Why Multithreaded Engagements Are the Secret to Accelerating Revenue Growth

What are sales leaders to do when 43% of B2B buyers prefer rep-free experiences? These buyers also speak volumes with their actions — they spend only 24% of their buying time meeting with all potential suppliers and continually refer to digital channels even while in contact with a sales rep. To add to the challenge, buying groups now have an average of 11 or more individuals — a number that can flex up to 20 for complex deals — involved in buying decisions. 

Today’s sales leaders cannot meet these challenges with outdated strategies. New problems require new solutions. Fortunately, sales leaders are armed with a suite of digital assets, interconnected processes and communal data. These tools, especially in the hands of increasingly digitally dexterous sellers, allow you and your team to deploy multithreaded engagements.

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What are multithreaded engagements?

Multithreaded engagements are a buyer-centric commercial strategy that aims to engage buyers how, when and where they choose. This strategy, sustained by digital interactions and technology, orchestrates the engagement of distributed buyers through intelligent coordination. Harmonizing messaging and anticipating the needs of individuals on self-directed journeys means each stakeholder receives contextualized support.

This helps suppliers validate and advance opportunities while minimizing the impact of iterative steps. Although multithreading has previously been elusive, it’s now made possible by advances in analytics, technology and seller competencies.

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Consider the existing challenge of many individuals in a buying group. There isn’t a singular buying journey. Instead, each individual takes a self-directed path to meet their unique needs.

Multithreaded engagements allow you to intelligently coordinate and support multiple individuals within a given buying group. Eventually, AI-powered technology, fed by communal data from all commercial systems and functions, will automate and facilitate this coordination.

Three Components of Multithreaded Engagements

Admittedly, for many organizations, this feels a bit futuristic and abstract. To make it more accessible, focus on these critical strategic elements:

1. Dynamic relevance with buying stakeholders based on the task they are trying to accomplish
2. Concurrent connections with multiple stakeholders on the customer organization’s buying team
3. Stage-gate support to memorialize buying group decisions and progress to backstop regressive steps 

When done well, multithreaded engagements have the potential to become a significant growth accelerator and a competitive differentiator. Gartner research suggests that by 2026, B2B organizations that unify commercial strategies and leverage multithreaded commercial engagements will realize revenue growth that outperforms their competition by a whopping 50%.

The time to start is now. Multithreaded engagements are possible, and they are an effective answer to today’s most pressing B2B sales challenges.

This story was originally published on the Gartner Blog Network.