Answer: Of course you do!
Sales & Marketing teams know that targeting customers with incomplete and siloed data is a complex process. Having a single, comprehensive view of your customer data in one place makes it significantly easier to effectively target the right people at the right time with personalized campaigns. Unfortunately, creating active, unified and accurate buyers profiles by hand is extremely cumbersome and error-prone. To overcome these difficulties, companies are beginning to automate the process by implementing Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), which empower sales & marketing teams to seamlessly blend all of their siloed customer data into a single source of truth – developing buyer profiles for people, companies (and even divisions with hierarchies) and accounts. Even better, with certain CDP solutions, those unified profiles are automatically updated in real-time as source data changes and new data is ingested.
A lot of buying signals (data) go into building the buyer profiles that sales & marketing need to successfully target their best customers.
Identity resolution is the backbone of active profiles, and active profiles are the backbone of sales & marketing.
What is Identity Resolution?
Identity resolution is the process of accurately associating data (or buying signals) with each of the specific people who interact with your business. Identity resolution is required to build a 360-degree view of your prospects/buyers, partners, suppliers and more. It is entirely critical to automating and implementing your lead-to-account matching process correctly. In today’s world, profiling is the backbone of any data-driven organization – the stronger your data is, the better your next-best-step decision making process is.
To be successful, companies must be able to accurately identify potential buyers, partners and suppliers throughout their data environments. Consider large on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud and cloud-based data ecosystems. With such a vast amount of complex data volume and variety, how can you be sure that your buyers, partners and suppliers are accurately identified in your systems?
With the right identity resolution and profiling software, you can leverage a centralized system to resolve buyer identities across all of your data and applications to ensure you’re generating the best possible buyer profiles at every hierarchy. Identity resolution makes your underlying data (and profiles) more trustworthy, improves customer service, enhances operational efficiencies and increases data analytics reliability. It can help you detect fraud, identify your best customers, and improve customer contact methods.
A high-quality identity resolution framework will help you at every stage of your data modernization journey, and enables you gain a competitive advantage to enhance business results in challenging areas including:
- Strategic targeting / prioritized outreach
- ICP analytics / TAM analytics / territory planning
- Data-driven decision making
- Revenue Automation
- Effective application of predictive models
- Account-based marketing (ABM)
- Creating account/contact hierarchies
- Lead-to-account matching and lead routing
- CRM clean up and ongoing enrichment
- Customer experience programs
- Data Health Reports
- Financial reporting and forecasting
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Governance and compliance
What are the advantages of having a high-quality identity resolution framework?
✓ Master your conversations and inbound leads in real-time with conversational AI.
Conversational AI is at best a robotic conversation without understanding the person and context. With identity resolution, you can match, enrich and route leads with the least amount of friction in your funnel – leaner questions, leaner forms. This lets you handle the most formidable tasks such as matching a lead to an account with only a personal email or routing high-value leads to the right sales team or nurture program.
✓ Improve your decision-making capabilities.
Base your business decisions on complete, accurate, consistent and current identity data. Identify, eliminate and prevent the spread of errors, duplicates or inconsistencies in your customer identity data hub. This ensures accurate buyer intelligence reporting/analysis and empowers you to make better decisions faster with complete, accurate and active customer data.
✓ Improve your risk management and compliance processes.
Identity resolution supplies your business with reliable, high-quality identity data that you can use to enhance compliance reporting and risk assessment.
✓ Enhance your customer experience.
With a single, more comprehensive and accurate view of your buyers, you can identify prospects in online inquiries and for omni-channel commerce. Identify your best customers. Improve contact methods. Additionally, you can reduce customer turnover and improve customer contact to effectively manage customers through their own unique buyer journeys, ultimately providing them with a more satisfactory experience.
✓ Maximize the value of your technology investments.
Identity resolution facilitates the anticipated value of your most strategic business initiatives. A powerful data-matching engine enables you to cross-reference siloed data sets and create unique identities across multiple records. So you can trust that your business applications and systems contain high-quality identity data at every step.
