• September 21, 2016
• Demand Generation, Sales and Marketing Alignment

The Real Deal: Proof of the Power of Purchase Intent Insight

Like you, I try to learn from my peers.  People succeeding at what I’m trying to do.  And one thing that really helps me is a meaty set of facts:  What was the situation before the deal?  How did things progress?  What was the end result?   Lots of people drop hints about their excellent work — far too often, I can’t get at the solid information that would really help me.  That means I can’t learn as fast as I’d like.  It means I can’t improve as fast as I should.  If something could clearly help me, an insight that gives me the confidence to move decisively, you can bet I’ll use it.  So that’s what I’m sharing today.  It combines the full story of a recent deal with the key ‘how to’s” you can use directly for your specific business.  Hat’s off to my TechTarget colleague Lindsay, for helping make this available to you.

The facts

• MSFT recently publicized that it had won a big piece of business at the UK Ministry of Defense (MoD). All told, they will be supporting 250,000 users of MSFT Office 365 and Azure.  You can read more about it here.  Congratulations to both!.
• TechTarget’s award-winning editorial certainly covered the story in Computer Weekly.  You can see our interview with MoD’s CIO here: CIO interview: Changing supplier relationships at the MoD. This interview represents the kind of content that your audience wants and the context you want to be in.
• What you didn’t know, and what’s important to your own revenue producing efforts, is that TechTarget knew about this deal well in advance. Through our purchase intent insight capabilities, we were watching content consumption behavior at the UK Ministry of Defense as they started to move on this initiative.  Very early on, we had knowledge of the project and pulled together a roadmap on what was taking shape.   So I’m going to tell you about that.

Here’s what happened behind the scenes

Like most enterprise IT teams, the UK Ministry of Defense uses TechTarget sites for information around their technology interests and needs.  In the months prior MSFT.com’s announcement, we watched numerous unique individuals from the Ministry consuming Cloud services editorial and vendor-specific information from TechTarget.  All told, they took over 100 specific actions in a clear context with content that is completely understood.

Our comprehensive purchase intent insight infrastructure and capabilities enabled us to directly observe these patterns and predict the upcoming purchase. 

Based on the quality of this information, we directly engaged with the Ministry of Defense during their research process and were able to create a detailed blueprint of the initiative months before the deal was done.   We know about projects and business opportunities that you can’t see or can’t get access to.

As a hyper-competitive professional, I know exactly what I could have done with that kind of information early enough in the cycle to make a difference.   I would have marshaled my team and gone after it with a vengeance.  Because the information I needed was there.  The facts were clear and verified.  It came from a process I completely understood.  All that was needed was me and my super team of sales professionals.

Sure every deal isn’t the size of the UK Ministry of Defense.  And you’re not MSFT.   As a marketer enabling your sales teams, you know that’s not what matters.  What matters is the quality of the information you’re providing and is it actionable to help increase my opportunity pipeline.  There isn’t an infinite number of deals out there and any opportunity sales doesn’t know about is an opportunity lost.

This a real-life example of the depth and accuracy of intent data insights available within our Qualified Sales Opportunities service and there are plenty more just like this.

Deep purchase intent insight on thousands of active IT projects

Right now, through the same purchase intent insight, we have this kind of information on 1000’s more projects.  With over 180,000 companies relying on TechTarget for enterprise technology research and vendor selection, we have the information you need to get an inside track.  By acting on exactly this, our clients are adding fuel to their pipelines every day.

Right now, you can know who’s in market to purchase.  You can know the who’s and what’s of the deal.  That’s what your sales team and marketing department really needs to accelerate.  Take a moment to think about what you could do with this kind of project insight.  We’re here specifically to help you.  So if you want to get going with our Qualified Sales Opportunities right now, let’s start today.  I’m eager to discuss the ins and outs of all our purchase intent insight offerings to all comers.  There’s plenty more good stuff like the MSFT UK Ministry of Defense deal to talk about and more.

All the best.  Good luck out there.

marketing intelligence, purchase intent data, purchase intent insight, Qualified Sales Opportunities, TechTarget