Moving goods from a manufacturer to their place of sale is actually very efficient, until the last leg of their journey. Planes, trains, and ships carry extreme volumes over vast distances, making the price per good low. However, when those goods reach a distribution center and need to be brought to their final destination, the cost increases exponentially.
Mass movement across a single route is simple. But the transportation of only a few items to a number of different destinations is complex and expensive. Commonly referred to as the “Last Mile Problem,” the final leg of any good’s journey can account for as much as 28% of it’s transportation cost.
The Last Mile Problem in Sales
In the age of digital sales, this problem is not exclusive to transportation. Your demand generation, marketing, events, and sales development teams work tirelessly to deliver more and more qualified, interested, ready-to-buy leads directly to sellers. But, they aren’t making it to their final destination.
Filtered out through inefficient Sales Development Rep (SDR) teams, dropped by sales, and lost amongst a sea of automated emails, scripted calls, and prescribed outreach processes, your hottest leads are languishing. This costs companies millions in lost revenue, missed opportunities, and ineffective processes. Yet it is a structure that has been completely accepted amongst even the highest performing revenue teams. The result is a staggering 79% of marketing leads not converting to sales.
The Last Mile Problem for Sales
/Last Mile Prob⋅lem/
Noun
1. The wasted investment and lost opportunity due to the failure of most leads to convert to sales appointments.
Last Mile Problem causes issues at every level of a revenue team:
To solve the problem, teams have used two approaches.
First, adopting engagement tools that automate to-do lists for a variety of communication channels in an attempt to generate more deals by simply increasing the volume of activities.
Ironically, This only further complicates an SDR’s job, as these tools automate large amounts of outreach, only to deliver the first interaction. This still doesn’t address the manual process of scheduling the meeting, which can take days or weeks depending on the buyer.
Second, they increase sales headcount. This incurs massive hiring costs that aren’t returned for at least a year, and just adds more junior level or ramping sellers. All the while, you struggle to match your teams’ ramp and capacity to your revenue goals.
Regardless of which method is used, your best leads just spend more time dealing with inexperienced sellers, when they should be with a knowledgeable account executive who can provide them with value starting with a scheduled, first interaction.
They fail to address the massive hole in their process. It is the equivalent of constantly pouring water into a bucket with a hole, it must change.
The Last Mile Must be Solved
So what is the solution to the last mile? The best way to fix it, is to eliminate it all together. Referencing the prior analogy, if your bucket had a hole, you wouldn’t just keep adding more water, you would get rid of the hole.
Even though revenue teams and sales cycles can be complex, the solution remains simple. To solve the last mile for sales teams, you need to deliver your most qualified, interested leads directly to your best sellers. This means your hottest leads essentially skip the line. They bypass automated outreach cadences, content offers, and cold calls and end up exactly where you (and they) want them to be… in a meeting.
When the last mile is eliminated:
Kronologic Solves for the Last Mile with Calendar 1st™
Kronologic addresses this directly and completely removes the last mile struggle all together. With Kronologic, you can automatically send your most qualified, ready-to-buy leads a calendar invite as the initial and primary touchpoint. This Calendar First™ approach has shown to result in a 2-5X increase in your lead to discovery/demo meeting conversion rates without decreasing your win rates.
Calendar 1st™
/Calendar 1st™ / Calendar First™/
Noun
1. The automated sending of calendar meeting invites at scale, using AI-based time negotiation, to book revenue focused meetings with no human intervention.
Kronologic is triggered by high-intent actions from leads that match your ideal customer profile. When they connect, it automatically reaches out with a calendar invite for a time when your reps are available to talk. If time negotiation is needed, the AI steps in and coordinates the new time using natural language processing or through a proposed time within the invite itself.
Automating this interaction engages people in real-time, every time, at their actual highest level of intent. Compare this to today’s inefficiencies where it is a person's responsibility to take an action once they are notified in their queue of tasks. Kronologic fills your sales team’s calendar with the best possible leads using no human intervention and benefits both sales and marketing downstream, as well as customer success upstream.
Demand Generation and Marketing
Marketing teams now have a direct and, most importantly, immediate line to revenue. The impact is an immediate increase in ROI on demand generation efforts. Leads go from engaging with a campaign, directly to a meeting with your sales team without any emails or calling. This not only provides instant results on any campaign, but more accurate insight into what works for future planning.
Sales Development
Calendar 1st™ frees SDRs to focus on human-centric activities, like identifying and relating to the buyers’ business challenges, relationship building, and higher-quality sales processes. SDRs become experts in building value during discovery calls, rather than becoming expert lead-chasing interrupters. In a recent Kronologic poll, 68% of SDRs report that they wish they could spend more time developing the pipeline, now they are free too.
Sales / AE’s
Sales receives more qualified pipeline with zero additional resources and no additional software to learn or use. Qualified meetings just appear on their calendar; all they have to do is show up. Sales reps stop wasting time chasing leads, coordinating schedules, and logging activity tasks, so they can solely focus on closing business, increasing revenue, and achieving goals.
Customer Success
Customer Success and Support teams don’t have that natural sales role in their character, but they do care about helping their customers win. Kronologic can help them by identifying account expansion opportunities and trigger meeting invites automatically for up/cross selling, platform upgrades, and even QBRs. Never again will a customer success rep have to flex a sales muscle to tee up and coordinate a sales discussion.
Account Managers
Account Managers are also aligned to enable customers to succeed, though their objective is ultimately account expansion. However, creating this win-win scenario takes time, coordination, and planning. Kronologic’s automation and AI never miss a revenue generating opportunity that a human might; not to mention, it does all the scheduling and time negotiating we already mentioned. Growing enterprise accounts has never been so predictable and reliable.
In Conclusion
Your buyers are tired of being chased down one-by-one; they just want a seamless and efficient experience. It’s time to solve your The Last Mile Problem by allowing Calendar 1st™ automation to scale a one-click experience that puts both sides where they wanted to be in the first place… the meeting.