✓ Handle your most challenging use cases in real-time.
With identity resolution, you can search, match and manage identity data records from multiple countries across multiple hierarchies. Enable your salespeople to immediately see up-to-date buying signals (including intent) associated with each new lead as they come in for quicker outreach. This lets you handle the most formidable tasks – even using different alphabets and handling complex, multi-language identity data.
Having the best identity resolution framework means you can achieve all of these advantages faster and better than your competitors can. So, how do you find the best identity resolution and unified profiles framework? Back in 2021, Forrester’s evaluation of 14 leading B2B CDP companies, considering several factors to compare each CDPs’ Identity Resolution and unified profiles framework. Forrester started by looking at each CDPs’ identity resolution and profiling services and if the process was user-configurable. They wanted to know if (and how) the solutions create unified profiles at the account, buying group, and contact level. Finally, Forrester looked at each solution’s ability to create a persistent store of unified profiles and if they offer B2B Revenue Waterfall™ enablement.
In that 2021 report, Forrester differentiated Leadspace as a leader in Identity Resolution & Unified Profiles. But, Forrester evaluated leading CDPs again this year… This time around, they scored Leadspace to be THE leader in Identity Resolution and Profiles! Leadspace was the only CDP evaluated in The Forrester Wave™: B2B Customer Data Platforms, Q4 2023 to score a perfect 5 out of 5 in this category.
Seeing as the effectiveness of data-driven decisions depend on the quality of the underlying data (unified buyer profiles), Leadspace’s perfect score in this category is extremely significant. While other categories matter, it all starts with Identity Resolution and unified, active profiles. Without a good framework for that, the rest of the capabilities a CDP offers will lean towards being obsolete, as they’re not operating from complete, accurate and active buyer profiles to begin with. So, we’re quite excited with our evaluation. Let’s dive deeper into Leadspace’s Identity Resolution & Unified Profiles framework.
Our identity resolution framework is based on deterministic/probabilistic identifiers (IDs). Unique/non-unique company and person IDs are used in clustering algorithms to unify profiles and validate/dedupe data. Unification logic is customer-configurable for business needs. For scalability, we use probabilistic IDs, PII and anonymous, to complement unique IDs for matching. Probabilistic clustering leverages decision trees (XGBoost) and other algorithms.
Clients that deploy the B2B Revenue Waterfall™ leverage us to support execution on the model. In order to optimize for accuracy, we use deterministic IDs for following types of unique Person and Company data. Our Person Unique Identifiers include Workmail, Webmail, Social Profile, Phone, and Cookie/Device ID, and our Company Unique Identifiers include Domain, ID/DUNS, Social Profile, Phone, and IP.
We provide identifiers at different levels of the company hierarchy so you have the ability to unify and create single records/groupings at the global HQ level, Country HQ level, Business HQ level and/or at specific regional/site locations. Account unification solutions are built to support the operational structure of organizations to identify buying centers and teams for customers’ offerings as well as the legal structure. For example, our operational hierarchies can be mapped to D&B DUNs legal based hierarchies to provide this interoperable framework across functions and teams. These hierarchies link profiles together and persist across systems. Events and behaviors then update and inform those profiles.
With Leadspace, you can expect the best identity resolution available – just ask Forrester. Check out The Forrester Wave™: B2B Customer Data Platforms, Q4 2023, where we were the only platform to score a solid 5 out of 5 in identity resolution and unified profiles. To learn more about how you can achieve best-in-class B2B profiles that you can trust, backed by the best identity resolution available (all while cutting your data spend in half), schedule your meeting today. Seamlessly create complete, accurate B2B buyer profiles that are pre-blended and active with unrivaled, embedded third-party data for people, companies and accounts. Eliminate your buyer data silos and accelerate the success of your sales & marketing campaigns with Leadspace’s CDP for best-in-class B2B buyer profiles you can bet your business on!