Account Research Tools - Expectations vs Reality
Let’s understand the gap between expectations and reality in account research tools. Uncover how these tools do research and promise detailed insights but often require rigorous verification.
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Last week one of the Sales Leaders told me,
“I much prefer your (Evabot) workflow as I don’t care how the sausage is made, I just want the output. The account research through other tools looks very complicated and too busy compared to the simplified output of your tool.”
Seems very normal?
Consider the following conversations (many sales leaders, including my friends, are struggling after signing up with so-called "Account Research Tools" or "Account Research Add-ons"):
– "I thought I could scale account research as a process for my team, but now I have to spend time building custom workflows for each prospect."
– "I have hired an additional 'Account Research Consultant' to help me implement the tool-chain for accurate and relevant account insights."
– "I have instructed my team to spend at least 2 hours on the research generated by the recently purchased account research add-on to a 'Sales Intelligence Tool.’’
– "My response rates have dropped with account research tools. I was better off hiring a pre-sales team to do manual research. Do account research tools really work?"
– "It's funny that an account research tool is giving me responses in a format with commas, double quotes '‘’', and brackets [] {} (). I had to get my team trained on parsing the coded data to extract insights as usable statements."
The Gap
Everyone is talking about these account research needs, but we are continuously hearing these complaints. So, where is the gap?
Expectation: They are looking for an "AI Agent as Research Lead."
Reality: They are receiving an "AI Agent as Research Intern."
Feeling more confused?
That's how noise is prevailing in the AI Sales Tools market.
What is happening?
My suggestion
To prevent yourself from failing, create a job description for an "AI Tool," and then dedicate time to demos and use-case testing. Otherwise, you might end up with an "Intern"...
To understand what is happening, Let’s give these tools a casual name for simplifying scenarios…
AI Agent as Research Lead - Senior AR Tool
AI Agent as Research Intern - Junior AR Tool
Insight Gathering
– Junior AR Tool: compile news, job changes, announcements, reports, and provide information on what is being done today and tomorrow
– Senior AR Tool : research and analyze relevant insights for data and facts across SEC filings, 10K Reports, News Announcements, Interviews, Podcasts, and many more closed door information sources
Contextual Insights
– Junior AR Tool: curate transactional message content like job-change, funding announcement, new expansion plan etc, that is relevant for both today and tomorrow..
– Senior AR Tool: deep dive into the contextual relationship between the prospect's current situation and the company's value proposition. Also provides confidence scores and optimal timing recommendations for reaching out.
Research Scalability
– Junior AR Tool: Each account requires a unique workflow and manual interception, making the approach non-scalable and demanding rigorous fact and context verification.
– Senior AR Tool: Trained and Re-trained on insight quality along with standard workflows set by Sales Experts. Scalability becomes the differentiating factor.
Human Efforts
– Junior AR Tool: requires a supervisor to implement and manage
– Senior AR Tool: plug n play
Evabot ⇒ AI Agent as Research Lead
Implementing “Account Research” as a process in existing sales workflows
– Step 1: Setup company context (value proposition, features)
– Step 2: Target accounts list
– Step 3: Daily ordered-list of targeted accounts on confidence scores, timings and triggers (along with priority and sources)
– Step 4: Deep relevant insights on all these accounts based on live data from all the sources (SEC filings, 10K Reports, News Announcements, Interviews, Podcasts, and many more closed door repositories)
– Step 5: Expert frameworks (PSA, OPPS etc) to craft a response-generating message with high priority insight
We have reduced the ramp-time and continuous effort with a typical account research process from a few hours everyday to a few minutes…
Now, I can excitedly say… “Expectation = Reality”
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