By using Account Rooms instead of email, the company believes that sales teams can provide their customers an easy way to discuss content, products and mutual plans. The new product is the latest addition to YesPath’s Account Engagement Platform, which already includes capabilities for account-based analytics and AI-powered content personalization.
“B2B purchases are actually significant projects, involving many people and a heavy time commitment. It simply doesn’t work to ‘herd cats’ through email, and as a result, deals are always slipping behind schedule or getting lost entirely. We built YesPath to augment CRM so everyone — buyers and sellers — can work together easily to make decisions with fewer meetings and fewer emails,” said Jason Garoutte, CEO and Co-founder, YesPath.
YesPath explains that it created Account Rooms to help sales teams adapt to changing buyer preferences. Empowered by search engines and social networks, B2B buyers now prefer to stay in control, doing their own research and postponing contact with sales reps. As a result, today’s reps have fewer opportunities to collaborate with prospects and struggle to connect, in spite of their efforts.
A survey sponsored by SAP found that 46 percent of B2B buyers are frustrated with salespeople who lack knowledge about the customer, yet the same buyers reported frustration with “aggressive” sales reps (48 percent) who contact them too frequently. The company believes that this catch-22 can only be solved by engaging buyers online and on their terms, extending a convenient venue for discussing customer needs.
YesPath also saw that B2B selling had a need for improved opportunity management. In industries with complex or custom products, a purchase decision might include over 10 people and span 6 months or more. These can be slow, labor-intensive deals, which sales reps attempt to manage primarily through email.
Key features of Account Rooms
- Timeline: organizes the history of the project and charts future plans along a chronological timeline so both buyers and sellers knows if they’re on schedule.
- Content management: imports sales and marketing content into a gallery so sales reps can share content with accounts at the right time.
- Smart recommendations: intelligently recommends content and special offers based on behavior in the Account Room and data in the CRM. YesPath algorithms pick offers to maximize account engagement.
- Engagement analytics: tracks buyer engagement in Account Rooms, including information about who consumed what content. Dashboards combine this with web traffic and email clicks to present one single view of engagement for each account. Sales leaders use this picture to uncover risk in deals before it’s too late.
- CRM integration: pushes engagement data back into CRM apps so that sales teams can see the latest activity without switching apps.
The YesPath launch comes at a time when the industry is showing unprecedented interest in Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Account-Based Selling (ABS). Sales leaders have recognized the limits of inbound marketing and demand generation programs which do not always reach the right people.
YesPath claims that Account Rooms will enable an ABS strategy for both new and existing accounts. Companies can use Account Rooms to coordinate sales efforts, product evaluations and purchase decisions — always with a focus on keeping deals moving.
Pricing and Availability
The Account Rooms product is available now. Pricing starts at $80 per user per month, which includes an unlimited number of rooms and unlimited users on the buy side.
