How The World's Most Valuable FinTech Firm Got To First Engagement 36% Faster

The Objective

The B2B Database Marketing team typically gathers lead data from multiple sources. It evaluates and scores these leads using a combination of internal rules as well as Machine Learning algorithms. It also collaborates with partners and information providers to ensure that it can build a robust pipeline for the sales organization.

In 2021, as part of a sales transformation initiative, it identified the use of data analytics and AI as a major thrust area to attract new customers and improve sales conversion. Understanding potential customers’ buying behavior and personality was recognized as a key element that would provide a competitive advantage to its sales and marketing teams.

The Challenge

The company zoomed into ‘Account Intelligence’ and 'personalization' as 2 primary domains, leveraging which it could accomplish its objectives. After further analysis, the team identified that personalization at scale was going to be a key lever to set its sales force up for success. Achieving such a feat would make a noticeable difference throughout the sales process: from pipeline generation, prospect engagement, relationship-building, right up until deal closure.

However, until that point, personalization at scale was a misnomer. There were tools that helped salespeople personalize their one-on-one interactions. However, for the company, and particularly its B2B Database Marketing team, a one-on-one personalization tool was theoretically helpful but practically of little use because it was unscalable. It therefore turned to Humantic AI and its easy-to-use APIs to bring next-generation buyer insights and personalization at scale to its sales teams.

The Solution

For personalization that could work at scale, the company zeroed down on the use of People Intelligence and therefore Humantic AI. Humantic AI’s Buyer Intelligence suite includes People Research Agent, its People Intelligence, as well as a robust buyer insights capability that can tip the scales for multi-million dollar deals.

People Intelligence allows salespeople to understand their buyers at a deep, human level before they even meet them. It can help revenue teams understand, at scale, what motivates their buyers, what drives them to make decisions, and exactly what landmines must be avoided at all costs when dealing with them.

Early in 2021, the company launched a trial programme with Brazil as the primary market. The B2B Database Marketing team divided the sales force into 2 teams: one that would communicate with prospects using personality insights (the treatment group) and another that would carry on as before, without incorporating personality insights (the control group).

Additionally, a simple workflow was created to verify the effectiveness of the treatment group's approach: their prospects' personality data would be forwarded through an open comment field in the lead object. Salespeople assigned to the lead would then use these insights across email, virtual meetings, and in-person conversations to adapt their sales messaging to fit their prospect's personality at every step of the sales process.

Thanks to actionable personality insights, the company's salesforce was now able to interact with buyers in a significantly more effective way, from cold calls to email drip campaigns, from discovery calls to negotiations, from relationship building to deal closures.

Impact And Future Plans

Since then, the company has started rolling out Humantic AI across its global teams. It has also enhanced how sales teams use Humantic AI: from using it only for message personalization, it now uses Humantic AI even to decide which of its products should be pitched to every new prospect. For instance, a risk-averse prospect might be pitched its fraud prevention product whereas a social and customer-oriented prospect might be pitched its checkout experience product. Personalization at this level had been unimaginable earlier.

• At the end of the 3 month pilot, a clear difference was visible in the results for the ‘treatment’ group. Time to first engagement, a crucial KPI for the team, had accelerated by a whopping 36% in the short timeframe compared to the ‘control’ group.
• A sizeable difference in this KPI within just one quarter was sufficient validation for the company to roll out Humantic AI enabled personalization globally. It zeroed down on the use of Humantic AI APIs to ensure that during the full rollout, personalization could be enabled programmatically at scale and not just 1-1 manually, as was done during the pilot.
• Humantic AI’s API functionality thus paved the way for the team to realize personalization at scale, going against the then-prevalent myth that authentic personalization can only happen one-on-one.

In the future, the firm also plans to start using ‘personality compatibility score’ for assignment of leads to salespeople to establish optimal seller-buyer match.