In the current B2B market, no product is “perfect” to be able to sell itself. Today, clients expect top-of-the-line service from businesses and excellent service – right from the time of discovery to the final purchase. Firms are heavily reliant on data for the success of B2B sales and marketing. And they know that data alone is not enough to reach prospects.
Sales and marketing professionals have, thus, come to realize the potential of B2B intent data and are using it effectively to tap undiscovered buyers and drive a higher volume of Marketing Qualified Leads.
Depending on how it is created, where it is sourced, and how it is utilized, intent data offers varying benefits. Companies are embracing it for various reasons, and solution vendors strongly promote it. However, many businesses have not yet identified the significant distinctions that might be crucial to maximizing Return on Investment.
According to Gartner, more than 70% of B2B marketers will use third-party intent data to target prospects or engage groups of buyers in specific accounts by the end of 2022.
Here is a blog that will help businesses accelerate their journey with intent data – no matter at which stage the buyers are. But first, let’s glance at intent data and how intent data can drive the B2B marketing process.
What is Intent Data and How Can It Drive the Success of B2B Marketing?
B2B suppliers can’t solely depend on product quality, innovation, and effective pricing. Their marketing strategies should also revolve around the buyer’s journey.
And if they are casting a wide net and relying on catch-all marketing efforts, they are squandering their time and money. Considering B2B leads are not easy to convert, testing strategies without a data-driven approach is too expensive.
Instead, they must strive to offer customer-centric experiences that meet the audience’s expectations. This is where intent data marketing steps in.
According to the research, 80% of B2B marketers utilize intent data to provide dynamic and customized experiences to prospective clients. Around 39% of these marketers feel it led to substantial benefits. Intent data prevents marketers from generating content that is not in sync with the prospects’ intent.
It enables them to offer the exact marketing content prospects need to move down the sales funnel. This is possible when B2B marketers are provided with customer information gathered from first-party and third-party data sources. To cite an example, browser cookies are used to keep a tap on the pages visited by the prospect.
Yet another approach is to analyze the search query keywords to determine their underlying intent. Over a period of time, enough data will be available to make sense of the target audience’s pain areas, interests, and ambitions. Essentially, intent data will give clarity on how close they are to making a purchase.
Now let us learn in detail the role of Intent Data for sales and marketing.
Intent data for Sales Development
While sales development has gained popularity, in the case of many enterprise software organizations, it is still a rather immature subject. Sales development organizations are frequently assembled hastily with the hope that they will mature as they progress. But the reality in many firms is that the build process leaves a lot of crucial gaps, which can easily become chronic points of failure. In a recent assessment of sales development groups, most corporations claimed that their teams still fail to meet their goals. While there are many reasons for this, the quality of data resourcing is a critical failure point.
While intent data has not yet become predominant for sales development teams, it is growing in usage. As per the research, even though the correct intent source has been shown to generate large increases in discussions, meetings, and prospects, fewer than 25% of all tech sales development teams were utilizing intent data systematically. When sales development teams are taught and able to access an appropriate source of buy intent data, they can conduct more effective outreach and perform pipeline-advancing meetings.
Intent data for Sales
For a long time, strategic account executives have been dependent on two resources to continue prospecting in their territories, namely qualified lead follow-up and cold prospecting. Both strategies lead sellers into nothing. When they approach the right person, they do so at the wrong time. In a bid to capture the full potential, they allocate either too little or too much time to a few accounts. This is because they are not able to set the priorities right.
Clearly, improved prioritizing provides significant potential for sales managers and salespeople alike. Even with constant quota attainment performance and suboptimal tools, revenue from these regions is less than expected. To boost quota attainment further (on the path to optimizing greater capture of all harvestable demand), sales managers must also have a more effective method for identifying the true possibilities arising in their teams’ territory. Then, to enhance capture rates, they must be able to motivate their account executives to capitalize on this foresight.
Quality intent data can substantially modify this equation. Combining the insights, it offers appropriate coaching. Sales managers can, thus, dynamically match their representatives’ coverage behavior to both the active prospects in a specific area and the entire potential across territories. This is operationalizable, mainly because quality intent data can give sales representatives greater “peripheral vision” — accurate, actionable information into actual demand activity independent of initial account rankings. By comprehending the content of intent data, sales managers can collaborate with account executives more effectively on an agile coverage model that captures more demand as it takes shape.
Intent data for Account-based Marketing (ABM)
The success of any Account-based Marketing (ABM) approach depends on sales’ success, as any target account will be deemed successful when it increases revenue from targeted accounts. ABM starts with the sales and marketing teams creating a list of specific accounts that call for attention. These accounts “deserve” greater attention since they share characteristics that advocate each one having the potential to generate more revenue. Sales’ job in ABM is to capture additional opportunities in those accounts and to generate more opportunities within them. In harmony with this, in ABM, the marketing team is responsible for enhancing the visibility sales have into what buyers’ journey are taking shape in the target accounts and honing the strategies to help sales teams generate more opportunities.
Thus, one of marketing’s crucial responsibilities in ABM is to engage target accounts so as to set the ball rolling for sales teams to create effective opportunities. The challenge for marketing teams is to identify and implement techniques that produce greater, deeper account engagement over time so that the sales team can generate more opportunities. To establish cohesive engagement with a buying group, an ABM team must offer unique value to the account that separates its contribution from the status quo and competition.
Properly sourced intent data helps marketers with both ABM challenges: Identifying existing opportunities within a target account for sales to pursue immediately and identifying the needs and interests of latent buying groups within a target account to create opportunities where no active buyer’s journey has yet coalesced.
Intent data for Marketing
For teams using a hybrid ABM model or dependent on standard demand generation strategies to generate a bulk of contributions made by the marketing teams, selecting the right intent data source can offer great performance improvements. Most B2B demand generation firms concentrated entirely on lead volumes until recently. But in the past five years the process has evolved significantly and external data – especially high-quality second-party intent data – can improve opportunity identification and conversion by demand generation teams in aggregate and at the connection between marketing and sales development in particular.
For marketing teams that use lead generation strategies and demand generation strategies, quality intent data can do more than just boost efficiency in brand advertising efforts. Instead of merely processing Marketing Qualified Leads as distinct individuals and depending solely on the qualification/disqualification of a single person to determine the future handling of a given situation, advanced teams are assessing the actions of several people inside the same account and pursuing meetings more strategically.
Conclusion
Using B2B intent data to boost marketing strategy is not simple. Businesses need to establish strategies for timely and effective outreach in addition to creating systems that analyze different data sources and assure data quality.
As an innovative intent data provider with ample experience, Binary Demand offers intent insights that help businesses make better decisions, engage with the best-fit prospects and drive better results.