Sales multithreading, or proactively building strong customer relationships with multiple stakeholders within a target account, improves your close rate.

After all, the approach lets you: 

• Build trust with not just one person but a handful of people on a buying committee (which have grown to include an average of 12 decision-makers)
• Keep the lead moving in your sales funnel even if your original point of contact leaves — because you’re already nurturing multiple folks at the company

But is there any data confirming the impact of sales multithreading on efficient pipeline generation?

Curious, we looked inward — asking our data scientists to do some digging. The results from analyzing over 5,000 opportunities across multiple B2B SaaS companies will surprise you. 

Find out what we learned below.

How does multithreading optimize your win rate?

Multithreading deals improves your win rate by five times, which is 480% higher than deals where you rely on only one person to convince their team to buy from you.

But that’s not all. Multithreading qualified leads also grows your deal size by 57%.

What does the data say when you add a previous champion to multithreading deals then?  

Previous champions, or “Gems” as we like to call them, are folks who have:

• Previously used your product
• Bought your product
• Or, just evaluated it

That is: Gems are folks who have already been through different stages of their buyer’s journey with you. So they know, trust, and have probably used/demoed your product, which means they’re high-quality leads that are likely to speak in your favor.

These alumni champions offer warm paths to closing potential buyers fast — growing your conversation rates and revenue. In fact, data from part 1 of our Hidden Gems series confirms that old Gems involved in new deals lead to:

• 114% higher win rates 
• 54% bigger deal sizes
• And, 12% shorter sales cycles

So the question now is: how much do these Gems impact your multithreaded deals’ win rates?

Our data shows multi-threaded deals that also involve previous champions have an additional 63% higher win rate.

As for the size of multithreaded deals involving Gems? It goes up too, by an additional 66%.

This means when you:

• Find previous champions or Gems as warm entries to ideal customer accounts
• And use them to multi-thread or connect with the rest of the buying group

You can increase your win rate by 8x and close 2.5x bigger deals compared to when you don’t use either of these tactics.

Want to 8x your win rate? Use this playbook

Admittedly, multithreading well is tricky. That’s probably why 70% of opportunities only have a single point of contact.

In fact, when folks come to UserGems in search of a buyer job change tool for pipeline generation, they’re focused on using their previous customers to increase deal conversion rates. But we always advise them to let their Gems help them multithread their way to new accounts too.

For this, we recommend following these five B2B lead gen steps to maximize revenue metrics:

 Step 1: Identify previous customers to target

Begin by highlighting who you want to target as previous champions as part of your lead qualification process. These could include:

• Past customers who have moved on to a new account
• Leads who were close to converting but have moved to a new company
• Closed-lost leads who have moved to a new company    

Step 2: Track job changes

Next, use UserGems to find champions working at new companies that align with your ideal customer profile. 

Essentially, UserGems tracks champions, alerting you when alumni customers change jobs and take on new roles at target accounts.

Of course, you can also manually track job changes, but when Monica Bacican, the Sr. Sales Operations Manager at LeanData tried to, the experience wasn’t good. It was, “Complicated! Overly technical! So many steps that required different reports and different tools.”

With UserGems, however, the LeanData team achieved a 32% increase in pipeline generation efforts. Plus, they were able to automate their B2B pipeline generation strategy, saving the team lots of time. In Monica’s words:

Step 3: Action your data

Now, ask your sales reps to proactively reconnect with alumni customers at target accounts to generate leads.

By the end of your calls with these Gems, ask them to introduce you to other stakeholders involved in the buying process.

Krysten Conner, Sales Strategist at UserGems recommends telling the Gem how their peers buy, then asking them if that’s true for their organization too.

Here’s a template you can use:

 And don’t rely on your NPS score to do the heavy lifting for you. Just because it’s good doesn’t mean Gems will come back to buy your product again on their own. You’re still going to have to initiate contact. 

In part 2 of the Hidden Gems series, our data confirmed that even for the best B2B companies, 91% of Gems don’t become repeat customers without any outreach on your part — even after 90+ days of starting their new jobs.

The takeaway: Make relationship-building with your power users, alumni, and potential customers an integral part of your sales process. And when previous champions join a new company, prioritize proactive follow-ups with them to drive more revenue.

Step 4: Multithread, multithread, multithread

After your Gems connect you with another stakeholder in their company, go ahead and connect with more folks on the buying committee. 

Create a solid lead nurturing process by building relationships with them, providing value, and educating them about the value of your product. 

In certain cases, you can start with a no-commitment email or social media updates on LinkedIn to get on the stakeholder’s radar — for example, when multithreading executives. This template is a great example of how to do that:

From there, update the executive(s) after meetings you have with their team — eventually adding a call-to-action (CTA) that invites them to join one.  

Your marketing team can also run multithreaded ads to this end. In fact, using this playbook at UserGems helped us increase our win rates by 31% and shortened the sales cycle by 17%.

Step 5: Track your results

Finally, review your results.

By including UserGems in their sales pipeline generation workflow, LeanData’s revenue team generated $100,000 in new sales in just over a week.

Similarly, by closing deals using Gems, Mimecast generated $18M in new pipeline for sales.

Keeping a pulse on these numbers yourself will let you make a persuasive case for using previous champions and multithreading for efficient pipeline generation. It’ll also help you better show your impact internally.