Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
Are you thinking about ditching your revenue team’s creaky, ineffective sales approach and embracing ABM … but aren’t sure of what you need to know? You’ve found the right blog post.
Today, we’re providing some mind-blowing highlights from a recent webinar hosted by Kerry Cunningham, our Senior Principal of Product Marketing.
The webinar unpacked what matters most for launching an effective ABM program and offers actionable tips for sales and marketing teams. It’s well worth a watch. But if you’re short on time, here are some insights. Kerry started the webinar by sharing some hard truths about the state of selling:
Hard Truth #1: If They’re a Lead, You May Be Too Late
B2B sales used to be all about leads. Even now, many revenue teams lean heavily into the lead-based mindset. But the emergence of Account-Based Marketing brought many revelations to revenue teams, including that account opportunities are far more important than individual leads.
When you turn your (obsessive) attention from solo buyers and instead examine the full spectrum of interest or intent that an entire organization is expressing in your solution, you’re able to dramatically increase the quantity and quality of your sales intelligence.
Without this analysis, your team won’t be aware that buyers are conducting so much research on their own that by the time your team determines that they’re an early-stage “lead,” they may in fact be much farther down the buyer’s journey than expected.
Your team plays catchup after that, putting them at a competitive advantage.
Hard Truth #2: B2B Buyers Aren’t Even ‘Buyers’ Anymore
These days, buyers are no longer individuals, but rather teams of people. On average, buying teams often include 10 people, Kerry explained.
“Not everybody involved in the buying process is going to be sitting at the table at the end of that last meeting when they sign the deal,” Kerry said, “but all of those folks are doing some research.”
How big are these teams? From the webinar’s transcript:
Kerry: “For bigger deals, there may be as many as 20 or more people involved. And again, all of those folks are having interactions. In fact, Forrester Research did a study recently that showed that on average, post-pandemic, buyers are having 27 interactions each. So when you have 10 people or 20 people, and they’re having 20-something interactions each, that adds up.”
But there’s an upside to all this activity, Kerry said. As buyers conduct research, they leave behind digital “breadcrumb trails” or “footprints in the snow” across the internet.
Sellers armed with leading account engagement technologies can track, aggregate and de-anonymize these intent signals. ABM tools help them better understand the buyers’ research and buying processes.
Hard Truth #3: You Might Deal with Multiple Buying Teams
Depending on the scope of your solution’s capabilities, your sellers may contend with more than one buying team.
Here’s an example: Let’s say a company is looking for a solution to handle the needs of many departments or divisions. Each division may task its own buyer or buying team to conduct its own research to find solutions that effectively solves its own business problems.
If your solution can serve the needs of multiple divisions, your revenue team is in a good position, especially if your team can proactively identify the divisions’ unique needs. (Account engagement platforms do a great job of this.)
However, don’t assume that your solution can be everything to every division, Kerry warned.
Kerry: “If you sell multiple solutions — say you’re a big tech company and you have three, four, five solutions — you may be selling to multiple buying centers. But those buying centers may not all be great prospects for your solution. So take into account the fact that some of the buying centers inside those specific accounts may or may not be good prospects for you.”
Hard Truth #4: Buyers Think They Know Everything About Your Solution (But Actually Don’t)
Many buyers believe they can get all the information they need about your solution (and your competitors) exclusively through online research, Kerry said. This is super-convenient for buyers, but sellers can’t fully control the narrative. That leads to big problems.
Kerry: “Not all the information that they get is going to be accurate. It certainly may not be how you’d like to present yourself. So one of the things that’s really important is you have to understand how your buyers are finding out about you.”
This requires identifying other likely sources of information — such as content from competitors or unreliable analysts — and proactively engaging buyers with data and talking points that counter this misinformation.
Conclusion
Pivoting to an account-based approach isn’t always easy, especially for revenue teams that are entrenched in a older sales approaches. But making the change to ABM can revolutionize your business, Kerry said.
