the sales team? 

Check out DemandFarm’s free, on-demand Masterclass on ‘Making Account Plans Actionable, Measurable and Sustainable’ now!

Challenges encountered with heavy sales tech stacks

There are five main challenges that arise with heavy tech stack. They are,

1. Non-optimal ROI from tools
2. No Cross-Pollination of data
3. No visibility into Risks and Customer Sentiment in the right context
4. Excess time spent on maintenance
5. App Fatigue from using too many tools

Most of the sales tech and marketing tech apps will have data at an organizational and enterprise-wide level. For any user to extract the maximum value out of all, they would need to log into each of these apps individually. This can not only be a highly laborious task but also leads to data silos, productivity loss and what is commonly called ‘App Fatigue’. For any sales organization to make complete sense of the data generated by each of these disparate apps, it is important that they not only talk to each other but are also able to deliver contextual value at the right time for a sales or marketing person to maximize impact. If these data sources are contextualized to strategic accounts then key account managers gain better insights.

Optimizing a connected apps ecosystem with your digital account planning tool

A single place for Account Intelligence can serve as a perfect place to plug in critical data points in the right context of Account Planning. Integrating your Account Planning solution with other sales tech to enrich the data quality and plan your account strategy can lead to better results both in the short term and long term. When bringing all of these data together, additional value can be found in the form of actionable insights that can be extracted from these data silos. 

1. Integration with contact discovery tools:

The benefit of integrating with Contact Discovery Tools is to get auto-populated data within your account planning tool rather than having to build it from scratch each time. 

2. Integration with sales intelligence and conversational intelligence tools:

This will enrich the existing data of your key accounts. Such an integration would enable gathering intel from calls and surfacing it in various parts of your digital account planning tool for further analysis to help strategize and grow your key accounts. Accurate B2B buyer intent data allows you to identify exactly if and when a B2B prospect is actively considering, or looking to purchase your product or solution. This enables informed and timely campaign decisions for your sales and marketing team. 

3. Integration with Marketing Automation tools:

By integrating marketing automation tools with your digital account planning tool, Key Account Managers can get access to marketing data which helps in better qualification of leads, better conversions, better engagement and hence stronger relationships. When product demand, white space identification and targeted marketing data collectively comes together with your account planning data, you get good insights across your key account portfolio.

4. Integration with Customer Success tools:

The benefit of this integration is to equip client-facing teams with key insights regarding customers’ post-sale journey. This brings in increased transparency and alignment. It can help view and track all relevant metrics from your customer success tool and digital account planning tool in one place for better planning. This further enables client-facing teams to formulate informed strategies. 

DemandFarm’s connected apps ecosystem

DemandFarm optimizes your account planning in a connected apps ecosystem in the following manner:

1) By being native to Salesforce, DemandFarm ensures consistency and continuity in your experience

2) By working with your sales enablement team to gather use cases of how 3rd party application data can be brought into DemandFarm and made available at the right junctures enabling timely, appropriate interventions as needed for your key accounts. 

3) By leveraging the data from these 3rd party apps, our insights engine can generate powerful and intelligent nudges, recommendations and contextual insights to make your teams more productive and impactful.

4) By specializing in key account planning and management, DemandFarm enables connection to multiple apps, leveraging data from them and contextualizing it to key accounts.

Check out DemandFarm’s free & on-demand masterclass on digital account management on ‘Making Account Plans Actionable, Measurable and Sustainable’ here.