If you’re not already on the data enrichment train, I’ve got a spoiler alert: Data drives B2B sales and marketing success.
Now with the obvious out of the way, it’s time to speak to bettering the data that fuels your company’s growth.
The better your data, the better equipped your revenue team is to personalize, segment and automate. These are all key factors in maximizing engagement with prospects on modern, digital-first buying journeys. The bottom line is better data empowers you to reach your growth objectives more efficiently, freeing up your scarce resources to fuel even greater scale.
Two important considerations in bettering your revenue team’s data are data enrichment and account intent data. Both contribute mightily to maximizing your opportunities in-market.
This post takes a look at both data enrichment and account intent data. First things first, let’s start with data enrichment
What is B2B data enrichment?
Data enrichment is the process of expanding upon your collected contact data with relevant context obtained from additional sources. Typically, B2B data enrichment augments contact data with additional information at the contact, account and/or company level.
Data enrichment can be performed two ways. First, it can be done manually, a time-consuming activity that keeps sellers from selling. The second way of accomplishing data enrichment is through an automated data service.
What are the benefits of B2B data enrichment?
The benefits of data enrichment are plentiful.
First off, data enrichment completes the data sets you acquire from your various lead sources, like web form fills, webinar registrations, events and more. Data enrichment completes the entire picture of your lead, allowing you to prioritize and budget your resources accordingly.
Data enrichment also improves lead qualification. Behaviors certainly contribute, but they don’t tell the entire story. Enriched data provides the contextual data necessary to determine if the account falls within your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and if the lead is the best person to engage. Your revenue team won’t run efficiently if spends time on wrong leads who might be sending all the right signals but are at all the wrong accounts.
Furthermore, data enrichment allows you to have shorter forms at your lead sources. Let’s face it: the longer the forms we experience as customers ourselves, the less likely it is we will complete the form. With all the difficulty around getting customers to your digital and physical properties in the first place, why risk losing their conversion at the contact information point?
Lastly, data enrichment facilitates a smoother lead handoff from Marketing to Sales. Enriched data informs Operations (RevOps and/or Marketing Ops) to properly route and prioritize leads, as well as prompts more personalized outreach. The more seamlessly leads move through your processes, the better the customer experience for your prospects.
As leads come into your processes, ensure they’re correctly matched to the proper account, particularly if they are part of a multinational enterprise. Then, enrich before you route or assign.
Sourcing the right B2B data enrichment solution
When sourcing an automated data enrichment solution provider, be on the lookout for key fields that routinely pop up empty and devoid of data. With your lead scoring and routing processes predicated on data, those empty fields break your entire process.
Aside from blank data fields, be on the lookout for static and outdated data. Static data doesn’t change after it has been initially sourced, and therefore can quickly become obsolete. Dynamic data sources, on the other hand, are continually updated to mirror the most recent information available.
With complete and accurate data, you can then confidently move forward with your engagement tactics.
What is B2B account intent data?
Intent data is a type of sales intelligence that delivers insights into how leads and accounts are actively researching a topic on third-party sites. It’s a collection of behavioral signals that develops an understanding of your prospects’ intentions. When online activity on a particular topic is higher than usual, it often indicates the prospect and/or the targeted account is in an active buying journey.
Intent data allows a revenue team to identify the prospects and accounts that are actively in-market, thereby empowering them to respond with informed, timely and relevant campaigns and outreach.
There are two primary sources of B2B intent data: First-party intent data and third-party intent data.
First-party intent data is the data you already collect and own. This data usually includes contact information from form fills, IP addresses, etc.
Conversely, third-party intent data is data collected from other digital properties by a number of intent data solution providers.
What are the benefits of B2B account intent data?
Intent data allows you to identify companies active in their buying journeys. When push comes to shove, distinguishing between active and relatively inactive accounts empowers a revenue team to prioritize its outreach. Over time, conversions and time-to-revenue will improve considerably.
Additionally, account intent data helps the entire revenue team learn more about its interested audience. By examining the accounts that are actively in-market for its products, solutions and services, your company can better refine and more specifically detail its ICP.
Sourcing the right B2B intent data solution
When sourcing intent data solutions, it’s important to understand the difference between predictive analytics and intent monitoring platforms.
Predictive analytics, also known as predictive intent, are “big data” platforms that predict future events. These platforms pull in a wide variety of historical data from a broad set of sources and use proprietary data modeling to predict who will purchase what, and when. As predictive analytics projects the future by looking into the past, it’s not always a true predictor of exactly what actualizes in the future.
An intent monitoring platform develops intent indications by examining current online activity of leads within target accounts. Intent monitoring platforms can help you identify new leads. Most importantly though, they notify you when leads are displaying active behaviors that indicate signals of intent to buy, like keyword searches, downloads and more. When behavioral data signals high intent, the time is perfect for your revenue team to reach out and engage.
Both predictive analytics and intent monitoring platforms add value, and some revenue teams will deploy both. In fact, some solutions providers combine both into their offerings. That being said, intent monitoring platforms are more simple, require fewer integrations, and deliver real-time insight, making them viable for revenue teams needing insights to their targeted accounts’ levels of interest.
Summary
The better your data, the better your marketing and sales processes perform. And, of course, the better your marketing and sales processes perform, the better customer experience you deliver to your leads and prospects.
Your RevTech stack is the engine that drives your go-to-market motions. Data is your stack’s fuel. Consider boosting the potency of your fuel with data enrichment and intent data solutions. Then, use LeanData to orchestrate the entire process, ensuring prioritized data is routed to the right representative at the right time, each and every time.