“Within the first year, 6sense clients who take all of these new techniques on board are able to produce substantially better results, bigger deal sizes, better win rates, and even shorter sales cycles,” Kerry said. “This is really the way B2B ought to be done.”
We’ve covered a few hard truths in this post, but come back tomorrow for Part 2 of this series. We’ll provide some helpful and actionable ABM tips then.
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Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
Do you target your high-value clients using account-based marketing? Have your sales and marketing teams gathered all the data required to set up a marketing campaign for your valuable clients? Well, if you have hit the start button, then you should be well-versed with conversational marketing strategies, too.
What Is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is a one-to-one conversation with the client or customer to provide them with an enhanced shopping experience. This conversation can include chatbots, live chats, filling up contact forms, or feedbacks.
Conversational marketing helps in generating leads, revenue, and personal connection with the customers. This approach also helps in understanding the pain points of the customer at a personal level. As a result, this personalized approach attracts the customer, enhances their buying journey, and makes them feel connected to the brand.
What Does Conversational ABM Mean?
Conversational marketing, when incorporated in ABM, is known as conversational ABM. And it is an essential step in enhancing the client’s journey through conversational ABM.
Conversational ABM is an essential aspect of account-based marketing. When targeted clients click on the ad campaigns or visit your website, they must receive a tailored treatment.
Let us explain this with a basic shopping example.
Assume that you are an owner of a luxury brand that sells cars. Your brand needs a public figure and, you have been targeting a couple of high-value clients for the same. You have been using ABM strategies to get to them. Finally, one day, one of them walks into your store. So what do you do?
Of course, you have the best salesperson attend to them. This salesperson knows everything about the client and addresses their pain points through a lucid and formal conversation. As a result, the client feels that you have made efforts to know them and address their challenges. They understand that for you; they are more than just a customer.
This personalized conversation constructed with the help of research data is known as conversational ABM.
Importance of Conversational Marketing in ABM
“Conversational marketing is about leveraging the power of real-time conversations and two-way dialogue to engage customers and seamlessly move them through your marketing and sales funnels. This could be online chats, social media channels, or live brand experiences, but the end goal is the same — engaging with customers one-on-one to stand out from the competition and humanize your brand.”- Nicole Bojic, SVP of strategy at InVision Communications:
Conversational marketing is of extreme importance. Conversational ABM helps you stand out in your client’s vision. Once the client visits your website or clicks on the link curated for him, your team needs to be super ready to provide them a personalized experience.
This approach of conversational marketing will help to:
Connect the client to the brand
Build rapport with the client
Make the client feel that you are well-versed with their pain points and challenges.
Build a personal relationship with the targeted businesses
Ensure conversion and client retention
How to Strengthen ABM Using Conversational Marketing
Conversational ABM is developed in the most personalized and formal way.
Conversational marketing in ABM is carried out through chats, calls, or in-person meetings. It is always better for a real person to have a conversation with the client in real-time instead of using chatbots. Align strategies so that your team instantly connects to the targeted client as soon as they visit your website or click on the relevant link.
They should have a personalized approach right from the beginning.
The best way to keep the clients connected is by involving them in a formal conversation while addressing their challenges and pain points. The live chat option has limitations, so your team should know when to switch from chats to audio or video calls. But, again, do this while keeping in mind the convenience and comfortability of the client.
Whatever the mode of communication is, you need to consider the following points while initiating conversation ABM.
Direct your sales team instantly to start the conversation as soon as the target account lands on your website. It may include enabling push notifications through emails, messages, or any other conversational marketing solutions.
Ensure that the welcome messages and conversations are streamlined with the research and ad campaigns. The client should feel connected, in sync, and cohesive.
Greet your target accounts with human-led chats over automated chats. This step amplifies a seamless customer experience.
Sculpt the conversation totally about the buyer’s account. They should feel that you have made great efforts to know them and address their challenges.
Your content needs to be customized to address their specific needs.
