Tip 4: Improve the data foundation
Good data is your greatest challenge
Data is the most important layer. But most people don’t have good data.
“You should think about the tech stack like a layer cake and the bottom layer, the most important layer, is really good, relevant B2B data,” explains 6sense’s Conant. “But most people don’t have good data.”
There are many reasons why data is challenging. For instance, if your organization recently acquired a new company, it may have to integrate multiple customer relationship management (CRM) platforms each with their own data labelling systems. This leads to inconsistent, messy and error-prone databases. Another issue is communication. “There’s no reason for the sales team to tell the marketing team that they changed a data field in the CRM, so marketing could be automating off of a field that’s no longer practical. You need to break down the silos and have effective conversations,” says Terminus VP of Digital and Performance Marketing, Murlowski. “I wish there was a magic tool we could use to clean up the data. Everybody’s data is messy, no matter what organization you’re in.”
There’s no quick fix, so it’s about finding the workarounds. Start with the basics. First-party data and third-party data are essential. First-party data should be aggregated to the account-level and include everything from campaign metrics and email opens to website visits, and everything that is in the CRM platform, emails, and calendars. “To do that, there are two technical challenges you need to solve,” says Demandbase’s Miller. The first is de-anonymizing web traffic.
A study by 6sense Research found that 97% of all traffic on B2B websites is anonymous, as is 90% of buying team traffic. This means organizations can’t tell when traffic represents worthwhile selling opportunities or meaningless page visits. If the target is a big law firm and there’s no real visibility whether they’re visiting the company website, that’s not a good start. The second, related challenge is lead-to-account matching – the process of matching a lead to the correct account in the CRM so sales can follow up appropriately.
Third-party data includes supporting information that helps provide a better understanding of company accounts more generally. “Ideally, you’ll have multiple forms of intent data, data from review sites, and contact data – that’s the bare minimum,” says Conant.
Miller adds: “Do you have the company name, the industry, the size, and the location? Do you understand the hierarchies within those organizations, for instance, that ABC is a division of Disney?” Technographic data can also be a vital indicator of an in-market company. “For what it’s worth, our predictive models show that for technology companies, that’s usually the number one predictor of an ideal customer profile (ICP) account,” Miller continues. “Connecting the dots across all of that data is a non-trivial challenge. A lot of companies don’t do that very well.”