Intent to Impact: The Holistic Application of Intent

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying never judge a book by its cover. Intent data is often perceived solely at face value, perhaps this is due to the general outlook of businesses, looking to drive sales, and therefore its other applications are overlooked, which can be detrimental, particularly if you operate under a recurring revenue business model.

So I wanted to take a second to briefly take a look into the holistic application of intent data.

Marketing

Content Strategy

The goal for content marketers is to create content that is going to speak to prospects, that is going to uncover truths and answer the questions that keep prospective buyers up at night but with such an array of businesses within the ICP or on the named account list, how do you identify what is top of mind for each of them.

Once you’ve identified your ICP or built your list of logos that you want to catch, your next job is identifying what challenges are causing their C-Suite to lose sleep which, as you can imagine, is no small feat!

But what if you were fed a weekly list of the topics that are top of mind at your target accounts that you can leverage to influence the content you create, ensuring that it talks directly to the pain that they are experiencing; in that moment*.

*Baader Meinhof principle - frequency illusion - when the stakeholders at these accounts receive these timely pieces of content it will appear as a lightbulb moment. Does a particular phrase come to mind… sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time?

• 54% of decision-makers say they spend more than one hour per week reading and reviewing thought-leadership content. (Edelman/LinkedIn 2021)
• Roughly one-third (31.8%) of organizations that had a content strategy in a CSO Insights study achieved 27.1% higher win rates and 18.1% higher quota attainment than those without a content strategy. (CSO Insights, 2020)
• Companies have recorded a lift in annual contract value of 171% after deploying ABM. (ABM: State Of The Market?report?from TOPO, 2019)

Inbound

I recently spoke with a business that had mastered the dark art of SEO and were producing top-quality content, in Layman’s terms they were successfully driving traffic to the site and because they had gated the content, were generating large numbers of inbound opportunities; far outweighing their outbound opportunities. The issue was that while having heaps of inbound leads they were unqualified and the BizDev teams that were tasked with Qualifying them, only had a certain amount of hours in the day. By leveraging on-site intent and lead scoring aligned to best-returning buying criteria, they were able to efficiently prioritise whom they should speak to first. This data can be fed directly into CRM to enrich the data on existing accounts or create an opportunity.

• 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
• Just 44% of companies use lead scoring systems. (DecisionTree)
• Joint?research?has shown that businesses can improve their deal closing rate by up to 67% by streamlining their sales and marketing teams. (Marketo and Reachforce)
• Companies excelling at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Forrester)

Better still, those visitors that didn’t convert (from anonymous to known) by submitting their email to un-gate the content weren’t wasted, as on-site intent can reveal those businesses that have visited your site; meaning you can retarget them with perhaps more relevant content or task your BizDev/Sales team with reaching out.*

• 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. (MarketingSherpa, 2019)

Sales

Net new (Casting the Net wide)

Time stops for no person and if you’ve ever worked in Sales, you’ll know that there are never enough hours in the day, week, month, or quarter. So when working in accordance with an ICP (rather than having a named account list) the challenge is that with so many businesses to target, how do you know where to focus your energy/effort… or more aptly, where are the low-hanging fruits?

With only 5% of your Total Addressable Market, actually in-market at any one time, knowing whom to contact and when is no small feat. So what can you do, hammer the phones hoping to catch someone at the right time? Send out a bunch of well-researched, well-crafted emails?baiting a bite, only to find?they’re?ignored??Or leverage in-market data by monitoring intent signals as your targets surf the internet looking for the answer to their most pressing questions.

• More than?40% of salespeople ?say prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process (HubSpot, 2022)
• 9 in 10 companies use?2+ lead enrichment tools ?to learn more about prospects. (TOPO - acquired by Gartner, 2019)
• 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally (Sirius Decisions)

Named account:

Similarly to the above, however here you are working within a defined market, therefore it’s likely that you are going to be putting more effort into building rapport and positioning yourself as a trusted advisor. What if you could remain a step ahead, bringing topics into the fray early and stimulating in-depth conversation around said topics, to further cement your position as a trusted advisor?

