Secret Sauce to Growth in B2B Communications – Intent Data
Communications businesses are leading the charge in the B2C consumer space. Understanding consumer needs and the buyer journey is no new news to leaders in this space…
But from the B2B side of the business, resonating amongst SMB and enterprise clients can be a bit more difficult – the challenge is reaching the right decision maker when they are ready to buy.
Invest in intent data…
A huge opportunity for B2B Communications is to better understand and mine “intent data” in order to anticipate customer needs and direct marketing and sales resources towards those needs. Intent data holds the “signals” that build the prospect’s story, what their interests are, where they are spending their time and existing usage.
Key sources of intent data can unveil a wealth of information to help you better target customers for acquisition, retention and cross-sell/upsell:
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3rd Party Sources
Data providers like Bombora and IDG are providing a wealth of customer information to append to your existing data. Various tech vendors, Marketo, Oracle, Lattice, IBM, and more, contribute content consumption and behavioral data from their own audiences. This aggregation of information outside of just your internal data can be monumental – additional insight such as other webpages a prospect touched, other links/content they clicked on, or prior interest in other services.
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Internal Behavior or Marketing Data
Your Marketo, Eloqua, or other marketing automation system holds information on prospect behavior. Putting your knowledge of what marketing messages your prospects have engaged with in the past or where they have been on your website (using Google Analytics) – can be a CLEAR tell-tale sign of what to pitch.
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Product Usage Data
How are you customers using the your existing products? Look at megabytes per month, cost per month, average usage per company size and more. This information can help your sales and marketing team trigger key events – such as when to offer bigger packages to avid service users and when to send out educational material on features/functionality/services to low users.
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CRM/Transaction Data
This data will allow you to understand the current status of your customer relationship – critical to pitching the next offer. Look at the product mix –What products do your customers use? How long have they been customers? How have they grown? Using this data, you can configure predictive analytics that determine who is most likely to adopt new services moving forward.When it comes to your CRM, look at specific industries, market regions and more to analyze MRR, contract renewals and # of customers retained on an in-depth level. Comparing and contrasting will help you identify which segments prioritize and whom to create more personalized sales and marketing outreach and in addition, what would be the next suitable offer.
Often, these intent data sources are stored in disparate systems, and fragmented by Inquiry-to-Order and Order-to-Cash. If you can connect the intent data gathered from products, systems, and services you can better equip sales and marketing to make the next move.
Does your business have a clear 360-degree view of your customers with insights that you can act upon? We would love to hear your thoughts below.
