It’s always that time of year – in sales and marketing we’re always starting a new quarter, ending a new quarter, trying to create demand for the following year or just planning. We always want to start strong and grow better. Let’s assume you start strong. But how do you grow better? How do you outsmart the competition? How do you create sales and marketing systems that help identify the leads that matter? We need to create a system to identify these closeable leads so that sales teams can understand which deals that they can count on for revenue going forward. 

I hosted a webinar where we explored how to up the odds of your marketing and sales campaigns’ success. Closeable revenue is all about the math. Whether that revenue is from demand generation, new opportunities, leads, etc. These days it’s easy (or should be easy) to use systems to determine those opportunities and leads that will convert into closeable business. 

We dove into the 6 steps to increase the odds of building closeable demand and closeable business. It boils down to creating the right profile so you can target the right audience and then building models to understand and categorize which are the right accounts/people to go after. Figuring out which are the best models to identify and categorize leads. Building campaigns using AI to optimize and go after the right kinds of companies and people. Testing the models to identify and evaluate the right results. And finally, do this across both sales and marketing to ensure both teams are fully aligned. So what are the right questions to ask as you go through these steps?

Step #1: Build Better Buyer Profiles – How do you build Buyer Profiles? Do you have a customer data project? Customer Data Platform? How often is it updated? Is it shared across GTM? What’s the breadth of data sources?

Step #2: Target Your Ideal Buyer & TAM – Targeting is easy once you have models. Have you created a model, or is it at least in your head? What are the buying signals that matter? How many lookalikes in the world? Which territory is your next best place?

Step #3: Create Your Buyer Model – Better campaigns are all about “lift” – propensity, persona and intent. How does industry, persona, tech install, engagement or company specialty fit in?

Step #4: Optimize Your Campaigns – Campaign to Buyers and Buying Team combinations by propensity, persona and intent. Do you understand which regions convert with which products or personas?

Step #5: Put Your Buyer Model to the Test – Increase lead flow by removing friction. Are you using A/B testing to formulate GTM campaigns and how much engagement is needed? Are you doing territory and ABM investment tiering based on GTM science?

Step #6: Align Marketing & Sales with Your Buyer Data Platform – Are both sales and marketing aligned together on the same customers and prospects to deliver the outcomes?  Are both teams together leveraging the profiles and funnel optimization techniques to deliver better growth?  Is there an aligned measurement system to track what you manage?

These are the six steps that I use in building scalable and closeable demand. Explore what we found really works and what is delivering today with results for sales and marketing professionals worldwide with respect to each of these 6 steps by watching last month’s webinar, Taking the Guesswork out of Sales & Marketing.

As B2B marketers, our goal is to deliver effective campaigns targeted at the best opportunities that exist within our Total Addressable Market (TAM). Of course, this means identifying your TAM is the first step. The following steps are – developing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), comparing your ICP throughout your TAM to determine which opportunities to focus on, and then getting the right campaigns in front of them at the right time. Unfortunately, traditional approaches leave us with siloed data, stagnant (or incomplete) profiles, and the inability to support all opportunities within an account at scale. Not to mention, the amount of effort, money and time that is wasted in going after the inaccurate accounts/profiles.

For this precise reason – there is a need to constantly create (and keep updated) more accurate, dynamic profiles for people, accounts and buying centers so we can properly prioritize and target opportunities with the right campaigns. ABM in the last few years has been the go-to strategy for most B2B marketers to tackle this issue—it sure is useful in identifying the right accounts, assuming you’ve properly compiled your siloed data. However, it fails in identifying the buying teams and targeting the right people within those accounts. It does not factor in the best profiles that as a marketer one would like to target or sales would like to engage with.

So how do we make sure we have the best B2B profiles?

No matter which technology you end up using for creating and maintaining the profiles in your systems – you need to ensure that the vendor provides some of the basic capabilities—as outlined below:

• Provide third-party account & person data, from a combination of leading B2B data sources. 

• Unification of first- and third-party data for account context and prioritization.

• Full account profiles including hierarchies, firmographics, standard or advanced technographics (web, SaaS and installed software and hardware), regular cadence of intent and mobile contacts.

• Direct integrations into CRM, marketing automation and other data platforms.

• Complete, up-to-date B2B profiles to target the right accounts and people, with real-time data enrichment, comprehensive segmentation criteria, intent, buyer persona scoring—and easily upgradable to advanced predictive profiling.

• Simple, straightforward pricing with all-inclusive discovery, enrichment, and form fills— a fraction of the cost of alternatives.

• Unified first- and third- party data including firmographics, demographics, technographics, account intent, mobile phones, account & contact context, specialties and more.

• Open, uncompromised quality with dozens of data partners, multisource validation, semantic categorization, and both scheduled and real-time enrichment.

Tools like Customer Data Platforms can provide all of these capabilities beyond unification as they integrate AI-optimized buying signals from curated third-party data-sources that go into building dynamic, multi-level buyer profiles which are regularly updated for accurate, timely understanding of your buyers. That, in conjunction with scoring models (Fit, Intent, Persona, TAM, and ICP), it’s easier than ever for B2B marketers to target the right people, with the right campaigns, at the right time. Read this product sheet to learn more about what to look for as you build your B2B profiles and optimize the whole process so that once you’ve discovered your TAM, buyer profiles are created at the person, account, and buying center levels – meaning you can segment, score, and prioritize entire buying groups - as well as individuals within accounts - instead of just accounts.

B2B Profiling enables big and small B2B companies to minimize spend and maximize ROI by equipping them with the tools necessary to proactively target the accounts and/or people with the highest propensity to buy. Fuel and optimize your demand funnel with the best B2B buyer profiles enhanced by predictive fit, persona and intent models to revolutionize your TAM-to-opportunity prioritization and drive a full funnel optimization.

Modern B2B growth depends on accurate, unified buyer data. Yet most organizations operate with siloed, outdated, and fragmented signals spread across systems. Identity Resolution is the foundation that ties it all together.

By automatically associating firmographic, demographic, technographic, engagement, and intent data to the correct people, accounts, and buying groups, an Identity Resolution framework creates dynamic, 360-degree buyer profiles that stay accurate in real time.

Instead of manually reconciling records, deduplicating contacts, and guessing at lead-to-account matches, revenue teams gain a trustworthy, continuously updated data layer that powers faster routing, smarter personalization, cleaner CRM hygiene, better forecasting, and true lead-to-account alignment. When identity is resolved correctly, every GTM motion becomes more precise, scalable, and revenue-driven.