Leveraging Aviso's Engagement Grade for Strategic Sales Success
Jan 9, 2025
In today's digital-first world, understanding the nuances of customer engagement has become as crucial as the pitch itself. It’s not merely about the volume of engagements—how many calls were made or how many emails were sent. Instead, it’s about the impact of those engagements: Which ones moved the needle, and why?
Aviso’s AI technology, powered by advanced AI and ML models, is designed to unravel these mysteries, providing a clear, quantifiable measure of your team's connection with potential buyers. Central to this is Aviso’s Engagement Grade, a metric that evaluates the quality of interactions between sales teams and their prospects or customers, turning everyday communications into strategic assets.
This feature empowers organizations to transform raw interaction data into actionable insights, fostering better customer relationships and ultimately driving sales success.
What is Engagement Grade?
So, what exactly is an Engagement Grade? Think of it as a report card for your sales team's interactions with buyers. It's all about measuring how well your team connects with potential and existing customers through emails, meetings, and other activities to assign a grade at Contact, Opportunity, and Account levels.
The grade you get, which ranges from A+ (highest engagement) to D- (lowest engagement), gives you an idea of how successful your interactions are and how likely they are to lead to successful deals. In simpler terms, the Engagement Grade is your cue card for spotting the strongest and weakest points in your communication efforts.
How is Aviso’s Engagement Grade Calculated?
But how does this fascinating grade actually come about? The process combines an array of significant factors. Think about the kinds of emails exchanged, the frequent meetings held, and even the seniority of the buyers involved. These elements are sifted through an AI model, crafting a score that paints a full picture of interaction quality and potential deal success. It even considers how recent interactions are since freshness matters a lot in engagement.
Key Factors Affecting the Engagement Grade
The Engagement Grade is based on real interactions between the selling and buying teams. These interactions are evaluated using a scoring system that considers several key factors such as:
Email Exchange: Emails received from buyers have a higher impact on the grade than those sent by your team. This weighting reflects the importance of active buyer engagement and interest, which are crucial indicators of a potential sale.
Buyer Meetings: Frequent meetings with buyers contribute significantly to the score. These interactions are heavily weighted in our model because they provide opportunities for in-depth discussion and relationship building.
Seniority of Buyers: If your team connects with senior decision-makers, this interaction gets more brownie points.
Recency of Interactions: The more recent your activities, the better, as engagement scores decrease over time.
Number of Buyers: Engage with multiple stakeholders within a buyer's organization, and your grades are bound to strengthen.
AI Model and Scoring System
The various signals from key factors are fed into Aviso’s proprietary AI model, which determines the activity's impact on the deal outcome, quality of engagement at contact, and Account levels. Additionally, the interaction weights are determined by assigning a score for each interaction based on its type, direction, and the number of participants. This will be fed to the AI model as signals representing the volume of interactions.
Time-Based Decay
Scores decrease over time, with a 4-week half-life. For instance, a received email worth 6 points initially will reduce to 3 Scores following the decay concept, meaning their value gradually decreases as time passes. This ensures that recent interactions are given more importance than older ones.
Converting Scores to Grades
The sum of interaction scores for a deal or account is ranked into percentile brackets, which are then converted to grades. As depicted in the graph below, it visually represents how Engagement Scores are calculated by considering two key factors: Cycle Time and Chances of Winning.
The Engagement Score helps categorize deals into different grades based on how efficiently they progress through the sales cycle and their likelihood of closing successfully.
Cycle Time measures how long it takes for a deal to progress. Deals that take less time to move forward generally indicate a higher level of engagement, while longer cycle times suggest a need for more attention and may lower the score.
Chances of Winning reflect how likely it is that a deal will be successful. Higher chances of winning contribute positively to the engagement score.
The combination of these two factors places the deal in one of the following four quadrants:
Grade A deals (Bottom-right) have both short cycle times and high chances of winning, earning the highest engagement scores.
Grade B deals (Top-right) have high chances of winning but longer cycle times, indicating that while they are promising, they need more time and effort.
Grade C deals (Bottom-left) progress quickly but have lower chances of success, meaning they need more engagement to increase their chances.
Grade D deals (Top-left) are both slow-moving and less likely to succeed, and therefore receive the lowest engagement scores.
By analyzing deals in these categories, teams can prioritize efforts and adjust strategies to improve the engagement levels of less promising deals or speed up successful ones.
Why is the Engagement Grade Important?
The engagement grade is not just a score; it's a guidepost for your sales strategy, offering insights into how your interactions allocate resources effectively. Here's why it matters:
Prioritize Deals: Engagement Grades help identify deals and accounts that are more likely to succeed. High grades indicate strong buyer interest, making them ideal candidates for focused effort.
Monitor Deal Health: Grades provide an early indication of whether a deal requires more attention. Lower grades signal areas where your team can take corrective actions to improve engagement.
Support Strategic Decisions at an Account Level: By analyzing engagement trends, you can optimize your team’s activities and tailor communication strategies to strengthen buyer relationships.
Enhanced Buyer Engagement Strategy: Engagement Grades serve as a nudge towards refining your engagement strategies, encouraging a deeper evaluation of how you interact with buyers and align your actions with their needs. As part of this process, your team can leverage Champion tracking to identify influential buyer contacts, schedule strategic meetings, and tailor your outreach enabling a more focused effort on strengthening these critical relationships. This concerted approach builds trust, fosters collaboration, and increases the likelihood of deal success.
Integrating Engagement Grades into Daily Sales Practices
Incorporating Engagement Grades into daily sales activities can transform how teams manage their pipelines and interact with clients. Here are some actionable tips on how sales teams can utilize these insights effectively:
Daily Check-Ins: Begin each day with a quick review of Engagement Grades across active deals. This helps prioritize which clients need immediate attention and which ones are progressing well.
Targeted Communication Plans: Use grades to tailor communication strategies. For high-grade interactions, maintain or increase engagement levels. For lower grades, develop a plan to boost involvement through more personalized and frequent communications.
Training and Coaching: Analyze patterns in Engagement Grades to identify areas where sales teams may need additional training or coaching. For instance, if a team consistently scores low in engaging senior decision-makers, targeted training in this area might be beneficial.
Feedback Loops: Integrate feedback mechanisms where sales teams can discuss what works and what doesn’t based on the Engagement Grades they receive. This encourages continuous improvement and adaptation of strategies.
Incorporate into Sales Meetings: Regularly discuss Engagement Grades in sales meetings to ensure all team members are aligned and understand the importance of each interaction with buyers.
Mastering the Art of Engagement: Concluding Thoughts
Understanding and utilizing Aviso's Engagement Grade can significantly boost your sales performance by honing in on the quality of interactions with your buyers. Whether it's through strategic email exchanges, regular buyer meetings, or focusing on senior decision-makers, the degree of engagement is pivotal. By prioritizing these factors, you can expect to enhance engagement scores and ultimately increase the chances of successful deals.
Regularly monitoring your Engagement Grades will not only allow you to prioritize deals with higher success potential but also signal areas requiring more focus. Tailoring your engagement strategies based on these insights will enhance performance and build stronger buyer relationships.
Are you ready to elevate your sales strategies with actionable insights and a clear focus on what truly drives deal success? Discover the full potential of Aviso's Engagement Grade and see how our AI-driven platform can make a difference in your sales performance. Book a demo with Aviso today!