Author: Mariangel Babbel

How to better understand your customers’ needs (without the limitations of traditional customer data)

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Want to understand your customers better than—and before—anyone else? Develop a deep understanding of their needs and pain points? Predict what factors influence them to buy before they even speak to one of your sales reps? 

Well, we hate to break it to you, but… your typical ideal customer profile isn’t gonna cut it. Why? Think about it. 

Has a company ever selected your business as their preferred vendor simply because they are a software development company with over 5,000 employees, headquartered in the Northeast region and heavily invested in cloud-based ERP systems? 

Or is it because your business offers a solution that solves their pain points, addresses their specific needs and delivers exceptional value? 

Probably the latter! So, you need a way to uncover the underlying motivations, preferences and behaviors that drive your customers’ decision-making processes.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to harness the power of exegraphic data to better understand your customers’ core motivations and preferences. That way, you can develop more effective marketing and sales strategies that resonate with your target audience and drive meaningful results.

Here’s an overview of what you’ll learn: 

  • The importance of knowing your customers beyond firmographic and technographic data
  • How exegraphic data complements traditional data for enhanced customer understanding
  • Example of how exegraphic data helps you understand and target your ideal customers better
  • How to find and begin harnessing the power of exegraphics
  • Additional methods to gain insight into customer needs and pain points

Let’s begin!

 

The importance of knowing your customer beyond firmographic and technographic data

Firmographic and technographic data have long been relied on as sources of customer insights. These data types offer valuable initial insights. They, however, fall short when it comes to truly understanding customer needs and motivations.

One limitation of relying solely on firmographic data is its inability to capture the complexity and diversity within customer segments. Companies within the same industry or similar size may have vastly different preferences and behaviors. Additionally, firmographic data fails to provide insights into the underlying reasons behind customer preferences and decision-making processes.

Technographic data, on the other hand, provides insight into the tools and technologies customers use. While this information can help understand if your solution might be a good fit for the company, it fails to delve into the deeper aspects of customer behavior or the factors influencing their purchasing decisions.

 

The transformative potential of exegraphics for understanding customer buying behavior 

Exegraphic data helps to overcome the limitations of firmographic and technographic data. By examining how companies operate and behave, exegraphics enable sales and marketing professionals to gain insights into the driving forces behind customer decision-making processes.

Exegraphic data encompasses various dimensions, including:

  • Company culture and values
  • Organizational structure
  • Industry trends
  • Competitive positioning
  • Product or service differentiation
  • Messaging and brand positioning
  • Marketing and sales strategies
  • Functional roles and responsibilities
  • Skills and expertise
  • Job postings and hiring requirements
  • Growth rates and funding

By analyzing these dimensions—and combinations of them, you gain a comprehensive understanding of the context in which customers make decisions, allowing you to tailor your sales and marketing strategies accordingly.

 

How exegraphic data complements traditional data for enhanced customer understanding

Exegraphic data complements traditional data sources by adding depth and context to your understanding of customers. While firmographic and technographic data provide a foundation, exegraphic data fills in the gaps and provides a more nuanced perspective.

For example, before incorporating exegraphic data, your ideal customer profile might resemble the following:

  • Company size: Mid-sized to large enterprises with 500-5,000 employees.
  • Industry: Technology and software development.
  • Geographic location: Concentrated in metropolitan areas in the Northeast US.
  • Technographic: Utilizes cloud-based infrastructure, agile development methodologies and data analytics tools.

While this profile provides a broad understanding of your target customer, it lacks the depth and context that exegraphic data can offer. By incorporating exegraphics, your ideal customer profile can evolve to include more specific characteristics, such as:

  • Company culture and values: Seeks innovation, values collaboration and emphasizes work-life balance.
  • Organizational structure: Flat hierarchy, cross-functional teams and agile decision-making processes.
  • Industry trends: Adapts quickly to emerging technologies, focuses on digital transformation and values customer-centric approaches.
  • Functional expertise: Strong product development capabilities, emphasizes user experience and prioritizes data security.

This deeper understanding allows you to tailor your messaging, offerings and strategies to resonate with your target audience on a more meaningful level, increasing the likelihood of successful customer acquisition and retention. 

 

Example of how exegraphics can help you target your ideal customers better

Now, let’s imagine how your marketing team might use that updated customer profile to create a demand generation campaign. Rather than relying on generic marketing strategies, they can leverage the updated customer profile enriched with exegraphic data to develop a targeted demand generation strategy.

Here’s how they might approach it.

