In the last two blogs I discussed how to discover your TAM and assign territories, and then how to determine where to focus your sales & marketing efforts by using AI/ML models to score leads and understand who is ready and able to buy your product. Now let’s look at how to turn the profiles within your TAM into actionable segments to drive your business.
What makes a segment more “closeable”? We believe that the best segment strategy starts with two things – coverage and context. Do your segments start with your Total Addressable Market and cover its entirety? And are each of the TAM segments then divided into buyer profiles from your Ideal Buyer Profile? If done well, you’ll have precise segments that you can further hone-in on over time with activation, engagement and other account or buyer personalization like products owned, industry or use case context. Finally it’s important to understand which sub segments perform the best and may show intent or better conversion. Once you have effective segments, it’s time to activate, score, route and alert.
In the times of direct marketing, we were told that the list is one of the most important ingredients of a successful campaign. The truth is that creating a segment or list for a campaign is pretty much driven almost entirely by a campaign manager’s gut instinct. In recent years we’ve added intent to the process, but we’ve seen that it typically only adds a couple of percentage points in upping the odds for creating closeable demand. The most important buying signals come from understanding the types of buyers your team has successfully sold to, how to recognize them and classify incoming leads into A, B, C or D categories.
Once the classification of incoming demand is done, making campaign activation quick and easy is a big part of streamlining your customer journey and improving your customer experience. By implementing a Customer Data Platform (CDP), companies can enable their sales & marketing teams to create smart segments and automatically activate them across numerous channels – all in the same tool. Furthermore, with a CDP you can receive automatic alerts about campaign performances that enable you to further direct the right campaigns towards the right people within the right accounts at the right time.
Some features of a leading activation and alerting framework include:
- Users can build account segments based on firmographics (geo, industry, size, revenue, etc.), look-alike modeling, predictive fit/intent scores, and install base technologies together with first-party attributes – at all hierarchy levels.
- Users can expand account segments with priority contacts using targeted personas and any contact attribute. Once created, segments can be updated via workflows.
- Data-agnostic segmentation is possible, creating a unified database of first-party data combined with embedded data and other third-party data sets clients have already licensed.
- The ability to ingest first-party data and enable it as criteria for granular, focused targeting and segmentation purposes, e.g., to target accounts that score high for intent and predictive fit that exist within a specific territory/geography.
- Users can directly activate these segments/audiences in CRM, MAP, sales enablement, and digital ads via direct integrations or platforms like LiveRamp.
To summarize, implementing the right CDP solution can facilitate and improve your sales and marketing campaigns through seamless activation and alerts processes. Figure out your available market, see who is ready and able to buy, then activate campaign segments that are increasingly customized for specific target accounts. Accelerate your sales and marketing campaigns and improve their success rates by implementing the right CDP solution with activation and alert functions. Better segments. Better activation. Better decisions.
To learn more about optimizing campaigns based on territory assignments, watch this webinar on Best Practices for Improving Sales Territory Management , and get on the fastest road to revenue.
