NOTE: This post originally appeared on the Intent Data publication on Medium.
Have you downloaded and read DemandGen Report’s 2019 B2B Buyers Survey Report yet? It’s sponsored by Demandbase and available for download here.
Here are some key takeaways on buyer behavior.
Great research like this can yield important insights. The chasm to cross, however, is to appropriately incorporate them into our revenue growth approach.
Contact Level™ Intent Data provides significant flexibility to leverage these insights.
Buyers are ready to learn from great sales people and content….but too often the lesson plans are based on the product/service rather than the prospect’s priorities. After all, there’s no real way to know the problem a buyer is working on solving. Except there is. And that has powerful implications.
Paid ads work. Putting them in front of the right audiences is a challenge. Contact level intent data enables companies to create custom audiences for remarketing on platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. The remarketing can be targeted based on the competitor with whom prospects have interacted, the details of the challenge they’re trying to solve, role/title, stage in buying journey, industry, etc.
Buyers are moving quickly to pricing and RFPs. That means the window to attract their attention organically, or stumble across them with serendipitous outbound sales is shorter. It’s more critical to know who is actively engaged with competitors. Contact level intent data provides those signals.
As buying teams expand and buying cycles lengthen, the status quo is rapidly becoming the key competitor to many B2B sales teams.
It’s relatively easy to identify deal champions and putative decision-makers, but understanding the roles, titles, priorities, and agendas involved is nearly impossible.
Contact level intent data can help. By identifying the actual people taking action, and alerting the sales rep to signals from accounts with pending deals, it’s possible to identify conflicting initiatives, additional players and competitive engagement.
“83% of buyers report that they often accelerate or put purchase decisions on hold based on their business’ changing needs and priorities.”
DemandGen Report’s conclusion, therefore, is that “vendors have to ensure they are positioned to help accelerate that decision as much as possible.”
That’s the allure of purchase intent data. It’s also where typical account-level data stumbles. These fast-moving, multi-party buying decisions require granular, contact level detail to obtain the critical insights necessary to be in front of the right people, at the right time, with the message that will be meaningful AND HELPFUL to them.
That’s the key to accelerating complex buying decisions.
(DemandGen Report’s John Dering and Andrew Gaffney will dig into the report in more detail during a webinar on 15 July 2019. More info here if you’re interested.)