 

Tailored messaging

With insights into the company’s culture, values and industry trends, your marketing team can craft messaging that resonates with the target audience. Highlighting the importance of innovation, collaboration, and work-life balance can capture their attention and align with their values.

 

Personalized content

Understanding the organizational structure and functional expertise of your ideal customers allows your team to develop content that addresses their specific pain points and challenges. This could include case studies, whitepapers or blog posts showcasing how your product or service can enhance product development capabilities, improve user experience or strengthen data security.

 

Channel selection

Knowing your target audience’s preferred tools and platforms enables your marketing team to choose the most effective channels for reaching them. If they use cloud-based infrastructure, for example, investing in targeted online advertising or partnering with relevant technology blogs or forums may yield satisfactory results.

 

Thought leadership opportunities

By identifying industry events, conferences or webinars where your target audience is likely to participate, you can create thought leadership opportunities for your company. For example, you can proactively seek speaking engagements or panel discussions to establish credibility and engage with potential customers.

 

Account based marketing (ABM)

With a deep understanding of your ideal customer, your team can employ ABM tactics to personalize interactions with key accounts. This could involve creating custom landing pages, hosting exclusive events or developing targeted campaigns designed specifically for software development companies in the Northeast region utilizing cutting-edge technologies.

 

Relationship building

By understanding their company culture, you can align your interactions to build trust and rapport. For example, you could engage with them on social media platforms where they are active, respond to their inquiries promptly and provide tailored solutions to their unique needs.

This targeted approach increases the likelihood of capturing their attention, building meaningful connections, and ultimately driving higher conversion rates and customer engagement.

 

How to find exegraphic data on your ideal customers

Rev’s Sales Development Platform empowers you to uncover and leverage exegraphic data, enabling you to identify companies that closely resemble your best customers.

 

Here’s how it works:

You’d start by feeding Rev’s Sales Development Platform (SDP) with a seed list of your top-performing existing customers. With this information, Rev’s AI then creates an aiCP (AI customer profile) model, essentially a lookalike model that analyzes the exegraphics shared by your best customers. The AI engine then identifies the underlying patterns and traits.

After building the aiCP, the SDP identifies other companies that exhibit similar combinations of distinct exegraphics as your best customers—and ranks them based on how closely they match your new ICP. This process resolves the challenge of finding more customers like your best ones in a remarkably efficient and complex manner that surpasses human capabilities.

The model then evaluates exegraphics using a points-based system, translating them into human-understandable terms such as industries, functions and growth rates. You can then apply your own criteria and lenses to refine the prospect list further, aligning it with your unique sales and marketing goals.

 

Additional methods to gain insight into customer needs and pain points

In addition to leveraging exegraphics, you can also employ several other strategies to better understand your customers’ pain points and needs.

 

Customer interviews

Conducting one-on-one customer interviews can provide valuable insights by allowing customers to express their thoughts and experiences openly.

 

Surveys and questionnaires

By asking specific questions and providing response options, you can collect valuable feedback using targeted surveys and questionnaires.

 

Data analytics

Analyzing customer data, such as purchase history, website interactions and customer support inquiries, can reveal patterns and trends related to your customers’ pain points and needs.

 

Customer support and feedback

You can identify customers’ common issues and prioritize solutions by monitoring interactions with customer service representatives and collecting feedback through channels like customer satisfaction surveys or feedback forms.

 

Competitor analysis

Examining the offerings and strategies of competitors can shed light on needs currently being addressed in the market. This analysis can help your company identify gaps and differentiate your offerings.

 

Industry research and trends

Keeping up with industry research, trends and market reports can provide insights into emerging pain points and evolving customer needs. Staying informed about industry developments can help your company proactively address customer challenges.

 

Final thoughts

By adopting a holistic approach to understanding your customers, you can gain a comprehensive view of their challenges and aspirations. This deeper understanding enables you to develop targeted marketing and sales strategies, refine your product offerings and deliver exceptional value.

Rev’s Sales Development Platform can help you uncover, analyze and leverage exegraphics to better understand your customers and unlock the full potential of your go-to-market teams.

Want to witness the power of exegraphics in action? Schedule a demo with our team. We’ll show you how to revolutionize your customer understanding and targeting strategies!

How to build true demand in today’s buyer’s market, with Manuel Rietzsch

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The undeniable reality of demand marketing is that buying behaviors have changed, and the old tried-and-true playbook hasn’t aged gracefully.

“It’s much more a buyer’s market now than it used to be,” says Manuel Rietzsch, VP of Revenue Marketing at AudioEye. “There was much less information out there, and buyers had to engage with vendors much sooner in the cycle to get that information.”

