• August 19, 2016
• Sales and Marketing Alignment

Tech Marketer Talks: [24]7.ai Harnesses Priority Engine Intent Data to Grow its Database and Deepen Engagement

Kevin Payne, former Vice President, Global Field Marketing and Michelle Wong, former Marketing Programs Manager are part of [24]7.ai’s Global Field Marketing team. The Global Field Marketing team is responsible for all demand generation activities which encompasses growing the company’s database, nurturing programs, and working with partners for integrated marketing. The marketing team supports sales across North America, U.K. and Asia Pacific and the company’s global expansion.

Company Overview

[24]7.ai provides a customer engagement and customer service SaaS solution to Fortune 5000 leaders in key verticals. The company’s intent-driven customer engagement platform assists several hundred million visitors across all channels for more personalized customer experiences resulting in improved customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and potential revenue streams.

Challenges

What were your key challenges before using Priority Engine?

To grow our database and nurture in ways we can engage and interact more effectively in the sales and buying process and also increase contacts for each of our named accounts.

Why did you invest in Priority Engine?

We were already familiar with TechTarget from working together in past companies. When we learned they had a data and marketing analytics tool that provides direct access to their audience and purchase intent intelligence in our technology space, it was very intriguing. Priority Engine showed the potential to solve for one of our biggest challenges: growing our database. We also have a named account list and a number of contacts we wanted to grow there so we saw two major benefits it could help solve.

1. Grow our database and contacts for each of our named accounts and provide additional data and intelligence on what people are searching on and interested in.
2. Craft marketing engagement and nurture programs to specifically target what prospects were looking at based on the stages of the buying process they’re in.

Additionally, within Salesforce, this tool shows us competitive vendors who are influencing prospects in key related topics. Sales can have access to far more intelligence than it ever has before.

Solution

How has Priority Engine helped your marketing?

Priority Engine enables us to do much better messaging and more enhanced nurturing because we know what the baseline is. It is exactly this type of intelligence that allows us to create content according to the buying stage and really target a specific account based on what topics they’re looking at. We can now tailor our assets, our content offers, as well as any all kinds of e-mail campaigns. Since the data is updated every week, it’s as real time as we get in terms of knowing what content is resonating. We can also reference content on our website based on what people are interested in looking at.

From a marketing perspective, knowing what topics are resonating helps dramatically influence what content we create for our own Demand Generation and nurturing programs. We can then tailor according to industry, to account, or different types of competitive material.

How does Priority Engine fit in with the rest of your MarTech stack?

It’s unique and unlike anything we’ve had before. It provides us with a source of new leads to nurture because those leads also come with active intent intelligence. The intelligence we get goes directly into Salesforce so sales has access we never had before to additional insights as to what’s going on at accounts . It complements everything and creates a more holistic story for our ADRs (Account Development Reps) to drill down into what’s of interest to particular prospects and what their pain points are.

How does it fit in with your existing workflows?

Priority Engine leverages what we have in place already. It was relatively easy for us to export the information out of the system and import it into our Marketo system. We just needed to architect how we wanted to use this level of intelligence and what the most effective programs would be to deepen engagements. While we could have just put them into our regular weekly nurturing stream, with this level of granularity we can now put them into a number of different nurturing streams based on perceived product interests and buying cycles they’re in. This helps us optimize our overall marketing more effectively.

On the sales side we trained and educated our ADR and sales teams on ways they can leverage all this great relevant data into more meaningful sales conversations with their accounts.

Results

What results are you seeing since using Priority Engine?

• We’re able to pass hundreds of more score-qualified leads to ADRs with Priority Engine. We’re seeing those leads progress to further stages now. The fact that we have hundreds of score-qualified leads from named accounts that we didn’t have before is a really good thing. For the active prospects who haven’t actually engaged with us yet, we can export the data and put them right into the engagement program.
• Our volume and quality of MQLs has gone up. Sales conversations have improved since we can now do better nurturing, which means the starting point for sales conversations is much better. We’ve also learned that with Priority Engine, we’re hitting the decision makers so it’s a higher quality lead.
• Priority Engine enables us to add thousands of contacts to our database who are actively researching so we have an opportunity to get in there and actively engage them at an earlier stage to get involved in the buying process. We sell fairly complex products and as a result we have longer buying cycles so the sooner we can start those conversations the more we can influence the buying process.

Priority Engine is a tool that allows us to get in earlier along those buyers journeys, and lets us take a more prescriptive approach. They may download a piece of content, but now we have them in our system and can continually nurture them with content that fits their need or addresses their pain points based on information we gathered from Priority Engine.

Do you plan to use Priority Engine for other marketing initiatives?

We’d like to do more sophisticated engagement streams that get even more granular since we have all this great data to work with. We also view this as a valuable tool to recruit titles to support our regional events. There is a lot of functionality we anticipate we can take advantage of as we continue to expand.

How would you rate your experience working with TechTarget?

Our experience with the TechTarget account team has been fantastic from the beginning. No one comes close to providing the level of service they do. Our Account Team is proactive, attentive, provides training and shares ways to optimize how we are using the product. Between TechTarget’s consulting services and Priority Engine tool, we now understand the buyer’s journey much better.

demand generation, intent data, Priority Engine, TechTarget