Whether you want to get more positive responses, book more meetings, or build meaningful relationships with your buyers, personalization is the ultimate weapon—one that allows high-growth companies to drive 40% of their revenue.
Personalization can help you stand out in prospective customers’ crowded inboxes by making your pitch laser-focused and highly tailored to capture their attention.
But here’s the kicker: despite knowing the clear advantages of personalization, sales reps still struggle to leverage it and ramp up their performance.
It’s high time you ask—what gives?
5 challenges of personalization in sales (and a fail-proof solution)
In theory, personalization is seen as the magic formula to succeed in sales. It captures prospects’ attention, delivers value early on, and brings a revenue lift.
But getting started with personalization is hard. It’s riddled with challenges.
Let’s break down five inevitable challenges that hamper adoption of sales personalization.
Collecting accurate and relevant data
Personalizing your sales outreach starts with collecting meaningful data about your prospects. This data can cover multiple bases, like your prospects’ purchasing power, pain points, buying intent, behavioral preferences, and expectations. Without this data, you’re shooting in the dark with generic pitches that don’t leave a mark.
Collecting this data is as time-consuming as it’s demanding. 74% of customers in a Gartner survey (both B2C and B2B) disables all tracking avenues for brands to collect any data on them, making your personalization efforts even more difficult.
Djamila Ouriachi, a Senior Business Developer at Datakeen, stresses the complexity of collecting relevant data.
We prospect 500 contacts a week; about 30% are C-level. You can imagine how time-consuming it can be to source personal details for 150 contacts, especially when this information isn’t always available.
Effectively segmenting your leads
Your success with personalization hinges closely on audience segmentation—the more nuanced segmentation you can achieve, the better.
But segmenting your prospects isn’t always a question of black and white. You have to dig deeper and collect more data points to segment your prospects into multiple groups. This is where it gets tricky.
Even if you have all the data you need, strategically finding common traits between your leads and creating personalized content for each segment can be taxing.
Attributing success to personalization
Another major challenge holding sales leaders back from realizing the value of personalization is the inability to track its success. There are no clear metrics to estimate the performance lift you achieved through your personalization efforts.
Tracking the conversion rate to your personalized emails won’t be an accurate benchmark since it’s a short-term KPI.
Besides, a majority of ROI from personalization is subjective. For example, personalization produces value by nurturing customer trust, winning upsell opportunities and building loyalty—all of which can’t be measured objectively.
The only reliable way to measure the real impact of personalization is by running a control experiment, which most sales teams don’t have the bandwidth for, unless there’s a specific enablement / rev ops team in the organization.
Using personalization at scale
Scaling your personalization efforts is no cakewalk. When you’re approaching a list of bulk prospects—where every potential client is just an entry in a database, you need standardized workflows, tailored resources, and a high degree of automation to strike home with effective personalization.
That’s exactly where teams drop the ball. Matthew Ramirez, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Rephrasely, explains where he struggles with using personalization in sales.
The downside to personalization is that it takes time to create content for every customer and prospect. And if you’re a small or medium business, you may not have the resources to do it well.
Implementing personalization at scale demands a sophisticated system for data management, customer profiling, predictive intelligence, and contextual segmentation. Most companies fail to:
- Create a unified database of all customer information
- Build the technological infrastructure to scale their strategy
- Establish cross-functional teams to offer a personalized brand experience
It doesn’t end there. One of the many requisites of scaling your personalization strategy is to expand your tracking efforts to understand what’s working and what’s not.
Building the right tech stack
Personalization gets significantly easier with the right tools to do the heavy lifting on your behalf. Successful business leaders focus on building a robust tech stack that empowers sales teams to deliver more relevant experiences to their prospects.
Zach Wright, Director of Sales Ops and Founder at iMEO, highlights his tech stack for personalizing their outreach.
We leverage DemandBase for intent data around ABM. We are also using tools like ZoomInfo, Seamless.ai, and LinkedIn SalesNav to deeper dives and better understand the lay of the prospect’s land.
But creating a solid toolkit to reach your personalization goals can be a big ask—especially if you don’t have the resources to invest in the right technology.
With Humantic.AI, personalization is only a click away
Humantic.AI’s one-click personalization is just what you need to tackle these personalization challenges (and more) with a single click. With this feature, you can modify your email in a way that tailors to their needs, preferences, and expectations—all under 10 seconds.
The tool saves you the trouble of sourcing accurate data and segmenting it correctly. Plus, its hassle-free functionality allows you to scale your efforts anytime without thinking twice.
Want to give one-click personalization a try? Write to us at connect@humantic.ai to get beta access.