This is particularly interesting when your offering involves quite a complex and drawn-out sales cycle (almost synonymous with businesses that follow a named account approach). Helping you to not only identify the topics that matter most to these businesses but also identify the location of the stakeholder that has been doing the research, down to the city*

*While this leaves the manual effort of then finding the stakeholder, it's more efficient than not having access to it (the reason the limit lies here rather than supplying stakeholder level info, is you guessed it... the pesky GDPR)

• 88% of B2B Buyers Only Buy When They See a Salesperson as a “Trusted Advisor” (LinkedIn State of Sales, 2020)
• 42% of sales reps feel they don’t have enough information prior to making a call. (CSO Insights, State Of Sales Enablement 2021)
• 84% of sales executives cited content search and utilisation as the top productivity improvement area. (G2, 2021)
• 76 Percent of B2B Buyers Now Expect More Personalised Attention from Solution Providers Based on Their Specific Needs (DemandGen’s B2B Buyer Behavior Study, 2020)

CRM Enrichment:

Has it ever happened to you, when you’ve had a great conversation but the timing just hasn’t been right?

You’ve followed every step and recorded everything with your CRM, setting tasks ahead of the projected times to negate the chance of being too late. Then the day comes to give a prospect a call, to find out if the other priorities had been solved for and whether budgets had been approved, and you’re met with “we’ve just signed with your competitor."

What if you could monitor all accounts within your CRM and have their off-site intent signals fed directly into your single source of truth, to enrich the data and enhance your chances; by notifying you as soon as they show an increased propensity to be in market?

Intent data… more like a crystal ball.

• 53% of top-performing salespeople have a higher confidence level in their CRM data than their counterparts. (LinkedIn, 2020)
• 57% of sales pros spend 3–10+ hours per week using CRM tools. (LinkedIn State of Sales, 2020)
• 76 Percent of Salespeople Cite Sales Technology as “Critical” or “Extremely Critical” to Closing Deals (LinkedIn State of Sales, 2020)

Customer Success:

A lot of crossovers here between the named account approach, CRM enrichment and expansion efforts. You have your defined set of clients, the size depends on how good a job your sales and marketing counterparts have done.

However, herein lies a great deal of value. You’re familiar with the fact it’s easier and cheaper to sell to existing clients rather than new prospects.

• 82% of companies say that customer retention is much cheaper than customer acquisition, but many companies spend much more on acquisition instead of nurturing the customers they already have. (Econsultancy)
• Of more than 500 sales professionals, 72% of salespeople who upsell and 74% who cross-sell say that it drives up to 30% of their revenue. (2022 HubSpot Blog survey)
• 88% of surveyed salespeople try to upsell their customers. 49% of that group say that understanding?customers’ needs and goals?is a key strategy. (HubSpot, 2022)

While this is the case, ease and speed isn’t the only benefit. NRR is one of the most crucial metrics for businesses with a recurring revenue operating model. Particularly if public or looking to IPO or secure funding, in the near future.

If we take 5 of the most successful SaaS IPOs in recent years, they’ve had an average NRR of 143%.

• Snowflake - 158%
• Twilio - 155%
• Elastic - 142%
• PagerDuty - 139%
• AppDynamics - 123%

It’s not only Expansion efforts that benefit from intent data, we can monitor existing clients to reduce churn risk (identifying it early can save the logo).

• Retaining customers is such a powerful profit driver, that even a 5% boost in retention will increase profits by 25% to 125%(Gartner).
• 82% of the respondents say "Active customer retention" is one of the most important objectives for their CRM team. (Tinyclues, 2021)

Identify and reduce churn risk, while maximising cross-sell/upsell opportunities. Point out a customer success leader that would turn their nose up at that.

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I guess what I’m trying to say is that like most things, Intent data is very much multi-faceted, and as they say… “A rising tide lifts all boats”.

These joint-up applications of tech and ways of thinking are what make my brain tick, so I’d love to hear about your experiences with end-to-end connections generated by your tech/services.