Tl;dr - Marketing and sales teams need actionable insights to support their ABM work, but they need it in meaningful context for efficient and effective sales outreach. Having the right company and personnel news, as part of a contact level™ intent data feed provides lots of sales enablement opportunities.
Scoops and More
ZoomInfo offers a helpful service called "Scoops." They describe it as "projects and leadership moves uncovered by our in-house research team. These 'Triggering Events' help you get your foot in the door ahead of the competition."
It's a very powerful feature that gives sales teams actionable insights to personalize conversations with account-based marketing and target account sales prospects, and to prompt those conversations when significant events indicate a potential opportunity.
After all, not only are vapid "check in" emails unproductive; they're counter productive. They establish your company and your team as mediocre. And mediocre is not a path to success today.
In contrast, starting a conversation based on some buzz, or a triggering event (new departmental leader, recently funded, new office - is that still a thing??!! - hiring for certain job roles, sponsoring events, and publishing certain types of content) creates a basis for legitimate communication that skilled sales people can turn into engagement.
So where do you source these? How do they fit into your marketing data stack? How do you put the relevant info in front of the right reps at the right time? How do you leverage the data for account-based marketing impact?
Enrichment vs Trigger Data
This type of data is an interesting hybrid of enrichment data and purchase intent. It's high-level company related news, but more dynamic than most enrichment data. At the same time it's not necessarily contact level™ purchase intent data either and may be of tangential interest but not necessarily representing a purchase initiative.
These "events" typically account level insights that carry implications for engagement with specific individuals and possible timing and qualification hints.
A good way to think of them is as indicative triggers or qualification data.
For instance, if your ICP calls for certain trend attributes (launching new products, recently funded, opening new office, hiring for certain job roles) as criteria for focus, then "Scoops" or news could help in the account fit scoring algorithm. Similarly, those same sorts of signals could indicate company initiatives that would potentially predict an account is more likely to invest in products like yours. If you create AI chatbot software for customer support, for example, and see lots of hiring for customer success job roles, it might mean that they're investing in improving support and your product could be a welcome addition.
That contrasts with the traditional intent data play which focuses on direct signals. Using the example above, traditional intent data plays would highlight companies researching AI for chatbot competitors or taking action on key terms around AI, chatbots and customer support.
Compared to Google Alerts?
Now you might be saying "Wait a minute. Every super star sales person I know has this information in account, contact and industry related Google Alerts that they've set up. Why does this matter?"
Great point. Those are the super stars. How about the rest?
Also, how about making it more efficient - harvesting, and parsing that info for them automatically (as well as monitoring other sources using analysis which isn't available through Alerts)?
The point of this tool is to stream it to the right people, at the right time, with the right sales enablement to facilitate its use.
Relevant Conversations
Let's return to the primary use case for this data.
It gives your sales team something to discuss and/or an indication of when it's time to have a discussion.
Combined with routine monitoring of news and industry press, the company news items will often provide a hook for a productive and timely conversation, and insights to fill those customization fields in email templates and call scripts.
Perhaps the best way to describe them is as the relevant details for dynamic personalization that will help to grab attention from overwhelmed buyers.
Of course it's up to the sale team to use the insights effectively, and that's where marketing has a great opportunity to help with sales enablement approaches to push the dots close enough together for sales to support relevant conversations efficiently.
Internal alert workflows can be built to notify a rep of an observation along with some insights on how the event might be interpreted/what it might indicate, along with some possible questions to ask and content to share that might be relevant.
IntentData.io News & Company Signals for ABM
Zoom's Scoops and Google Alerts compliment various industry resources and other providers of this sort of alert info.
IntentData.io also can provide information of this type along with 3rd party intent data. News signals and triggers include:
- Opening new offices
- Recent funding/investment
- Product announcements/launches
- Leadership Changes
- Partnership and client win announcements
- Hiring for specific roles
- Awards & recognitions
These compliment the technographic data that is also available
As more companies move toward an account-based marketing (ABM) model AND SIMULTANEOUSLY work to improve efficiency and scale, having these details from a consolidated source with coordinated and segmented feeds and integrations becomes very important.
Combined with 3rd party contact level intent data that's collected through observation of public actions (not problematic bidstream or limited scope / opaque topic driven publishing coops), this news/trigger info can provide important actionable insight for marketing and sales teams.
