Technology has changed the way consumers behave, requiring companies to overhaul their sales and marketing strategies. Clients and prospects do not only expect premium products and services, they expect an outstanding customer experience throughout the whole process.
The role of marketing and sales are intertwined – their work is complimentary and leads to collective revenue growth. Specifically, marketers have the goal to get customers to utilize the company’s product or service, this is done mainly through convincing them that investing in your business will provide solution to your needs.
The process of guiding a customer from learning about your company to closing is referred to as a sales and marketing funnel. In order to effectively nurture your leads and establish prospects as clients you need to understand your prospects motivation to buy.
Quick Takeaways:
- Understanding your customer is the first step in optimizing your marketing funnel.
- In order to generate good leads, you need the right lead generation infrastructure and appropriate campaign strategy.
- Intent data allows you to target potential buyers more accurately.
- Sales-Marketing alignment is crucial to generating high quality leads.
Marketing today is completely different from what it was a decade ago when businesses experienced better name recall, less congested markets, and endless opportunities for innovation. Today, there is more competition in all aspects of business development. Businesses need to not only amplify their products or service quality, offer affordable price points, and deliver practical innovation, they also have to provide excellent customer-centric marketing and client servicing.
Understanding customer interactions across all touch points is the number one challenge for marketers. Companies who adopt data-driven marketing are more likely to have an advantage over the competition and increase profitability. Moreover, these firms are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year.
Some of the common challenges related to on-boarding intent data include
Understanding Your Buyers
Competition is high, and customers know they have options. B2B companies need to be intuitive and distinguish what their customers need without being told. Intent data informs service providers of buyers’ intention based on their online behavior. Being aware of your prospects actions and properly analyzing the information allows you to predict interests and preferences that will set you apart from the competition.
Ensuring Quality Data
Utilizing intent data has a wide range of advantages, aside from being able to target buyers more accurately, intent data allows you to have quality information to build successful marketing campaigns around.
Managing and Modeling Data
Intent data is not only beneficial for sales and marketing teams, it can bring more order and better back-end data management by aligning your data around the overall goals and objectives of the company.
Giving your marketers the power of intent data will provide your company a huge competitive edge. Maximize quality data collections to build your analytics towards a better and more detailed understanding of client demographics, geographical analysis and market trends.
Aligning Sales and Marketing
In order to have a seamless approach to lead generation, sales and marketing are the two significant units that need to know how to work together. Marketing teams need to be able to properly identify potential clients and send high potential prospects to the sales team for up-selling and eventual closure.
It’s vital that these two units have their goals and objectives aligned. Then, intent data can streamline any concerns through the provision of real-time accurate insights.
Managing Your Timing
There is such a thing as customer fatigue and there is no time for blind testing and targeting. With high-quality intent data available at your fingertips, companies can position themselves to achieve maximum gains from their efforts. By working off accurate data, your team is better informed to make decisions regarding the right approach and timing with regard to sales efforts and engagements.
There are plenty of challenges that need to be addressed with regard to your intent data and marketing funnel, ranging from the quality of data to overall back end data management. Intent data is a marketing solution that offers a great advantage when properly utilized. Maximize sales and marketing efforts and minimize barriers related to quality of data, inharmonious customer interaction efforts, and under-appreciation of customer data through proper use of buyers’ intent data. Having a strong customer-oriented sales and marketing campaign starts with information on your target market.
By building a content marketing strategy that is anchored on the intent signals reflected in the data gathered regarding your prospective customers, you will be able to generate positive online activity and relationships through appropriate interactions, product displays, and offerings. Bringing together intent data and including it into your marketing funnel will give you stronger predictive power and in turn, revenue impact.