Know when to upgrade from a chat conversion to an audio/video call to take things forward.
Go beyond basic conversations and show how much the client matters to you.
Do everything to provide them with a premium and over-the-top sales experience.
And the Conversation Leads to Conversion.
Based on a survey by DemandGen Report, 95% of target accounts said they would choose the solution provider who helps them navigate through each step of the conversion process.
Conversational ABM is a critical step for a successful ABM. Thus, ensure you prepare your sales and marketing team for the best conversational approaches. This will eventually lead to successful engagement and conversion of the targeted clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing is encouraging conversations that are client-centric. These one-to-one conversations are designed to provide a personalized and premium customer experience. The conservations are aligned with the research and specifically address the pain points of the customer.
What is ABM strategy?
Account-based marketing is a marketing strategy that concentrates on creating strategies and targeting high-value clients. This client list for ABM is curated while keeping in mind that these are the most likely to convert. The strategy consists of gathering maximum data about the client and creating tailored ad campaigns or pitches for them.
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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
Account-based marketing has been around since the early 2000s, but only recently have businesses started to implement it widely in their marketing strategies. By focusing on ideal customer profiles (ICP), businesses shortlist key accounts and target them with customized content campaigns to convert them from marketing-qualified leads to buyers. An account-based marketing strategy uses sales and marketing orchestration to transform the way key accounts are approached.
ABM marketing contributed to a 70 percent increase in the number of opportunities created. (Source: Gartner)
Nash Haywood, Global Director-Digital Conversion & Paid Media, Genesys, talked about ABM’s impact on how sales and marketing teams function.
“We wanted to have more control of the entire (marketing and sales) process, and an ABM approach allowed us to do that.”
B2B account-based marketing drives valuable engagement and leads to higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies.
Benefits of Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing benefits range from increased marketing efficiency and higher ROI to higher engagement and retention. Let us take a look at them in detail:
ABM Enhances Your Marketing Efforts
ABM marketing is data-driven. Account-based management becomes easy with crucial data like role, industry, and buyer journey stage. Based on this data, appealing personalized content campaigns are created to target key accounts. These campaigns optimize your marketing efforts. They also give insights on which channels and messages appeal to your targeted key accounts so that you can refine your account-based marketing strategy. According to Emarketer, 46 percent of marketers are benefitting from real-time optimization to accelerate their pipeline revenue.
Sales and Marketing Teams Synchronize
An account-based marketing campaign aligns the goals of the sales and marketing teams. It also brings other important stakeholders, like the IT team and the executive team, together to create an effective strategy for achieving goals.
Sales and marketing orchestration can lead to a massive increase in marketing revenue (up to 208 percent as stated by MarketingProfs).
ABM Improves Marketing Efficiency
Account-based marketing automation technology helps streamline marketing processes and scale ABM implementation across different marketing campaigns. Activities like ad targeting, modelling, upselling media buying, and executing lead nurturing campaigns can be done efficiently using account-based marketing software. You can cease marketing to accounts that do not respond to your campaigns and focus on the ones that do. This can help you save your money and allocate your time and resources better.
You Retain Customers Better
ABM uses hyper-personalized content to pursue higher customer engagement and retention. By showing key accounts the content they want to see, brand awareness and trust are increased. An account-based marketing campaign, especially one created to engage target accounts, contributes to an enhanced customer experience that makes B2B marketing significantly impactful. It translates to long-term associations and bigger deal sizes.
You Close Deals Faster
You can move key accounts through the sales funnel swiftly and close deals faster by identifying decision-makers of your key accounts. B2B account-based marketing saves time and resources, which can be used to generate new leads. That is why this is one of the most important account-based marketing benefits.
ABM Improves Deal Sizes
Account-based B2B marketing targets only key accounts with buyer intent. It is about quality more than quantity, and this makes a whole lot of difference in how you approach accounts and strike deals. A shorter sales cycle through account-based marketing means landing a big account that signs away more money than many small accounts would.
