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Strategic Relationship Management: Welcome to the New Era
Anand Shah
Since Databook was founded, we have been singularly focused on delivering technology that helps sellers connect their solutions to the needs, priorities, and financial pain of B2B buyers.
Our announcement of the industry’s first Strategic Relationship Management (SRM) platform is the culmination of our work to date, and we’re immensely proud to be pioneers in such a critical space for enterprise B2B sales. Now more than ever, it is critical for organizations to deeply understand their customers and bring value to every conversation. Customers including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Databricks who are using SRM are achieving on average 1.9x larger deal sizes and upwards of 50x return on their investments.
Understanding Strategic Relationship Management (SRM)
SRM is a go-to-market process for deepening and expanding sellers’ connections with customers by aligning around a clear understanding of customer need. This alignment is absolutely vital today, as B2B buyers have fundamentally changed in recent years—and salespeople’s inability to keep up with those changes is costing them valuable opportunities for bigger, better deals.
This gap between buyer needs and seller performance has largely evolved from an imbalance in the sales tech stack. Increasing pressure to hit huge numbers has made sales tech so hyper-focused on tactical execution that strategy has all but disappeared. And I’m not talking about the generic concept of strategy, but rather an actionable, customized plan for how to successfully engage and sell to every individual account. Without a strategy, rooted in customer data from real financial statements and reports, sellers have no way to connect the dots between what they’re selling and what a buyer truly needs at that moment. Seller outreach becomes irrelevant noise. And buyers simply stop listening.
The Impact of Buyer Needs on Sales
Need proof? Our recent survey of almost 800 sellers found that almost a quarter of them haven’t used a customer’s 10-K, 10-Q, P&L statement, earnings transcripts, or even financial news to inform any part of their sales motion in the last six months. Not surprisingly, 33% of all buyers now desire a seller-free sales experience.1
As an SRM platform, Databook solves this challenge with powerful AI that captures dynamic buyer data signals and, through a unique business value graph, continuously translates those signals into what you’ve been missing: a clear picture of customer needs that’s always up to date and mapped to your sales motion.
How SRM Transforms Sales Strategy
Using that consistently refreshed picture, our Strategy Builder application then surfaces a set of relevant go-to-market strategies called Opportunity Roadmaps, and infuses them into your GTM ecosystem—so everything from account research and planning, to opportunity management and forecasting, transforms from a static process into a living system. You—the human seller—now put your skills to use, deciding how to proceed. And Databook gives you a way to act on every decision, so you’re more efficient and more effective.
Balance is restored.
Embracing the SRM Movement
Clearly, we’re excited about the impact SRM will have on B2B enterprise GTM efforts. To Databook, SRM isn’t just a category—it’s a movement. It represents the end of an inadequate and ineffective approach, and the beginning of a new era. With SRM, your buyers’ strategic priorities set the narrative for every sales relationship. In other words, we let their strategy do the talking. You can be the strategic sales hero who listens, connects, and delivers value. And as our customers are already learning, relationships built on this kind of mutual understanding not only lead to higher-value deals—they also elevate productivity and improve pipeline to ensure consistent growth and success.
Join the SRM Movement
To kick off this new era, we’re running a series of events to dive deeper into what SRM means to the industry, how it will positively impact both buyers and sellers, and where customers are already seeing success with our SRM platform today. Check the links below to listen in and join the movement.
| DAY | EVENT | SUMMARY | SPEAKERS |
| Day 1 | Announcing Strategic Relationship Management | Welcome to the new era. Join us as we explain how understanding the strategic story for any customer is imperative for closing bigger, better enterprise deals. | Anand Shah, DatabookMatt Dixon, Author of The Challenger Sale |
| Day 2 | The Rise of the Strategic Buyer | Hear a reality check on how buyers have changed, and how your sales strategy needs to adapt or be left behind. | Kassidy Bird, DatabookJill Rowley, Stage 2 CapitalKirsten Knipp, Global SaaS Startup & Scale-up LeaderScott Barghaan, Salesforce |
| Day 3 | The Strategic Sales Gap | Learn how sales and revenue leaders can lead the charge and transform the way their teams approach selling to provide real value to customers, and close bigger, better deals. | Dave Graswick, DatabookCraig Rosenberg, Scale Venture PartnersTony Gilbert, Databricks |
| Day 4 | Tell a More Valuable Story | Hear how sellers from three industry-leading companies unlocked the ability to tell more valuable stories by connecting to prospects’ real, urgent pains. | Mike Placido, DatabookJimmy Oyeniyi, DatabricksMichael Ristic, AnaplanCarson Heady, Microsoft |
| Day 5 | How to Know What They Know Before They Know It | Learn how to form strategic relationships that plot a direct path between the customer’s strategic needs and the value your solution promises. | Kassidy Bird, DatabookKyle Osterman, DatabookSean Geary, Databook |
