Customer Acquisition: Strategies and Guide to Drive Revenue Growth

Customer acquisition is getting harder than ever. The stark reality: Competition for high-value prospects’ attention is high, and 70% of B2B sellers find that gaining access to customer stakeholders is a challenge when selling virtually.

One way to overcome the customer acquisition challenge is to design a “high-value offer.” High-value offers increase success rates in securing meetings with new prospects, leading to new revenue opportunities.

As a linchpin in your customer acquisition strategy, a high-value offer should be the single best opportunity a buyer can find to learn more about how to solve a problem, interact with experts from your company and explore potential solutions.

High-value offers share four key attributes:

1. They include a live interaction or discussion that buyers rate as high-value compared to other tactics.

2. They offer business value that makes the time investment worthwhile.

3. They address timely topics that align to the buyer’s immediate priorities.

4. They present a unique opportunity not readily available elsewhere.

Prospects find the most value when an offer includes one or more of the following:

• Problem-solving and/or personalized advice to improve their situation

• Collaborative planning to chart a path to advance their situation

• Unique domain expertise and experience that can make a positive impact on their situation

When communicating your high-value offer, focus on the following:

• Relevance to the audience. Center your topic on the prospect’s most pressing issues, focusing on business or role-based value. Apply and tailor the offer to the prospect’s unique situation. 

• Exclusivity for the audience. Emphasize your unique insight, expertise or content and tie your interactions to commercial value (i.e., make it clear that the insights you share could have a price, but you’re giving them for free in return for the prospect’s time).

The number of daily quality conversations (defined as a connect or response where at least one piece of qualifying or disqualifying information is learned) has dropped 55% from 8 to 3.6 per rep since 2014. As buyers continue to shy away from engaging with sellers, prospecting has become a team sport.

Enable a cross-functional customer acquisition strategy

Even though sales and marketing share a common goal of driving revenue growth, disconnects between the two functions lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Aligning sales and marketing can improve seller productivity and help meet customer acquisition goals. 

Sales enablement typically sits between sales and marketing — but enablement activities around prospecting often happen in silos. A modern customer acquisition strategy clearly identifies the objectives of each commercial leader. Sales enablement can bridge the gap by designing a clear, cross-functional prospecting approach. B2B organizations that unify commercial strategies and leverage multithreaded commercial engagements will outperform their competition by 50%.

Refocus seller time on engaging and developing quality opportunities

Embracing a data- and technology-driven prospecting strategy not only enhances seller productivity but also supports sellers in increasingly competitive markets.

Focus sales teams on how to engage buyers and generate quality conversations instead of just generating a greater quantity of low-value meetings. To achieve this, leverage technology, data and AI to drive modernized prospecting strategies.

To support customer acquisition and sustain revenue growth, many CSOs increase their spend on new sales technologies. 

But most CSOs don’t see their current tech stacks as effective, and sales often gets stuck in a cycle of purchasing tech that fails to meet expectations. To jump-start customer acquisition, move from a technology-first focus to an outcomes-first focus. 

Embrace complexity by defining use cases

Sales tech procurement traditionally begins with questions about the technology. Yet much of the complex information that could better inform the RevTech selection process and utilization plan is either defined late in the process or omitted.

Defining use cases early on lowers the risk of complications further down the line, such as:

• Incompatibilities with your existing technology, data or operations

• Technology capabilities that are not fit for purpose 

• Poor adoption from frontline users

• Limited ability to measure or clarify impact and value on customer acquisition

RevTech use cases are vital for planning and can be split into two categories: value to the organization and value to the user or process.

To address value to the organization:

• Manage expectations. Define what the proposed solution will do, and commit to it before engaging stakeholders. 

• Engage stakeholders. Solicit understanding and agreement on future capabilities and how they impact revenue operations. Examples of stakeholders include:

  • Sellers. Solicit input and buy-in for adoption from frontline users of the technology.

  • Finance. Get approval for investment and agree on measurement parameters.

  • Commercial. Discuss the fit in relation to the commercial model of the business.

  • Analytics. Explore the size of opportunity to validate assumptions about what the use case would deliver toward the business outcome.

• Plan outcomes. Defining and communicating the value and how value will be measured are key to optimizing your future RevTech. Define, prioritize and schedule core units of value delivery, such as seller productivity, deal value, deal volume and sales velocity.

CSOs face a persistent challenge to generate a high-quality pipeline in new and existing accounts. To improve pipeline quality, lead the charge to align all functions around a shared strategy for pipeline generation.

An account-based customer acquisition strategy focuses the organization on a specific business objective. For example, in a growth strategy, the objective might be to grow the pipeline by increasing the average deal size of new opportunities. If efficiency is the priority, the objective might be to increase conversion rates or reduce average cycle time for opportunities in the funnel, shortening the time to realize new revenue.

After identifying the strategic objective, work closely with marketing to enable more effective cross-functional execution. Improve collaboration by prioritizing the following activities: