CDP: A new arrow in the sale’s quiver

If I asked you what is more important than driving leads to your company? The answer more often than not would be “converting them”. Many organizations suffer from a leaky top funnel where despite being able to generate leads, they are unable to create any value out of them.

Based on research conducted by the CSO Insight study, 42% of sales reps feel that they don’t have the right information before making a call; 45% report needing help figuring out which accounts to prioritize; and across the board, sales reps are spending 20% of their time doing their own research on prospects to try to figure it all out.[1]

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can be instrumental in addressing these issues by helping score and prioritize sales leads. Before we dive deep into that, let us first understand what a CDP is. A CDP is a tool that collects data from various sources and curates them specific to a companies’ requirement of a holistic customer view. CDPs help stitch the data together to make a coherent and unified customer profile that marketers can effectively capitalize on. This enriched data is then made available to a plethora of other systems for consumption.

Account based selling is a hyper personalized selling tactic where sales and marketing teams collaborate to close high value customer accounts. There are three main ways in which CDPs can augment account based selling efforts –

Plugging in real time alerts

CDPs can track online customer behaviour and notify sales reps when the user behaviour exhibits a strong intention to buy. For e.g. — when the user visits the price listing page, visits the product page multiple times in a short interval or requests a free trial/demo.

Creating context for compelling sales pitches

Research shows that nearly 63% of users who request information from companies do not buy for a period of at least 3 months[2]. Therefore, nurturing leads is extremely important.

CDP used in combination with marketing automation platforms and tools can give sales teams deep customer insights to have more intelligent conversations with leads, quickly deepen relationships, and fast-track sales cycles.

Lead routing and predictive lead scoring are means to this end. CDPs use predictive data (probability of purchase, churn, visit, opening email) to create rich customer profiles. Predictive Analytics can leverage Machine Learning to provide you with in-depth customer knowledge and most effective ways to target the most qualified leads. This results in saved time and improved bottom line. In a recent survey, Forbes concluded, “predictive marketers are 1.8x more likely to consistently exceed shared organizational goals, and 2.9x more likely to report revenue growth at rates higher than the industry average.”[3]

Lead routing is the process of assigning leads to sales reps based on geographical location of client and sales rep, channel of lead acquisition, area of expertise in the lead’s industry, technologies used by the lead and intent data.

Improving Account Qualification and Targeting

CDP can be used to highlight accounts that have higher chances of conversion. This allows the sales teams to better align their efforts and time. CDPs do this by segmenting prospects by buckets, including interactions, intent, etc. Using this targeted approach, businesses can boost their chances of converting leads to clients.

As account-based selling becomes more pivotal for B2B companies, CDPs can be a potent tool for collating data across channels, improving data accessibility, sharing key customer insights and prioritizing on critical leads. Sales teams can then harness the power of CDPs to generate leads, improve targeting, build deeper relationships with prospective leads and close the most meaningful deals faster.

[1] https://www.dmnews.com/customer-experience/article/13037285/5-big-data-insights-to-transform-b2b-lead-gen

[2] https://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/sales/sales-techniques-and-negotiations/why-you-must-follow-up-leads

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/01/24/89-of-b2b-marketers-have-predictive-analytics-on-their-roadmaps-for-2016/?sh=6b1a6d7d1822