From Customer Data to Customer Intelligence: The Evolution of the B2B CDP

Leadspace Customer data platform, b2b cdp, marketing technology

If you’ve read more than a handful of marketing blogs, you’ve likely come across the phrase “a 360-degree view of the customer.” That’s the ideal for every marketer and sales rep, right? The more you know about your customers, the more likely you are to use your time and effort wisely when engaging those customers.

In an effort to get that comprehensive customer view, organizations invest in CRMs, MAPs, CDPs, and other marketing technologies. In the B2C world, many of these technologies can provide an adequate picture of the consumer.

However, in the B2B world, getting a complete understanding of the customer can be a bit more nuanced. An individual rarely makes a large ticket tech purchase completely on their own, it is most frequently a team decision.

  • But which of these people should you devote real time to cultivating?
  • Who are the key decision makers in the organization?
  • Who are the influencers and blockers?

How do you sort through the “noise” to get the right buying team? The answer lies in unified customer intelligence.

What Is Unified Customer Intelligence and Why Is It Important?

Unified customer intelligence combines all 1st and 3rd party data to create a single source of truth. Beyond just getting all the information in one central location, a unified customer intelligence platform enriches and enhances your data so it’s accurate, timely, and most importantly, actionable.

A B2B CDP powered by artificial intelligence can enrich, de-dupe, and analyze your data by leveraging capabilities such as lookalike modeling and predictive scoring to deliver insights that help you identify the best leads and accounts to target. This functionality lets you elevate your use of customer data beyond simple data capture into the realm of true customer intelligence.

So, what can you do with this nuanced, multilayered customer intelligence? You can use unified customer intelligence to:

  • Uplevel from basic lead enrichment.
  • See beyond company hierarchies.
  • Segment by so much more than behavior and job titles – then activate anywhere!

UPGRADE Lead Management to Unified Lead Intelligence

Time is money. This expression is especially applicable to lead management, particularly the front end of the process. The lead management process involves multiple steps, from lead generation to lead capture to lead routing and finally, lead follow-up and nurture. The less time spent between lead capture and follow-up, the better your conversion rates will be. But as companies turn their attention to buyer-centric lead management experiences, it can be difficult to capture all the necessary information required to route accurately and qualify seamlessly.  

Leadspace’s Unified Lead Intelligence solution differs at every step of the typical lead management process. It starts with real-time enrichment with your 1st party data sources (hello customer data!), in addition to 30+ external data sources. This gives you the ability to shorten your intake forms by taking advantage of lead-to-account matching that ties leads to active customers, accounts, persona segments, and buying teams. And with the addition of predictive and persona modeling, you’ll have solid information on the best TEAM of people to follow-up with at ICP accounts that are most likely to buy.

UPGRADE Account Hierarchies to Unified Account Intelligence

How confident are you that you can fully analyze and understand your TAM from the 30k-foot view down to the individual site locations for each account? Confident enough to draw up global sales territories and account assignments? 

These troubling questions can lead to issues down the road. Not understanding where your best potential customers are can limit revenue potential. This is especially true if you have opportunities in untapped markets. 

A lack of unified data can also lead to time wasted on accounts that aren’t the best opportunities.

If you’re relying solely on 3rd party data to define your sales territories, you could be making ineffective decisions that lead to discontentment across your teams and negatively impact outcomes. 

Leadspace’s Unified Account Intelligence enables you to conduct accurate TAM analysis with data on industries, revenues, and account hierarchies from a sales and marketing perspective. This is different from the way most data vendors look at account hierarchies. They typically focus on the financial and legal structure of the account while we focus on the buying teams and key decision-makers.

You need a reliable way to identify the connections between entities. Too often this work is left to sales and marketing to try and carry out manually or is attempted using some type of third party vendor. If you can’t accurately determine a company’s parent or partner companies and the person responsible for making purchasing decisions, it becomes difficult and time-consuming to connect with the right leads and accounts.

UPGRADE Targeting to Unified Audience Intelligence

Target lists and segmentation are arguably the most important aspect of any marketing and selling effort. Your message, content, and offer are irrelevant if you can’t align them to the right people and teams within an account. Marketing automation software became a hot commodity within the martech stack due to its ability to segment audiences but unfortunately MAPs haven’t evolved past behavioral and job title segmentation.

Leadspace’s Unified Audience Intelligence solution enables you to build richer profiles that extend far beyond job titles and email engagement. This living database syncs with your internal and external data sources and is accessible to sales, marketing, and CX departments across every division. Silos become a thing of the past when you have your customer data, marketing data, and sales data unified on a platform that can activate on any channel.

And sure, you can push those segments back into your MAP for email deployment, too. The days of storing redundant, obsolete, or trivial contact records in your marketing automation platform are over. This can lead to immense cost savings, especially if you’re using tools that charge on a per-contact basis. 

It’s Not Just About Bad Data

It is not enough to simply clean up your data if you’re still dealing with low engagement. You need a way to capture actionable insights from your data so sales and marketing teams can improve campaigns and close more deals. Unified customer intelligence in a centralized database that’s accessible across your organization makes this possible.

Leadspace provides a 3d profile of the customer with contact data, buying team data, and company hierarchy data. This foundation of quality data enables better lead management, along with predictive scoring and channel-agnostic activation.

By complementing your existing tech stack with Leadspace, you can improve ABM campaigns, lead distribution and management, and ultimately, increase your revenue.

To see how Leadspace can help you achieve unified customer intelligence that leads to faster speed-to-lead, streamlined business operations, and revenue growth, explore our customer data platform today.