As previously published on 7/11/24 in MarTech
Did you know that you have your own intent data, you don’t need to buy it. If you are executing campaigns, especially in existing accounts you have data that goes much deeper than what you could buy.
You just know where, and how, to look for it. Once you find it you will realize that what has been sold, or said, to you about “signals” isn’t exactly true.
As marketers, we’ve been told that there is a connection between a “signal” of a prospect seeking information with their interest in your company or product. That a response to an offer made could imply they’re “in the market to buy”
This is how Zoominfo describes intent data based on signal strength.
- “Derived intent signals are a mix of first-party and third-party signals. These offer insights into behaviors that indicate interest in a company, such as ad engagement, web activity, topic engagement, and technology use.”
As a result, we have a tendency to think of this as a MQL. But this is where things break from reality. Again from ZoomInfo:
- “Identify interest: Purchase-intent signals help identify which companies are actively researching your solution before they fill out a form on your site or engage with your sales and marketing teams.”
This is simply not true, it’s an assumption. Let me break it down, unless you understand a buyer’s personality, which would give you real insight into their behaviors and motivations, and you are able to observe this over time, you can not assume that they are “actively searching” for what you are offering because they have ‘purchase intent.”
We have found only a small percent (5-10%) of cases where this is true, and we have evaluated engagement and intent data across 7 industries and thousands of interactions. When you look at your own data you will find the same thing.
Given the fact that 5% of your targeted audience is in a buying cycle at any one time this would make sense. But what is more interesting is what is in the 95% of data that you aren’t analyzing or buying.
Here’s what you need to know about to analyzing your own engagement data
First, pull data from your sales and marketing systems at the account level. We’re often so busy executing we rarely have time to look at what has happened in the past. You’ll want to pull 12 to 18 months of engagement data based on the length of the sales cycle.
Pull data on 10 accounts to start. They could be the 10 biggest or most important (based on pipeline value) accounts. Here’s what you’ll want to look for in the data.
- Engagement over time – this is an important metric because it’s a measure of mindshare you have with a buyer/contact. Look for how they have engaged with your outreach over the past 12 to 18 months. Is it a “burst,” for example, a C-level engages multiple times in a month or is it “consistent” – a couple of engagements over a longer period of time.
- Engagement time – how much time did they spend with whatever was offered. Was it millisecond or seconds? This will help you understand their level of engagement. Are they glancing at what was sent or did they dig deeper?
- Engagement frequency – did they hit one thing multiple times in one day, and over a period of time? This may be an indicator of them forwarding information to others. And it gives you insight into who might be the “router” of information inside of the account.
- Engagement offer – what are they engaging with, e.g. what offer or outreach. Are they looking at webinar invites, new case studies, reading the newsletter, etc. Having 10 accounts will give you real insight into what content really matters.
This insight will help you understand if the audience is interested in your brand, solution, or just what was offered.
Most times, it will be just the offer. But that’s a great insight because it allows you to narrow down your activities to the things that really matter to your audience. What content offers really do is they open a window for a salesperson to be viewed as valuable. It doesn’t tell you if the target is in a buying window or in a certain part of the buyer’s journey, unfortunately.
Giving the sales organization insight into how, and what, audiences are engaging with enables them to focus on starting a relationship. Through a better understanding of why people are doing what they are doing, it gets to their real motivations. The signal becomes insight.
For example, did they look at your upcoming webinar invite or user conference? How many times did they look at it? How many emails related to those events did they open? Did they attend the event? If they didn’t, you now know they were interested.
This creates an opportunity for the salesperson to offer an on demand version of the webinar or maybe a free pass to next year’s event. They’re building a relationship based on interest, not jumping to selling a solution where they have shown no real interest in pursuing.
And that is what is in your 95% of the engagement data that doesn’t get analyzed. It tells sales who to spend their time with, and how to start a relationship, that one day could become a new customer.
