Oracle blitzes sales and marketing pros with new cloud options

Account Based Analytics

Article | August 3, 2022

The only constant thing about account-based marketing (ABM) is its evolution. ABM goes beyond plain sales and marketing. It is a strategic and dynamic approach to marketing. It influences B2B buyers who are savvy, digitally native, and educated buying committee members who are otherwise difficult to target, let alone convert. ABM has evolved from pure one-to-one ABM to one-to-few and one-to-many. We know how ABM is now ABX, which harnesses intent data and programmatic advertising for better results. Consider a company that wants to implement account-based marketing on its key accounts. If every aspect of this organization revolves around the needs, demands, and requirements of its key accounts, it becomes an account-centric enterprise. In the first part of this article, we will discuss how an account-based approach on an organizational level can enhance your ABM strategy and help you create relationships that deliver mutual value and growth. Building an Account-Centric Organization Transforming an entire organization into an account-centric one is overall an eight-step process. Let us look at the first four: Two-fold Approach: Check Your Foundation Examine your foundation before implementing an account-based strategy. Ensure that your tech stack is optimum and that the right employees handle the right responsibilities. Secure the internal buy-in needed to get your ABM program up and running. Adaption: Make Your Changes Eventually Make changes to your current strategy only when required and over time. It is unnecessary to completely revamp your organization to align it with your ABM efforts. Ideally, make changes based on your performance. Always focus on the target account so all your teams— demand generation, events, sales, and marketing teams— will have the mindset to target your ICP. The correct approach is to enhance your processes as you go. Awareness: Train and Educate Your Teams Your entire team should live and breathe ABM. Align your sales and marketing teams. Other teams should match their processes to best suit the target accounts’ needs. Train and educate your teams, so they can easily adapt to new ABM processes and don’t feel blind-sided. Analysis: Data Matters a Great Deal Understand your data. Constantly review, acknowledge, and adjust your processes based on the data at hand. Then, support it with the knowledge of your salespeople. Get their input and advice on which accounts to engage with for optimal results. Then, bring them into the decision-making process for outstanding results. It’s a Process Building an account-centric organization requires time and commitment. In the next part of this article, we will discuss important aspects that impact and govern the success of your ABM strategy. Stay tuned to read the next part of the article.

Account Based Data

Article | August 19, 2022

The Pareto Principle is introduced by an Italian economist - Vilfredo Pareto. According to this principle, for several results, 80% of the outcomes arise from 20% of the cause. Other variations of the Pareto principle states: 80% of the sales come from 20% of customers or 80% of marketing engagement comes from 20% of accounts. Many researchers believe that ABM is a descendent of the 80/20 rule. By following this rule, businesses can spend the bulk on creating personalized marketing campaigns for the 20% of customers who spent the most on the product or services of their company. How the Pareto Rule Brings Sales Growth? In ABM, the Pareto principle can be used as a guide to overcoming the business growth obstacle and acquiring extremely productive business solutions. So here are a few strategies that will assist in bringing the resources and attention to the top 20% of customers. 1. Identify Best Customers Companies might have hundreds or thousands of customers or prospect lists either from email, social media, or by the website. To ensure making a wise choice, it is a must to have a glance at the historical data of every account, then compare it with the ideal customer profile and determine which makes it to the list of the best customers. After finding the top customers for the business, assure to mark them as a top priority. 2. Locating Their Area An important factor is to check the Point-of-Sale platform and find the area from where the highest number of best customers belongs to. It will lead to determining the most suitable sales or marketing strategies that can boost the growth of the organization. 3. Rank The Need Of Customers After creating the list of best accounts or customers, try to dig a bit deeper and discover the want, need, or problems each customer has. If in case, the insight is not up to the mark, a company will have to form a team that can gather some information, by: Tracking customer’s social media Having a conversation with the customer Purchasing Insights from vendors. After finalizing the need list make sure to mark each with their importance and address them accordingly. 4. Offer Personalization Across Different Platform Marketing according to the way that connects with each customer deeply without engulfing the resource and budget can be achieved by making the process as automated as possible through hiring developers. Some of how businesses can personalize their channels are: Using images that shows the customer’s interested area Addressing each customer by their name Sharing related case studies with the customers Including a personalized note Remember to keep a track of the progress you made through these steps and modify your list and strategies based on them. Take Away! If used properly, the Pareto rule in account-based marketing helps a business in keeping the focus on what matters the most. It stops enterprises from multi-tasking all the time. With the help of the 80/20 rule, businesses can properly allocate time and resources to the areas that produce the best results. That being said, relocating the budget while cultivating time for referrals from the customers who generate long-term advantages is the core to sustainable growth.

