Flying Blind in Your Sales and Marketing? Account Intelligence to the Rescue

If you read my last article about account blindness, you understand all too well that fragmented systems and increasing buyer anonymity have made sales and marketing a struggle for many B2B organizations.

The bad news is that such a deep lack of insights is incredibly prevalent, but there’s good news, too. In order to go-to-market successfully, there’s a lot you can do to gain account intelligence and stop account blindness in its tracks.

Defragment Your Go-To-Market (GTM)

Even though breaking down technological silos within organizations has been a hot topic of conversation in recent years, silos are still everywhere. Such fragmentation in your GTM is what causes smart marketers to unintentionally spam their buyers with intrusive and irrelevant interactions. They act based on hunches, rather than real information. They use their right hand to send an email, not realizing their left hand has already sent a similar one. This clunkiness is not just annoying to a customer; it can be a total deal-breaker. 

So, how can you defragment your systems? By pulling together all your first-party and third-party data under one roof. Data from your CRM, marketing automation system, corporate email and calendar, website and advertising metrics are all considered first-party, whereas third-party consists of data like company information, hierarchies and groupings, news and events, technographics, contacts, social insights, connections, intent and account identification. 

In order to tap fully into account intelligence, you must not only have all of these data sources in existence — but also be able to integrate them, cleanse them and make sense of them. By doing so, you can orchestrate every action across all of your systems and channels, through advertising, account-based experience and sales motions. This creates a unified, smarter approach that treats buyers like humans and builds brand trust.  

De-Anonymize Your Buyers 

The ability to move through digital channels more anonymously than ever before might be attractive to your buyers, but it puts marketers between a rock and a hard place. How are you supposed to find and reach buyers if you’re increasingly unable to know who they are? The only solution to this is to de-anonymize your buyers. 

By using advanced software with first-party, third-party, technographics, firmographics and intent data, you can finally have visibility into otherwise anonymous buying signals. Look for a solution with this depth and breadth of data, as it’s the only type powerful enough to give you the most accurate account identification possible today. 

Putting It All Into Action

Of course, the two previous steps won’t get you very far if you don’t use your account intelligence to activate sales and marketing motions. Based on these comprehensive insights, here are some of the ways you can move the needle on your go-to-market: 

• Empower your SDRs (Sales Development Representatives), AEs (Account Executives) and sales team with knowledge of the in-market accounts that are richest in opportunity so they can close more deals.
• Share your findings with your marketing team, so they can personalize the end-to-end buying journey for your prospects.
• Give sales and marketing advanced visibility into buyers’ behaviors so they can more successfully orchestrate cross-channel campaigns, provide top-notch content experiences to your accounts and measure your programs. 
• Provide your data warehouse with clean, validated data that can be used to create powerful reports and predictive models.  

When you prioritize account intelligence, you’ll have what you need to know who your buyers are and have better success reaching them — instead of flying blind.

This article was originally published on CMSWire.