In the last few blogs I discussed how to discover your TAM and assign territories, then how to determine where to focus your sales and marketing efforts by using AI/ML models to score leads and understand who is ready, eager and able to buy your product. We also discussed how to turn the profiles within your TAM into actionable segments to drive your business. Now let’s look at what is needed to make the right decisions with all this great data to accelerate business outcomes and maximize ROI.
An average B2B database has well over 50,000 individuals. All of those profiles should be enriched with marketing campaign engagement data, intent, scoring and buying signals etc. It should be updated in real-time as source data changes and new data is ingested – along with using that data to make sound business decisions. That’s a lot to ask from a traditional salesforce or marketing automation platform. While marketing automation platforms are valuable for taking immediate action when working within a single channel or a small data set, that is not enough in today’s fast paced and dynamic markets. We need to take it to the next level with a platform that envelopes multiple channels, firmographics, scoring models, and other real-time consumer behaviors to include and analyze those insights that marketing automation platforms neglect. This is where a decisioning platform, like a customer data platform (CDP), can help.
Why Is a Customer Data Platform Built for ABM?
With a Customer Data Platform, companies can automate insights, propensity scores, and other data-driven decision-making processes, putting the power of your data directly into the hands of those who need it most – your sales and marketing teams. Using a CDP, you can create complete buyer profiles and leverage propensity models to quickly seek out closeable leads and truly focus your efforts with an account-based marketing approach.
Let’s explore the five steps to optimizing your sales territories for an account-based marketing approach. Let’s look at the best practices for each of the five steps and how a CDP’s decisioning capabilities can facilitate and automate these best practices along the way.
Best Practices for Optimizing Sales Territories or Account Assignments or ABM Picks:
Step 1: Understand your ICP (at the account and person level), and configure it via firmographic data for accounts and demographic data for contacts – create it with AI modeling and lookalikes for accounts and contacts. This should be based on the kind of accounts and contacts that you or your competitors have closed.
With a CDP, you can achieve accurate and complete multi-sourced AI profiles by leveraging embedded third-party company and people data sources. You can automatically unify your variably-sourced first-party data with embedded third-party data at scale with business-focused tools for the industry’s only TAM to opportunity profiling and activation. This sets the stage for a single source of truth as you seamlessly blend siloed customer data into a single source of truth at multiple levels—profiles for people, accounts, and buying centers – with the industry’s best lead-to-account matching.
Step 2: Create your TAM by territory and gather the account universe from third-party data tools. Use a customer data platform that uses third-party and your internal data to understand the TAM universe against your AI model. Do this for every territory so that you understand if a state or zip code has the right resources.
With a CDP solution you can turbocharge your growth strategy with Fit and Intent models to identify the highest-returning market segments and optimize territory assignments to maximize sales effectiveness. Put the right account contact details, buying signals and propensity-to-buy scores directly in front of your reps to prioritize leads and opportunities in their pipeline.
Step 3: Map terrain of each territory or campaign outreach with customers and whitespace. List the number of companies you do business with in each territory and look at your overall whitespace and lookalike companies against that territory. Use this to understand renewals, upsell and new logo strategies and to determine resource allocation.
With a CDP, you can master your whitespace by leveraging TAM and ideal customer profile to understand your most attractive whitespace then laser-focus campaign segment members by targeting your best lookalike accounts and personas.
Step 4: Identifying the right and ready ABM accounts for each territory or campaign. Match your weekly intent vendor signals to the ICP criteria for each of your salesforce accounts and integrate account AI models and intent signals directly into Salesforce to prioritize accounts by fit and readiness. Update this weekly as intent signals and topics change every week.
A powerful CDP solution enables you to enhance your active profiles with Fit and Intent models to automate insights – enabling your marketing team to create complete buyer profiles. Leverage decisioning models to quickly seek out and achieve closeable business and take the guesswork out of identifying the top strategic accounts for investment by focusing on those who are most likely to buy your product.
Step 5: Identifying the right and ready contacts for each territory or campaign. Match your Marketo, Pardot or Hubspot scores against your Salesforce prospects and accounts, then use persona scoring with engagement scoring to identify the best engaged contacts/prospects to go after. Use this to lower regional sales and marketing list buys.
With a CDP you can add the personal touch to your unified profiles, creating the best buyer profiles from engagement to personas as you automatically leverage profiles with personal demographics and buying behaviors from social signals and interests to statistically assign personas instead of nondescript job titles. This further enables you to optimize your marketing and sales engagement by leveraging AI predictive models to accurately prioritize the top 25% of leads that deliver 60-80% of your business. You would also be able to create and activate precision segments with engagement and other account or buyer personalization to optimize conversion rates.
In summary, by utilizing a Customer Data Platform (CDP) you can leverage AI, ML and custom modeling to prioritize ABM account selection and garner actionable insights surrounding data-driven next-best actions. Unification, active profiles, intent, persona, look-alike, and engagement scoring processes can all be automated and updated in real-time with a powerful CDP solution. Additionally, the AI/ML-driven scoring models can be used to drive/trigger automated workflows & processes across sales, marketing, & customer success use cases. This includes but isn’t limited to:
- Enabling inbound leads to be directly routed to sales or specific nurturing streams based on propensity-to-buy attributes.
- Utilizing AI-driven intent scoring to enable customer success to proactively improve customer retention and prevent churn.
- Improving BDR outbound and digital marketing conversion rates by utilizing AI/ML-driven propensity-to-buy and intent scoring models to more intelligently curate ABM audiences and improve ad bidding strategies.
- Recommending content stream by persona, or product best offering typically in cross/up-sell scenarios.
Empower your marketing, sales and BDRs to reach the right people within the right accounts, at the right time, with the right content – faster than your competitors. For more information, check out our product sheet Optimizing Sales Territories or watch our webinar, Best Practices for Improving Sales Territory Management, and take the first step towards hopping on the fastest road to revenue.