Manuel has witnessed these transitions firsthand for the past two decades in B2B demand marketing. He’s led teams at Pluralsight, Hopin, InsideSales and Divvy, and serves as an advisor to several other organizations. He has collected particular insights into how the marketing playbook has become outdated—and how to build true demand in today’s market.

In this interview, Manuel looks at what makes today’s market so buyer-centric, why marketing teams need to get comfortable with the long game, what attribution-heavy strategies miss about organic marketing methods, and how marketing organizations can optimize themselves by focusing on the right programs (even when managing budget constraints).

 

It’s a buyer’s world: Meet them where they are

Manuel says that it’s a buyer’s market out there because the dynamics have shifted to where buyers have abundant options—and marketers must jockey for limited attention and resources. In this environment, buying behaviors have changed well beyond just the tools that marketers use to communicate with potential buyers.

It’s a lot like the ways that film production must shift over time in order to keep pace with evolving viewership. Marketers have to adapt their playbook to how, exactly, today’s market favors buyers and presents increasing challenges for demand marketing teams.

  • So much info, so much noise. Every strategy you’re using to reach buyers, your competitors are using too. Then multiply that for every product and service vying for your audience’s attention—we’re all awash in marketing. “So many companies market and target the same people that everybody else wants to sell to,” Manuel says.
  • People know the process. The first marketing email you ever got, if you can remember it, might have surprised you. How could you know that giving out your email address would result in a sales attempt? Now, it’s beyond given. “People know the process,” Manuel says. “They know that if they fill out a form and they download something, they will get a call from the SDR and they’re getting a lot of emails sent to them. People don’t want that anymore.”
  • Trust is shifting from brands to peers. “There’s a loss of trust in companies and marketing in general,” Manuel says, “and buyers are much more shifting to trusting their peers.” He also notes that customers tend to engage with peers (whether colleagues, personal acquaintances, online reviews or social media connections) long before they actually engage with a vendor. “People follow people,” he says. “We pay much more attention to what people have to say than we do what brands have to say.”
  • People prefer the B2C engagement style over the classic B2B one. “People want to go somewhere and educate themselves on their own time, their own pace and want venders to give them all the information they need to make a decision,” Manuel says. They don’t want to be nudged or nurtured or led to water by an SDR, but they do want to understand what you offer, how you solve their challenges and how you provide solutions that they need.
  • We consume content differently now. Successful marketing playbooks used to feature high-value downloadables like white papers and ebooks. Those still have their place—but now, “We are so much more used to scrolling through bite-sized content,” Manuel says.

 

Any one of these dynamics shifting might require a marketing team to rethink its strategy. All of them? “You’ve got to approach people differently and meet them where they are,” Manuel says. “You can’t just rely on the old fill-out-my-form kind of motion.”

 

Demand isn’t instantaneous: Play the long game

We’ve heard a frightening (maybe even controversial) statement recently that demand is dead—that you can’t generate demand anymore.

Manuel weighs in that this statement is true. Half true, anyway. Because there is creating demand for your solution—and then there is forcing demand. The latter looks like cold calling, for example, and generally sees very, very low conversion rates.

If that approach isn’t dead in B2B, it’s dying.

“How do you market to somebody and create demand with somebody who either doesn’t have a challenge right now, doesn’t have initiative, doesn’t have budget, or isn’t making the buying decision on their own?” he asks. “It’s really hard to do that.”

Manuel sees that some small percentage of the market is both in your ICP and actively looking for solutions. It’s the other, much larger group where he identifies the potential for creating real demand.

“That’s where you can create demand long-term by educating them, by creating that relationship with them, by showing them that you understand their challenges and that you are able to solve their challenges—and you have solved their challenges for lots of other customers successfully,” he says.

 

Keep hitting the pavement: Optimize the short game

To generate long-term demand, though, marketing teams need to make the long-term play of creating relationships with potential buyers. This is exponentially more difficult when there are multiple people involved in the buying decision, each one held accountable. It’s much harder to create short-term demand if there are no initiatives and challenges that prospects have top-of-mind.

Harder, but not impossible—if we optimize our short-term demand engine. Yes, even with cold-calling.

“As marketers, we can equip and point our BDRs and SDRs in the right directions,” Manuel says. “What accounts are hitting our website, who’s showing intent. That’s where there might be some short-term demand. We just don’t know who they are yet because they haven’t filled out a form. But we can point to the accounts hitting our website. Let’s go after them. Let’s identify the personas within that account, start being proactive.”

