Accelerate Revenue Growth with Multithreaded Engagements

What are sales leaders to do when 43% of B2B buyers prefer rep-free experiences?  These buyers also speak volumes with their actions.  Today, B2B buyers spend only 24% of their buying time meeting with all potential suppliers and they continually refer to digital channels even while in contact with a sales rep.  Finally, how can leaders streamline selling when buying groups have 11 or more individuals involved in buying decisions.  Note, that number can flex up to 20 different individuals for complex deals.

Today’s sales leaders cannot resolve these modern-day issues with outdated strategies.  New problems require new solutions.  Fortunately, sales leaders have been armed with a suite of digital assets, interconnected processes and communal data.  These tools – along with increasingly digitally dexterous sellers – allow leaders to deploy multithreaded engagements.

What are multithreaded engagements?

Multithreaded engagements are a buyer-centric, commercial strategy that aims to engage buyers how, when and where they choose. This strategy, sustained by digital interactions and technology, orchestrates the engagement of distributed buyers through intelligent coordination. By harmonizing messaging and anticipating the needs of individuals on self-directed journeys, each stakeholder receives contextualized support. This kind of support helps suppliers validate and advance opportunities while minimizing the impact of iterative steps. While multithreading has previously been elusive, it’s made possible by advances in analytics, technology and seller competencies.

Consider the existing challenge of many individuals in a buying group.  There isn’t a singular buying journey.  Instead, each individual takes a self-directed path to meet their personalized needs.

Multithreaded engagements allow sales leaders to intelligently coordinate and support multiple individuals within a given buying group, often facilitated by sellers.  Eventually, AI-empowered technology, fed by communal data from all commercial systems and functions, will automate and facilitate this coordination.

Three Components of Multithreaded Engagements

Admittedly, for many organizations, this feels a bit futuristic and abstract.  To make this more accessible, sales leaders should focus on three critical strategic elements:

1. Dynamic relevance with buying stakeholders based on the task they are trying to accomplish.
2. Concurrent connections with multiple stakeholders on the customer organization’s buying team.
3. Stage-gate support to memorialize buying group decisions and progress to backstop regressive steps.

When done well, this will become a significant growth accelerator and a competitive differentiator.  Gartner research suggests that by 2026, B2B organizations that unify commercial strategies and leverage multithreaded commercial engagements will realize revenue growth that outperforms their competition by 50%.

The time is now.  Multithreaded engagements are possible and an answer to today’s most challenging B2B buying challenges.