- February 14, 2017
- ABM, Demand Generation, Intent Data
Is your ABM Approach Like a Game of “Whack-a-Mole”? Trade Triangulation for Real Purchase Intent Insight
Every marketing and sales team has the same challenge, right? We need to know the right account, the right people in the account and the right time to turn all our attention to them. If we don’t know all three things, we’re going to spend a ton of time on “discovery”. All that effort can seem like a game of “Whack-a-mole”: Accounts and contacts that look pretty good keep popping up. And we have to pursue them, despite knowing in our heart of hearts, practically all these pop-up “opportunities” expose little real value. Early on, we check them all. We nurture our hopes. Then maybe we start guessing based on hunches. Truth be told, over time, we simply tire of the game.
Of course there’s a ton of data enhancement solutions right now promising to help sort things out. They promise to guide us in a variety of ways. Some try to predict real opportunities by modeling past behavior observable in our CRM (“Predictive”). Some promise to identify truly “active” accounts with website cookies and IP lookup; they even offer to overlay compiled data to suggest the people to call (they call this “ABM”). And still others try to build out a picture of the account and then, by scraping web news, infer possible buying activity (they call this “Intelligence”). As I see it, these approaches all suffer from the same fundamental flaw. I call it “Triangulation”.
Triangulation is Work. That’s Bad.
They’re triangulation because you may get 2 important pieces of information, but you’re always missing the critical third piece. Without this, you’re still mostly in a guessing game. And that means more work for you. Here two examples:
- The “look-alike”—Company X looks just like a company who once bought from you. You went out and bought the list based on the same titles that were involved in your past win. Now, all you have to do is determine when they might be in market again. You’re basically starting from zero.
- “Who’s behind the wheel?”—You know an account came to your website a lot so they must be interested. Independently, you source a list of names to populate contact information. All that’s left to do is find who on that list might have been doing the research – yikes. Better than random, but still too far to go.
Think about it. If you’re like me, you want to save as much effort and time as possible. With these methods there’s a lot of work left to be done, all of which falls on either you as the marketer or worse, on your colleagues in inside sales.
Real Purchase Intent Insight Saves Work. That’s Good!
Real purchase intent insight comes with the right contacts at the right accounts built in. Real purchase intent insight is created from the combination of live activity tracking and learned patterns over thousands of proven deals. There’s no triangulation. The path is laid out for you and everything you need is there for you to act on right away. You know the three key elements you need to get right in there and sell. Who/where, what and when!
But Wait, Whack-A-Mole is Fun!
Like you, I’m a marketer with the scars to show for it. I know there’s a ton of pressure on us every day to “feed the beast”. Everyone around us wants more of everything. And they want it cheaper. But simply putting more in the top of the funnel can’t guarantee of getting more out of the bottom. And that takes work. Cheaper names can’t fix that. More dials in Inside Sales is a risky way to pan for gold.
I want to know exactly when to focus on a particular account. I want to know exactly who is on the buying team and exactly what I should be talking to them about. That’s what real purchase intent insight puts at my fingertips. We call it IT Deal Alert Priority Engine. “IT Deal Alert” because it tells me that a deal is in process. “Priority Engine” because it tells me which accounts and which individuals within my ABM list I need to double down on.
If your company is an enterprise technology vendor, you can use Priority Engine to dramatically increase your Marketing and Sales performance. You can integrate it into your stack to deliver better insight for planning, execution and optimization of programs currently running. Because it provides better fuel, Priority Engine is the best way to enhance performance of your ABM approach from the very start. Every week, it tells you exactly what to take action on and how. To find out more about how Priority Engine can power improved pipeline contribution, contact [email protected].
ABM, Account-Based Marketing, marketing analytics, marketing intelligence, purchase intent insight