Buyer Intent Data

Article | October 7, 2022

Intent data is a modern sales intelligence tool that helps you capture a prospect’s buying signals. By using an effective intent data strategy, you can be the first to reach out to a prospect and aim for a conversion. In an interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata.io, talked about the importance of data in converting leads. “With access to valuable data, marketers are focused on leads that are more likely to become buyers. They can also work on targeting their messaging towards these potential buyers.” According to SalesIntel, 97% of B2B marketers agree that intent data will give brands a competitive edge. Intent data collects signals that come from consumption of content like: Blogs and infographics Product comparisons Product reviews Message boards Case studies News However, it can be challenging to incorporate intent data into marketing and sales initiatives. Regardless of whether you're working with first-party, second-party, or third-party intent data, it can have multiple applications across a range of systems and workflows and may overwhelm your team. An excellent B2B intent data approach can ease the process and use of intent data. Motivate your team to harness the power of intent data to drive business growth. 5 Essential Elements of an Intent Data Strategy 52% of B2B tech companies implement an intent data strategy in their account-based marketing program. (Source: SalesIntel) This statistic shows that more and more B2B marketers are seeking the help of intent data to make their account targeting more effective. Let us look at what essential steps you should take while integrating B2B intent data into your account-based marketing program. Alignment: Your Intent Data Strategy Should Line up with Your ABM Strategy To get the results you expect, synchronize it with your ABM marketing strategy. You can use intent data in different ways to optimize your account-based marketing. Here are two of the many ways it can help you with target account prioritization: Bind the intent data to your ICP criteria. Which ones show buyer intent out of the accounts that match your ICP? This information can help your marketing team push these accounts further into the funnel. Your sales reps will have meaningful communication with these target accounts. Overall, the chances of conversion will go up because you know the intent of your ICP-based target accounts. There may be net new accounts showing buyer intent but they fall outside your pre-defined ICP. Segment these accounts and increase your sales pipeline. If your company doesn't have a lot of data, this use case can help you change or define your ICP criteria and help your sales pipeline. Buy-In: Bring Your Teams Together For all the teams to come together and work towards the same business goals and objectives, you need to get buy-in from the C-suite of your company. Only your leadership can drive your sales and teams to break silos and work with the mindset of establishing processes and using tactics that can create harmony between them. Ensure that the teams understand what you want to achieve with intent data for ABM. Share it with them and align on a follow-up strategy, metrics, and key accounts. Set up training programs so that your teams understand the newness and precision that intent data will bring to account-based marketing. Testing: Begin with a Small Pilot Apply your strategy to a small set of accounts. Involve limited sales team members within your company, probably a team you are closely associated with, to oversee the use of intent data in B2B marketing through your ABM program. This can help you understand where the strategy needs to be tweaked and what approach you need to use while using intent data. Pilot testing is an effective way of streamlining and recording your processes. It can be the foundation for implementing all your intent data initiatives for other sales teams over time. Get everyone on board to analyze the results of your pilot test and then decide on the best way to integrate intent data into your account-based marketing program. Analysis: Examine the Performance Metrics To gauge the impact of intent data on your account-based marketing program, you must collect conversion rates before the pilot test. This way, you can compare the before and after rates and examine how intent data helps ABM. Marketing and sales teams can look at what works and eliminate what doesn’t. This learning curve is crucial before you use intent data companywide. Integration: Collate Your Systems with Intent Data You can amplify the impact of your data strategy by integrating it with your systems like CRM, marketing automation software, and ABM platform. Through intent-based marketing, you can increase the performance and visibility of your brand throughout the sales funnel. Integration can also spearhead landing deals and expand your account-based strategy across different domains. Implementing an intent data strategy step-by-step can lead to success and benefit all teams across all departments, increase customer satisfaction, and enable you to scale your business. Kazoo Saw a 2-3x Increase in Reply Rates after Using Bombora’s Company Surge Kazoo, an employee experience platform, integrated data from Bombora’s Company Surge buyer intent data tool with its 6sense account engagement platform data. It saw a 2-3x increase in reply rates. Conclusion When combined with additional data, B2B intent data can help you develop a scoring model that considers fit and engagement, making it more effective. If you use intent data in B2B marketing correctly, it can be a great way to improve your ABM strategy. FAQ How can an intent data strategy enhance ABM? It can help in ABM marketing by indicating early buyer interest, facilitating content personalization, and helping with creating targeted account lists and lead scoring. How can sales and marketing teams benefit from intent data? Sales and marketing teams can use intent data for ABM to create effective go-to-market strategies, accurate target account segmentation, and personalized outreach. What does intent data do to improve lead scoring? Intent data provides predictive purchase insights. With the help of this information, you can approach the accounts close to making purchase decisions.

Article | April 13, 2020

Intent is an indicator that an account is interested in a certain topic, based on the content consumption of people within an organization. I know that sounds a bit abstract, so let’s look at how it actually works. Let’s say that Gio is looking at some content on marketing attribution. Gio is a Marketing Operations Specialist at Whale Enterprises, and he’s considering buying some new software. Gio’s research is creating intent data that can be tracked by intent providers, who can then let marketing attribution providers know that Whale Enterprises is showing intent to buy a marketing attribution solution.