In this post, we'll explore how intent data can unlock growth in your B2B business when paired with the right customer insights. Intent data is also the best indicator of what prospective buyers are looking to purchase and at what time they're ready to buy. It's the first step towards building a 4 step data-driven B2B growth strategy.
Lower Your Customer Acquisition Costs
A considerable portion of your marketing budget is probably is wasted on people who will never buy from you. Meanwhile, potential customers are slipping through the cracks because your team is too busy trying to connect with the wrong people.
You can use intent data to:
Identify customers who are exhibiting purchase-intent signals
Develop advertising and marketing strategies that target the right people with the right message at the right time
Prioritize sales leads so you can focus on the most promising prospects first
Get your messages in front of the right audience, at just the right moment when they're ready to hear from you
The key takeaway here is that intent data helps reduce the number of wasted efforts by identifying your best prospects who are eager to learn about your products and services.
Boost Customer Lifetime Value
The lifetime value of a customer is the overall profit that a business makes from any single customer. And as we all know, customer retention is much cheaper than customer acquisition. According to the Harvard Business Review, it costs 5-25x more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
One highly effective but underutilized method is to use intent data to understand what products your customers are researching online. These insights can then be used to create more personalized experiences for your customers and make more informed decisions on investing in new content and product ranges.
Companies must monitor everything their existing customers are doing. It's a fact of business in today's competitive world. By tracking your customers' product and competitive intent topic clusters beyond just their initial conversions, you're keeping your finger on the pulse of their entire customer journey. And that helps you better understand what they want and give them just that.
Set Realistic Goals for the Year
You will be able to confidently forecast sales projections and understand the performance of your sales team by using a reverse funnel analysis. Creating a reverse funnel analysis is quick and easy. It provides you with a realistic picture of how many accounts will make up your Total Addressable Market (TAM), the average close rate, and the average sale price. You can calculate any number of deals your sales team needs to close to hit their monthly or quarterly targets with these metrics.
The information calculated in a reverse funnel analysis allows for more constructive conversations about sales forecasts within an organization. In addition, it gives you the data needed to discuss your projections with your management or executive team intelligently.
Achieve More Wins and Forecast Your Pipeline with Ease
Intent data is a great way to predict the success of a deal. For example, setting up topic clusters around your brand, product, and competitors for a current deal your sales team is working on will give you insights that could be early predictors of the deal's success. In addition to these indicators, intent data can also be used to predict pipeline by mapping out the entire buyer journey from the initial search to final conversion. With this data, coupled with factors like firmographic data, you can apply behavioral data points to each stage in the journey, determine possible trends, and even predict deal outcomes earlier in the sales process.
In my experience building custom predictive models for clients, there are five common mistakes we see in this process:
1. Not applying business rules/logic to your predictions
2. Not applying external information (macroeconomic or industry-specific info)
3. Not taking seasonality into account when predicting demand
4. Not using enough inputs into your predictive model (lots of variables!)
5. Using unrealistic inputs
Key-Takeaway
By turning insights about your customer's and prospects' intent data into a growth engine for your business, you can transform the legacy approach to B2B marketing. Instead of telling your audience what to buy and when to buy it, savvy B2B marketers use intent data to deliver critical messages that focus on precisely what they need before realizing it themselves. As a result, success in B2B marketing is no longer a matter of press releases and reputation. Instead, the B2B brands that win today treat their buyers like the intelligent humans they are, connecting with them at a deep, emotional level and providing them with the right content at precisely the right time.
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