By Jack Jones, Inside Sales Specialist.
New year, new targets – right?
A new year also brings with it fresh motivation and focus.
Like me, you’re probably back from the break fully recharged and keen to start hitting targets fast. As an inside sales team in the data insights space, we speak to clients and prospects daily about the value of buyer intent data. Over the past year, we watched with interest as buyer intent products shifted from a desirable to an essential sales enablement tool, across the B2B landscape.
In 2021, Sales and Marketing departments alike discovered the true power of having a direct line to actionable contacts that are ready to buy now, rather than continuously targeting those that might like to buy…maybe…sometime in the future.
Research by Customer Think found that a majority of sales and marketing executives believe that intent data improves lead conversion by at least 50%.
With buyer intent data now forming a vital component to customer acquisition strategies, sales and marketing teams are learning to put that data to work hard, ensuring they are reaching customers already searching for their solutions.
As they get to grips with the true value of buyer intent, what else can we expect them to discover on their journey? Here are my thoughts on the additional value buyer intent data will bring to sales and marketing in 2022.
Tracking Buyer Behavior During Engagement
A key learning for our in-house sales team in recent months has been understanding that buyer intent data isn’t only valuable at the prospecting stage. It is really powerful to have the ability to track buyer behavior even when a prospect is in conversation with you. Once a prospect lands on your website and begins actively engaging, your marketing team can nurture them through retargeting ads and email campaigns.
From a sales perspective, we don’t have to step away once they’re engaged, we can actually step up. By leveraging buyer intent data at this stage, we can identify the prospects that are actually willing to engage in a buying cycle based on the type of content they are consuming. For example, your hottest lead begins to also engage with a competitor's website, you can consider your value proposition against theirs and tailor your approach and next steps armed with that knowledge.
Refine Lead Scoring
Buyer intent data can help you to filter the prospects actively researching pain points and those simply looking for a particular topic without any intention to make a purchase.
As Lead Onion COO, Michael Green puts it, “What a lot of companies don’t realize yet is that you can acquire data when a company has started following your competitors on social media, started following keywords that are key to your product, or that they made an announcement about an investment or hiring for new roles.”
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Lead Onion’s Surge feature filters with the 5 pillars of buyer intent, recognizing interactions with the different types of intent data to highlight accounts most likely to buy in real time. Surge allows you to spotlight the accounts that are showing intent across multiple channels and sources so you can prioritize your hottest leads. You can even create a watchlist so you are notified when a company is surging for intent to buy your product.
Recruitment Agencies Win More Deals with Buyer Intent
Insights into which companies are hiring for specific roles are highly valuable for recruitment teams, in-house and agency side. Recruitment is a super competitive space and agencies are likely to be competing with multiple vendors for every role. Early insights and growth signals give them the competitive edge.
Lead Onion’s tools give recruiters invaluable foresight, saving them days of scrolling through job boards and missing commercial opportunities. Recruiters can tap into Lead Onion’s 100% compliant B2B contact database to source top candidates in minutes, and reach them fast with multi-touch email and phone automated cadences.
Tailored Outreach with Sales Cadences
We already understand the power of tailored outreach, but coupled with up-to-date information on a prospects’ current stage of the buyer journey, we can contact them with the right message, at the right time. With Lead Onion, you can create a structured framework with triggered contact touchpoints. This really helps to speed up the outreach process and, more importantly with regular follow-ups, you can move your hottest leads across the sales funnel.
Read more about the impact of sales cadences in our guide to developing a data driven sales strategy.