You Get a Higher ROI
According to a report by ITSMA, 87 percent of marketers stated that ABM delivered a higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies. Since account-based marketing is a data-driven strategy that uses personalized content to target accounts, this approach is easier and more cost-effective as it saves time and resources because of its precision.
ABM Performance Is Measurable
Account-based reporting is a key account-based marketing benefit. Using metrics like engagement, brand awareness, target account reach, retention, ROI, and influence helps you understand how well your ABM strategy is working. You can optimize your strategy to make it perform better.
ABM Makes You the Expert
While implementing account-based B2B marketing, you gain deep insights into the conversion behaviours, preferences, challenges, and needs of your target accounts. This knowledge makes you an expert in offering solutions that your target accounts crave. It also helps with new service or product design ideas that can cater to customers in a more personal way.
Creating an ABM Strategy That Works
To create an account-based marketing program that works, follow these steps:
1. Define the key accounts you want to target.
2. Identify the decision-makers for these accounts.
3. Create hyper-personalized content for them.
4. Zero in on appropriate channels to get maximum impact.
5. Create impressive content campaigns to increase engagement.
6. Measure the success of your campaigns using the correct metrics.
Account-based Marketing Services to Scale Your ABM Strategy
To adopt ABM at scale for exponential business growth, you need to evaluate your target accounts and then expand your ABM strategy from a small scale to a full-blown ABM. Your expansion can also be across new segments or businesses based on industry or company size. Artificial intelligence and marketing automation make it easier to implement ABM at scale.
Account-based marketing services offered by companies that specialize in ABM and marketing like Marketo, Terminus, Demandbase, Optimizely, and Oracle make it easier to implement an ABM strategy at scale. These companies offer services to attract and convert prospects, scale up your marketing, and grow customer relationships through up-selling and cross-selling.
Account-based marketing automation, email marketing, lead management, account-based management, social marketing, digital advertising, mobile marketing, multi-channel marketing, account-based reporting using ABM metrics and optimization along with account-based marketing software can help you scale your ABM strategy without breaking a sweat.
How SAP Created New Pipeline Opportunities Using ABM
SAP launched an account-based marketing program to target the company's top 10% of key accounts. These accounts were responsible for a third of their revenue in America. Through their ABM program, they offered specialized marketing plans for these accounts. SAP gained new pipeline opportunities and moved $57 million down the pipeline because of the benefits of account-based marketing.
Summing It Up
The time to implement ABM in your marketing strategy is now. Adopting it into your marketing strategy can help scale your business and achieve your business goals.
FAQ
What are the benefits of account-based marketing?
Some noteworthy account-based marketing benefits are: higher ROI, sales and marketing alignment, customer retention, and a shorter sales cycle.
Which metrics measure ABM performance?
Metrics like engagement, ROI, customer churn rate, content engagement, conversion rate, and average deal size are used to measure the performance of an ABM program.
Why is ABM more efficient compared to other marketing strategies?
ABM targets accounts with buyer intent, helps with better resource allocation and is cost effective. These factors contribute to a higher ROI and bring great results.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | April 15, 2021
Intent data is an essential piece of the account-based marketing puzzle. It’s the type of data that can give B2B companies a competitive edge as they look to identify engaged, active prospects at prioritized accounts that show a clear pattern of interest in a product, service, or solution. As importantly, intent data can pinpoint signals in a buyer’s journey that lets you know what their next step might be, helping you target them with personalized, contextual messaging.
There are a couple of flavors of intent data, but in this case, third-party intent data is the focus.
Third-party intent data originates from external sources and may include many potential online interactions that have occurred away from your website and your company’s interactions. Website visits at competitor sites, webinar attendance, downloads, product reviews, social media interactions, and online subscriptions to publications in your industry or sector are fair game for third-party intent data insights. Like an intricate spider web woven from numerous data points, third-party intent data offers a view of online behavior for potential prospects as they traverse their buying journey.
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