Winning insights: One standout demand gen programme for Atos

Account Based Analytics

Article | August 3, 2022

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.

Buyer Intent Data

Article | June 20, 2023

Empathy is an emotion that many marketers invoke when they are developing their positioning and messaging for various campaigns. They consider questions such as: “If I put myself in the buyers’ shoes, what do I think they think or feel about this particular pain point?” “Do I understand the challenges they are facing?” “How can I help them overcome this issue and provide long-term value?” Over the last few years, many B2B marketers have leveraged account-based marketing (ABM) to address these questions with specific use cases and examples tailored to their target accounts, in order to boost engagement and drive high-value conversions.

Account Based Data

Article | August 19, 2022

Getting the attention of the target audience at the right time is the aim of every B2B marketing strategy. Most consumers research products and services before making a purchasing decision. B2B companies are no different. This means potential accounts are always on the lookout for a solution to a problem they are facing in their business. These are prospects that will convert into approachable leads and eventually customers if you offer them just what they are looking for, just when they are looking for it. To find these lucrative prospects, marketers like you need to harness B2B buyer intent data. B2B intent data gives you deep insights into your marketing ICP’s behaviour, pain points, and requirements. With this important data, you can give your sales team promising leads they can follow up on. In an interview with Media 7, Marc Laplante, CEO and Co-founder of Intentsify emphasized the importance of intent data. “In B2B marketing and sales, intent data is typically understood as a tool to identify or prioritize which accounts we should target for advertising, lead generation, and sales follow-up. These are undoubtedly powerful use cases. But they represent only part of the intent data’s value. You should also use intent data to convert those accounts down the funnel into customers and revenue. Intent data, if granular enough, will highlight your target accounts’ problems, interests, research into competitors, geographic location, and buying stage.” Let us take a look at what buyer intent data can do to bring you the sales numbers you want and how it can enhance your B2B account-based marketing strategy. Buyer Intent Data Brings You Ready-to-buy Customers Every user has a unique online behaviour, which can be distinguished using behavioral signals that uncovers the topic, product, or service the person needs. This information gives insight into the perceived intent of your marketing ICP. As a marketer, this information will help you plan effective advertising campaigns. The sales team can use this data to design the right pitch tracks, demos, and collateral to convert members from your targeted buying group. Additionally, this data can also help your customer success teams identify existing accounts that showcase a churn risk or an upsell opportunity. It’s a win-win for three teams at once. B2B intent data uses website data, off-site activity, CRMs, social media data, and content consumption data from online content like infographics, blogs, product comparisons and reviews, discussion boards, case studies, and news to pinpoint buyer insights. Intent Data Improves the B2B Buyer Journey The B2B buyer journey is a combination of accounts navigating through early stage (awareness content to identify the problem), middle stage (exploring solutions), late stage (comparing vendors that offer solutions) and finally the last stage (purchase/upsell/churn). Between exploring solutions and comparing vendors, lie hidden opportunities that haven’t reached you. Intent data can bridge this gap for you. Intent data providers give you data that is tailored to keywords that are relevant to your business and use case. This data targets buying locations at the website level and aggregates signals across a corporate family. Deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) are used to screen the content to achieve relevancy and to map billions of unique online engagement events every week. Analytics pinpoint the accounts that are showing any kind of buying activity and correspond to your targeted keywords. All this actionable data can shorten your buyer’s journey towards conversion. Identifying early-stage prospects At this stage, intent data signals surge around the keywords or topics that relate to the general challenges and pain points of your prospects because they are looking at the cause of their problem. They will try to find a elementary solution and get to know more about the products and services different brands are offering. Identifying middle-stage prospects The intent data signals at this stage will show a higher level of activity around topics or keywords related to a precise product or service category because the prospects have already identified the root of their problem and the options they have to address it. Identifying prospects ready to purchase At this stage, the signals are mostly focused on topics related to your brand, your specific product names and features, and your competitors’ product names. These prospects are ready to spend and should be approached at the earliest to achieve conversion. Sources of Buyer Intent Data Intent data providers offer two types of intent data: 1. Internal Intent Data (First-party Data) This data is collected in-house through a marketing automation platform or through application logs if you have a web-based app. You can control what you collect and how you collect it and act on the data instantly. You can customize the purchase intent to your liking. 