Why is it that Forrester Research finds that 90% of B2B companies are either implementing or looking to implement a CDP? This is an astonishing statistic. It’s surprising because most people question themselves with respect to what a Customer Data Platform (CDP) really is and whether they could describe it to their colleagues. Here are a number of the real world use cases that are driving the need and why this essential technology is changing the way Go-to-Market is done.
As a leader in the Forrester Wave, Leadspace is fortunate enough to meet with hundreds of companies every quarter who are looking to tackle sales & marketing challenges. Typically, the challenges fall into 4 categories – profiling, targeting, campaigning, and closing.
Profiling Challenges
Despite all the industry mastering and data quality issues, most sales and marketing teams say that their data is still just not right for their GTM use cases. The contact information isn’t accurate. The data is in separate salesforce or marketing automation instances – often because of M&A – and the overhead of trying to do cross-sell or up-sell across these instances is daunting. The fill rates are low in key fields to discern or segment for persona-based content. As a result, actionable account and lead/contact profiles are not in the right shape for easy lead-to-account matching, lead qualification by sales development reps, or even basic campaign segmentation.
Targeting Challenges
The Account Based Marketing trend is driving both sales and marketing professionals to think differently about who really are the companies they could and should be going after. This starts with core fundamentals like what is a company or product or territory Total Addressable Market? What is the Ideal Customer Profile and who are the personas that matter? Who are the lookalike companies that are currently in a whitespace and what’s the best way to go after them? Many of these requirements are at the core of how to align the goals of sales and marketing. Can the sales territory plan be aligned with the TAM/ICP and how can the marketing strategy be aligned by territory, account, product and persona? And what are the buying signals that should inform each of these elements?
Campaigning Challenges
Typically this comes from the sales team suggesting they aren’t getting the right leads and the marketing team coming under pressure to generate more pipeline. The challenge is natural alignment and understanding how by territory, by account, by product and by persona the marketing team is targeting campaigns, which tactics/channels are effective in driving engagement. And which leads are likely to turn into closeable business. Aligning campaign segmentation with sales territory strategy is one of the first steps to performance-improve results. Finally, and maybe most importantly, it’s critical to understand when not to spend money as well. Which channels or activities are really top-of-funnel, which are middle and which are bottom? And when should lookalike buyers trump engagement activity in lead scoring, nurturing and prioritization.
Closing Challenges
Typically this is a combination of the marketing team generating what is seen as the wrong leads and the sales team not knowing which leads if any to focus on. This is a critical juncture of GTM investment. This is the point in time where the real money is spent. How can every advantage be taken to help the sales team understand all the buying signals that any account is giving and if they indicate a match with the company’s ICP and lookalike customers? How many deals can a sales rep focus on in any given quarter? Is it the right persona fit for the economic buyer? When is it the right time to choose to invest in a Proof-of-Concept – likely one of the most constrained resources in the closing process?
In the coming 12 blogs in this series, we will explore real-world use-cases, best practices, and case studies to demonstrate how Leadspace enables sales & marketing teams to overcome these challenges within each of these four areas – all within a single quarter! We’ll be discussing how we’ve helped companies to…
Profile Better
- Utilize our B2B data management and buying expertise to build closeable unified profiles. We’ve critically evaluated, selected and curated the industry’s best third party company and people data sources in the world.
- Add the personal touch to your unified profiles. Create the best buyer profiles at the individual level by using personal demographics and buying behaviors from social signals and interests to assign personas instead of nondescript job titles.
- Route better with the industry’s best lead-to-account matching from Leadspace. Our AI-powered engine enriches and scores leads in real time with firmographic, hierarchy, intent and propensity data to fuel the most sophisticated lead management scenarios.
Target Better
- Visualize your territory, industry, and geography strategy with Leadspace FIT to identify the highest historically-returning market segments.
- Leverage Leadspace TAM and ICP to understand your most attractive white space by targeting your best lookalike accounts and personas.
- Take the guesswork out of identifying the top strategic accounts for investment by focusing on those who are most likely to buy your product.
Campaign Better
- Leverage Leadspace ICP and Persona to identify the right ABM accounts and fuel high-performing lists based on lookalike buyer demographics, interests and job titles.
- Laser focus campaign segment members with Leadspace Persona by leveraging our 80 off-the-shelf personas or create your own custom personas. Our persona-matching scores make it easy to match content accordingly for the best program results around.
- Optimize your ABM investments to intelligently segment your audience by channel and then activate them in Leadspace Studio for closeable demand.
Close Better
- Optimize your marketing and sales engagement with Leadspace FIT and Intent scores to prioritize the top 25% of leads that deliver 60-80% of your business.
- Leverage the Leadspace platform to populate and design customized persona-based buyer journeys and engage top prospects with relevant and compelling content through the right channel, at the right time.
- Put Leadspace for Salesforce to work to deliver the right account contact details, buying signals and propensity-to-buy scores directly in front of your reps to prioritize leads and opportunities in their pipeline.
Stay tuned for next week’s blog, where we’ll dive into the first of many best practices for using Leadspace to Profile Better in weeks – not months!