build it or buy it

Why is B2B Marketing still struggling to connect?

By Nick Miles

Why is B2B Marketing still struggling to connect?

A primary goal of marketing is to fill the funnel with high quality leads. One of the most critical components, is ensuring your message is connecting to those people as individuals. This isn’t new but the scale and complexity, is. For enterprise, the journey commences with the drive to obtain the correct information on all relevant and target companies & contacts so the road to engagement and qualification can begin.

With a growing emphasis being put on Account Based Marketing, and more airtime being placed on “being more human”, what are the available options that ensure a timely and effective solution to meet the data needs of your strategy?

Buy It

The purchase of a list containing potentially relevant contacts that will bring you closer to your ABM goals. A few benefits are quickly presented:

1. Speed

2. Cost

But lingering in the back of your mind is relevancy, quality and compliance. How accurate is this list, and how can I prove it if asked to?

A few questions come to mind…

1. How quickly and accurately do people update their personal information in the digital world?

2. Aren’t job descriptions & roles often ambiguous and elaborate on sites such as Linkedin?

3. What about all the complexities in multi-national conglomerates and how clearly defined are the organizational structures and power bases?

4. Where does this information actually come from?

Stop for a moment.

If people aren’t updating this information, then could it be out of date, irrelevant or even embellished? How do I know these contacts relate exactly to the roles the sales team has requested to meet with? Aggregated or crowd sourced is generally how list purchases are created – through the big data interconnected digital world. Naturally, to no fault of the Data Vendor, the data is not as current as it could be. This option is best placed when brand building or to create awareness when pin point accuracy or qualified leads are not the objective.

Build It

Rather than hedging your bets with a list purchase in hopes of yielding some account intelligence, many marketing organizations are leveraging account profiling and list building to develop a highly targeted foundation for their ABM engagement strategy. Simply put, account profiling is a means of building the right database to garner the most effective and results driven campaign.

A few benefits of list building through account profiling come to mind:

1. Complete 100% accuracy of the account & contact information

2. Sales relevant contacts that have the correct level of decision making

3. Contacts in functional areas that have challenges my business can solve

4. Organizational insight into the decision-making infrastructure

This approach provides you with accurate knowledge of key decision makers and influencers, giving complete confidence in your data for the upcoming campaigns. This option is best used with highly targeted outreach where precision is required to get your message to exactly the right people at exactly the right time.

Compared to purchasing a list, the investment is higher and the quality far greater, however when making a decision, the question becomes what is the cost of getting it wrong?

Making it count

Time is precious and the digital world is noisy. Prospects’ expectations are increasing and demands of personalization and relevance are growing at an alarming rate.

Marketing strategies won’t win unless they are built on a solid foundation of relevant and accurate contact data. Sales won’t win unless they’re meeting with the right people at the right time.

Targeting exactly the right contacts has never been so important. So, when deciding upon the options, take a step back and ask – What guarantees to get me closer to my goals because I am engaging with up-to-date relevant decision makers and influencers and putting my message in front of exactly the right people?

Organizations who fail to recognize the importance of highly accurate contact data when competing to build key relationships and compress sales cycles, will struggle to deliver a high ROI again and again.

To learn more and to start building the right account and contact for your marketing campaign success, contact Nick Miles.

Further reading

Scaling Your Sales Through Customer Retention Podcast

Scaling Your Sales Through Customer Retention

What if you could keep your customers for years and continue to grow with them? What if everyone in your company was responsible for customer retention? What if everyone in your company sold? When a culture of caring permeates your company….

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• Data Integrity

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In time of dramatic change, with technologies and behaviors changing faster than ever before, our core principles and experience enable us to provide a timeless framework to deliver results where others repeatedly fail. Based on years of research, centering on deep fundamental truths and taking our own knowledge and customer successes, the alignment and awareness of these 3 focus areas, working independently or seamlessly together, we ultimately deliver a greater return on investment for our customers.