Keeping B2B buyer profiles up-to-date is essential for maintaining effective sales and marketing strategies. Unfortunately, keeping profiles up-to-date is tedious and often neglected. Failing to update our customer or buyer profiles does your sales and marketing teams a tremendous disservice. Your teams could spend thousands of dollars and weeks of focus trying to get in touch with a great lead from last year, completely unaware that the person changed jobs three months ago – all because their profile within your CRM and marketing automation systems wasn’t up-to-date. People change jobs and companies go throughM&A all the time – and your sales and marketing teams need to stay informed. That’s just one of the many ways your teams will lose with outdated buyer profiles. Having accurate, up-to-date data seems like a no-brainer, right? Let’s consider why many sales and marketing teams don’t always have the data they need.
It takes a lot of buying signals to build the buyer profiles that our sales and marketing teams need to win business. Firmographics, demographics, technographics, intent, 1st-party data, predictive and engagement. Generally speaking, we can’t get all of those signals from one place. Instead, we’re forced to buy numerous sets of static data from several vendors, then blend it all together. Buying multiple sets of data from multiple sources is inherently expensive, and manually combining that data with our first-party data is time-consuming, cumbersome and error-prone. We might jump through those hurdles at first, but the problem arises when we need to update it.
A static data set is just a snapshot in time, and there’s no way to tell when data has changed to the point where you need a new snapshot. This means that in order to ensure our buyer profiles are up-to-date, we need to regularly buy all of our data over and over again, continuously blending it all together with the old data. That’s going to be very expensive, and it’s going to require a lot of time and effort dedicated to data unification. In many cases, by the time you’ve enriched your new data with the old data, that new data has already become old data. Naturally, many companies will decide that their slightly old data is good enough because they can’t justify the cost of constant data purchases or the time spent unifying it.
Not updating your buyer profiles is a huge mistake in a world of data-driven decision making, where all of the decisions you make depend on having accurate, complete and up-to-date data. Even the best predictive AI models will point you in the wrong direction if the data being analyzed isn’t correct. Simply put, if you want your sales and marketing teams to have the tools they need to reach out and close business, you need to give them buyer profiles that are dynamically updated.
Let’s look at 10 common strategies for ensuring that your buyer profiles are current and accurate, then consider a more realistic solution for automating the entire process.
1. Regular Data Audits and Cleansing
Conduct regular audits of your customer data to identify and correct inaccuracies, duplicates, and outdated information. Use data cleansing tools and software to automate the process of identifying and fixing data quality issues.
2. Automated Data Enrichment
Integrate with third-party data providers to automatically enrich and update your buyer profiles with the latest information. Use APIs to connect your CRM and marketing automation platforms with data enrichment services for real-time updates.
3. CRM and Marketing Automation Systems
Ensure that your CRM and marketing automation systems are integrated and synchronized, providing a single source of truth for customer data. Use dynamic fields and triggers to automatically update buyer profiles based on new interactions and data inputs.
4. Engagement and Interaction Tracking
Track website visits, content downloads, and other online interactions to gather insights and update profiles based on recent activity. Monitor email engagement (opens, clicks, responses) to keep profiles current and identify changes in buyer interest or behavior.
5. Regular Communication and Surveys
Regularly solicit feedback from your customers through surveys, feedback forms, and direct communication to update their preferences and needs. Encourage customers to update their information through personalized emails or during regular check-ins.
6. Social Media and Online Presence
Use social listening tools to monitor mentions, interactions, and updates from your buyers on social media platforms. Regularly check and update profiles based on changes in job titles, company moves, and other professional updates from LinkedIn.
7. Sales Team Insights
Schedule regular meetings with your sales team to gather insights and updates about their interactions with buyers. Encourage sales reps to update buyer profiles in the CRM after each significant interaction or meeting.
8. AI and Machine Learning
Utilize AI and machine learning to analyze historical data and predict changes or trends in buyer behavior, helping you update profiles proactively. Implement AI-driven tools that provide automated suggestions for profile updates based on recent data and interactions.
9. Integrate Multiple Data Sources
Integrate data from ERP and financial systems to get a complete view of buyer behavior and update profiles with transaction history. Integrate with customer support systems to capture and update profiles based on support interactions and issues.
10. Segmentation and Personalization
Use dynamic segmentation and tailor your marketing campaigns and sales outreach based on updated profiles to maintain relevance and engagement.
Sounds simple enough, right?
Obviously, following through with all of these common strategies, and keeping your entire team involved enough to make them work, is not an easy task. These strategies make the whole process sound more complicated than I initially laid out. While all of these strategies are good strategies to implement, I bring them up only to show how complex the process can be for keeping buyer profiles up-to-date – without a dynamic data solution.
Achieving such a feat will require an AI-driven system for resolving buyer identities across numerous static databases and aggregating all of that data to build robust buyer profiles that automatically update as the source data changes. A Customer Data Platform (CDP) can empower sales and marketing teams to seamlessly blend their siloed customer data into a single source of truth – developing buyer profiles for people, companies (even company divisions with hierarchies) and accounts. With the Leadspace CDP solution, those unified profiles are automatically updated in real-time as source data changes and new data is ingested.
Leadspace’s Comprehensive Dynamic Data Solution
Unlike standard data providers, Leadspace is not a static database. Leadspace ingests all of your existing first-party data, enriches it with 30+ embedded third-party B2B sources and unifies it all, automatically creating dynamic buyer profiles for people and companies with full hierarchies. Each of our 200+ fields cross-reference multiple sources to populate the most accurate and up-to-date values, and can be scheduled to automatically update as people and companies change, ensuring you’re relying on the most up-to-date, operationalizable buyer data available. Our direct integrations with Salesforce, Salesloft, Marketo, Eloqua and Hubspot ensure you have all the firmographics, technographics, intent and hierarchy data you need at your fingertips.
We do all of this with our best-in-class (according to Forrester) Identity Resolution framework for mapping data to the correct buyer profiles and connecting them all together with hierarchies. 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, and suppliers. 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.
Conclusion
Without an effective means of associating accurate, up-to-date buyer data to the correct person, company or buying committee, sales and marketing teams should expect to encounter numerous challenges in making their buyer data actionable for true, data-driven decision-making. Worst case scenario, you’ll end up actively creating bad customer/prospect experiences as a result of poor personalization due to inaccurate or outdated buyer profiles. The right data attributed to the wrong buyer is ultimately wrong, and bad personalized outreach will make for a worse experience than no personalization at all.
Long story short, Leadspace’s dynamic data and best-in-class Identity Resolution framework, you can ensure that your B2B buyer profiles remain accurate, relevant, and useful for your sales and marketing teams, leading to more effective targeting, personalization, and engagement. Check out this CDPI paper to learn more about how an Identity Resolution framework enables your team to optimize data into a single source of truth for B2B sales and marketing.