As B2B buyers become more risk-averse and buying committees grow, sales teams are leaning on multithreading to nurture all the decision-makers involved in the sales process.

But while multi-threaded sales deals are becoming common, I wondered how we could leverage multithreading across both sales and marketing. As UserGems’ Director of Demand Generation, I asked myself: what if we started multithreading target personas as sales reps talked to prospects?

Guided by this thought, I ran some hyper-personalized LinkedIn ads to nurture different departments at target accounts aligned with our ICP.

The results? A five times higher close rate when we had over five people involved in deals. We also saw:

• 31% higher win rates

• 25% bigger deal sizes

• And a 17% shorter sales cycle on average

The key is identifying which accounts to multithread—and we'll show you how we automate that step later in this post.

What is multithreading?

Sales multithreading involves pulling different decision-makers on a target account’s buying group into your sales conversations.

For example, while talking to the sales team, you can simultaneously nurture other people in the target organization — say, a RevOps team member.

Nurturing more people from the same account lets you close deals faster. Data from part 3 of our Hidden Gems series confirms multi-threading sales deals:

• Increases win rates by 5 times

• And grows deal size by 57%

Multithreaded deals have a 480% higher win rate than single-threaded ones.

The data shows multithreading works for sales reps. But how can it help marketers?

That's marketing multithreading. The approach: use paid media to nurture different personas—CFOs, RevOps, and others involved in the purchase process.

By following this playbook at UserGems, we start multithreading key decision-makers at potential B2B organizations at the same time the sales team starts talking to them.

As a result, our marketing team passes on 300 nurtured accounts to sales each month — with contact details. Then, the sales team only has to add them to their sequences instead of having to find their contact details and nurture them from scratch.

UserGems’s 5-step paid media multithreading template

We started multithreading at UserGems with a small test on LinkedIn, where our target buyers are.

It began with running personalized ads aimed at our target personas: the RevOps team members and the C-suite, which looked like this:

These paid ads gradually started gaining traction as people referenced them on prospecting calls. They’d tell us they took screenshots of the ad to share them with their teams.

The results convinced us. We built it into our sales strategy with these five steps.

Step 1: Identify and split target accounts into two groups

Start with reviewing your sales pipeline to identify which accounts to target. Then divide them into two to conduct a split test — nurturing only one group with LinkedIn ads.

We kicked off our paid media multithreading campaign in a similar manner by dividing contacts in our CRM and assigning them a value.

Half of the accounts were then multithreaded with paid ads, and half weren’t. We aimed to test the campaign's impact on our win rate, deal size, and sales cycle length.

You could manually review your pipeline to find target accounts, but that gets time-consuming fast. We use UserGems to automate this step.

We use UserGems to automate this step and receive a qualified list of warm leads that align with our ICP. These include:

• Alumni customers who have already used or evaluated our tool in their previous role and are open to trying it again at their new job.

• New executive roles that have recently been filled at our target accounts with decision-makers looking to spend 70% of their budget in their first 100 days, which makes them more open to demoing our tool.

Step 2: Create a LinkedIn campaign

After you identify accounts to target, divide them by personas — such as RevOps, sales, and marketing — and create a dynamic audience on LinkedIn.

We also automate this step since we rely on UserGem’s account tracking. So every time an opportunity opens up, UserGems alerts us of it while providing the lead’s contact details.

We’ve built a report for each of the target personas at these accounts. So marketing only needs to use it to push LinkedIn ads to different stakeholders involved in an account’s buying journey.

Step 3: Include previous champions in multithreaded deals

Where possible, we also include past customers in our multithreading campaigns since involving them grows deal sizes by an additional 66% and win rates by 63%.

This makes sense as 51% of B2B buyers today use their past experience with a tool to make their buying decisions. Because UserGems can track buyer job changes, we use it to automate this step. It alerts our team every time a champion switches to a new job, sending along details such as their:

• Contact information

• Previous role

• And the new organization they’ve joined

The relevant account salesperson then uses one of our playbooks to reach out to champions and use their one-on-one relationship to open the deal.

At the same time, the marketing team runs ads targeting key stakeholders in the champion’s new organization’s buying committee. In doing so, we make it easy for alumni customers to convince their team to invest in our champion tracking software.

Step 4: Run paid ads

Make sure the ads you run are hyper-specific to the recipient persona. Your ad's messaging wins attention (and possibly action) only when it resonates with your target persona.

We run three types of ads based on the persona we’re targeting:

• Pain point-specific ads. These target marketing and sales personas and highlight a specific struggle, such as ‘hitting pipeline goals faster.’

• Action-specific ads. These target folks from RevOps and include a specific ask (CTA) such as ‘join the next call your sales team is having with us’

• Testimonial-specific ads. These ads target CFOs and other personas that might block deals. The aim is to share social proof to win them.

Step 5: Track results

The final step is to review the results the multi-threaded sales approach has driven.

Evaluate the overall results instead of looking at specific metrics such as demo requests.

This is important because paid ads alone rarely drive demo requests — even conversion views tend to be low at times. So at first glance, the results may look disappointing. These LinkedIn ads support your other sales efforts, nudging buyers toward a yes.

This is why you must start off this campaign with a split test so you can compare the test groups’ results. Only then will you be able to see the statistical significance of such a campaign.

For instance, in our case, the group of accounts that were shown personalized LinkedIn ads closed at a five times higher rate than single-threaded deals that weren’t. Our win rates were also 31% higher, and deal sizes grew by 25%.

Close more deals with marketing multithreading

As the buying process changes, running paid media campaigns on channels your target buyer uses is an effective way to nurture multiple stakeholders involved in the decision-making process.

Multithread those stakeholders and you'll see what we saw: 31% higher win rates, 25% bigger deals, and a 17% shorter sales cycle.

You can also further amplify your results by:

• Multithreading past customers into open accounts

• Using previous champions as your point of contact for deals

Start by identifying alumni customers — UserGems can help by tracking customer job changes on autopilot. Then, run social media ads to pull in various decision-makers in their new organizations’ buying committee.

Want to see how this works in your pipeline? Request a demo.