2. External Intent Data External intent data is third-party intent data and is collected outside of your business. It is sourced via IP lookups, cookies or specific websites. However, third-party cookies will be phased out soon. So, B2B marketers need to rely on first-party cookies, data points, contextual advertising, and tracking technologies to get information on their prospects. Read more about cookie-less ABM here. B2B Buyer Intent Behavioral Indicators Actions that prospects carry out on your website or the internet are compared with the behavioral data of prospects that become SQLs (sales qualified leads). Here are some behavioral indicators that show purchase intent: High intensity engagement with your brand’s social media posts Exploring your product or pricing pages Exploring product or service customer review page Reading articles about your product’s features on your blog The frequency of prospects’ website visits and the actions they take Content consumption, like downloading e-books, templates, or any other resources What Does Buyer Intent Data Do for You? While implementing account-based marketing techniques, you should prioritize intent data above everything else. Capitalize on the potential of intent data by incorporating it into your sales and marketing workflows. Adjust your interactions to match your prospects’ demands and establish meaningful connections with them. Primarily, intent data helps prioritize a list of target accounts that need to be pursued. Once the sales and marketing teams are aware of a user's location in the sales cycle, they may focus on moving them along in the purchasing process with customized content. Let us look into what intent data can do for your business in detail: Efficient Prospecting According to a survey by HubSpot, 75% of businesses ranked being able to close more deals as their top sales priority. With intent data, a prospect that is in the market to buy is easier to find because of predictive analytics. You already have your ICP in marketing in place and when prospects match this list and are in the market to buy, buying intent data efficiently puts your brand in front of these leads. Apart from this, buyer intent also helps segment your target list based on the intensity of the purchase intent. Targeting accounts with high intent through email marketing, content marketing, advertising and direct mail becomes easier. Enhances Outbound Sales The higher the quality of leads, the easier it becomes for your sales team to convert them. Buyer intent data lets your sales team know the exact position of a lead in the buying cycle. Instead of wasting time emailing unqualified leads, your team can approach these prospects which match your ICP in marketing and start a meaningful conversation. Intent data also increases the ROI of your B2B content syndication efforts. Superior Lead Scoring Your marketing team can predict prospects’ purchase intent based on what they are researching. They can do lead scoring with precision and supplement your sales team’s efforts. They don’t have to rely on traditional lead scoring methods where they add points to a lead’s score when certain actions are performed. Intent data uncovers possible paths that your leads can take even when they are not on your website. Personalized and Targeted ABM campaigns Personalization is key for any B2B account-based marketing campaign to bring the results you expect. The most effective method to enhance your ABM strategy is to map out your buyer journey and sprinkle it with relevant content to influence leads. You can also use intent data to strategically personalize and rank your ABM demand generation campaigns, so that every touch point of your ABM campaign meets your prospects' expectations. Relevant Content Creating content that can catch the attention of your prospects while offering solutions and value is crucial to get the conversions you expect. Intent data will help you see the correlation between topics and the context of those topics with the solutions your prospects are looking for. If you are aware of the questions that your prospects have before they go to market, you can answer them through your content. Buying intent data offers you just that. Let intent data drive your content strategy to give your prospects just what they want. Intent Marketing Intent-based marketing is when you know just where to spend your time and budget. In intent marketing, the focus lies on analyzing the intent of your prospects and strategizing how to meet them. Spending less time trying to target and rank keywords with low or irrelevant intent can help you increase your ROI, make an ironclad content strategy and a streamlined lead generation process that results in conversion and revenue. Assessing Buyer Intent Understanding and calculating buyer intent is not an easy task. It depends on these three factors: Recency Buyer intent that reports how recently a prospect engaged with your content is valuable so that your sales team can approach leads who have visited your website. Frequency Frequency indicates the intensity of your prospects’ intent to buy a product or service to solve their problems. If they visit key pages that have information on pricing, case studies, customer stories, etc., your sales team can reach out to them immediately. Engagement When your sales and marketing teams score leads, one of the most important parameters on their scale is engagement. If a prospect is engaging with the content on your website, through a chatbot, or as a result of an email campaign, you know it’s a great time to reach out to them. Apart from these factors, buyer intent data tools also use variables like firmographics, technographics, account size, and job titles for accurate buyer intent mapping so that you can reach out to your marketing ICP with a personalized message in your intent-based marketing strategy. Metadata Sees 42% Dip in CPL with G2 Buyer Intent Metadata, a demand generation platform that runs paid campaign experiments and self-optimizes them to generate revenue, invested in G2 buyer intent. Their cost per lead (CPL) dipped 42%, their click-to-open rate for ads increased 114%, and their average deal size for ads spiked by 18%. Final Thoughts Buyer intent data changes the way you interact with your prospects and leads. Harness buyer intent data tools to have an edge over your competitors and get more conversions. FAQ What are the essential elements of an intent data strategy? Align your intent data strategy with your ABM strategy, get buy-in from the C-suite, begin with a small pilot, analyze performance metrics, and integrate your systems with intent data. How are B2B marketers leveraging B2B buyer intent data to boost revenue? B2B marketers use intent data to create effective content, identify buyer groups, improve lead qualification, boost team productivity, and increase customer retention to boost revenue. How does intent data enhance your lead scoring process? Predictive purchasing insights help you find prospects in the market so you can make a list of accounts that are close to making a purchase decision. This makes your lead scoring process easier and better.

Article | April 20, 2020

Account-based marketing (ABM) has been around for long enough now that most companies have either rolled out strategies or are actively exploring their options. Looking at the ABM adoption model produced by the ITSMA, an industry association for technology-based marketing and services, many companies are in the experimentation stage and looking to further refine their initial pilot programs. As you begin to experiment and expand your ABM programs, there are many complexities that you can introduce like content personalization, website personalization, scaling accounts and channels, and additional technology and automation, to name a few.