 

Attribution is not a stand-alone: Lean into organic channels, too

Above, Manuel listed that buyers consume content differently now, especially with seeking their own information. We wondered what unexpected channels he would identify as highly relevant and effective in today’s market.

His answer: The ones marketers tend to ignore.

“Marketers have always defaulted to the channels that are closer to us, because we can measure and track them much more easily,” he says. “Paid search, SEO. It’s much harder for me to measure and really understand what impact my podcast has, or a community that I sponsor has.”

These channels may not be more important, but they are underutilized. To use them more, Manuel suggests that marketers (and our counterparts in finance) need to grow more comfortable with investing in activities that our attribution systems don’t fully pick up.

“One thing that I’ve seen really work is creating good organic thought leadership on LinkedIn,” he says. “Actually make that an orchestrated demand initiative instead of it being an unmanaged thing.”

This play connects with the idea that people follow people and pay attention to what they have to say, more than they do with brands. In other words: remember the human element to really understand what connects with your buyers. “Demand has relied heavily on paid tactics in the past,” Manuel says. “I think it can shift to more of this organic and community marketing.”

 

Remember that attribution and organic play together

Attribution better not go out the window altogether—through various platforms, marketing teams can boost engagement and visibility of these organic programs. The danger in leaning too heavily on attribution is that it can pick up an exact moment of interaction with a prospect, while overlooking all the levels of organic engagement that preceded it.

During a relevant project he worked on, Manuel compared an attribution tool with self-reported attribution and found nearly completely incompatible results. Self-reported attribution showed entry points that never would have showed up in the attribution tool itself.

Marketing teams need this deeper, more holistic understanding to point sales teams in the right directions. (In fact, Manuel points to this alignment as the reason for the advent of RevOps teams.)

“Before somebody engages with you, they read a post on LinkedIn and they asked a peer about you,” he proposes. “They might’ve seen somebody talking about you on Twitter, they’ve listened to podcasts, and then they go to Google. The only thing you’re going to see is the attribution to Google search—and this can create bad behavior if you put more money and focus on Google and no effort put into these other things that actually are creating the demand.”

 

Final thought: Lean, mean demand machines

Regardless of what’s happening in the buyer’s market, most marketing teams are facing a different, internal constraint: consolidation. Do more with less—we’ve all heard it. So how do we deal with these frictions?

Manuel offers a paradigm shift. It’s not do more with less. Instead, it’s do more of the right things.

“When I do consulting or I come into a new company, what I see is quite a bit of waste,” he says. “I always look at it as the 80/20 rule: 20% of your activities lead to 80% of your pipeline.”

When the economy is great, Marketing gets to ride the wave of higher budgets, more headcount, so very many tools. Now, with times more uncertain, we all get forced to do our work more efficiently and with a different focus.

“I think we need to focus much more on revenue and business outcomes—not leads, not MQL, but pipeline and revenues,” Manuel says. “This requires a change in mindset. We have to feel comfortable with shutting off the channels that the data tells us aren’t working.”

In the end, Manuel says, marketing teams can run really efficiently—and the C-suite knows it. Marketers are going to be held more and more accountable, which means that the same old playbook isn’t going to keep cutting it. The market has changed, buyers have changed—and Marketing gets to lean into what matters most to their buyers.

Data integrity and revamping your ICP

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Every GTM motion in a RevOps organization has its own distinct function. Yet somehow, they’re supposed to collaborate darn near seamlessly.

Data is the medium that facilitates that interdependence. It’s a common language that provides common context to everyone in RevOps, highlighting where resources are best focused and driving decision-making across the org.

But all too often, that data lacks integrity, coherence and meaning. We see this perhaps most prevalently in a RevOps team’s ICP. Where nearly every other function benefits from updated tools and cutting-edge practices, the role of data in shaping an ICP is frequently overlooked.

Here, we demonstrate the concerns with traditional ICPs that lack data. Then we look at the kind of data that can redefine and dynamize the way you identify best-fit prospects, strengthen and support the entire RevOps team and optimize your practices for driving business efficiency (and, of course, revenue).

 

Old-style ICPs lack data

Ideal customer profiles are as old as time… or at least as old as sales. And ICPs are rooted in sound philosophy: if you can identify what your best customers have in common, you can better identify great prospects because they’ll look alike.

Unfortunately, the ICP concept really hasn’t evolved much beyond superficial indicators in all those many years.

ICPs in practice are too often static documents with maybe half a dozen characteristics. These are usually fairly easy for salespeople to access, determine or estimate: an organization’s industry, headcount, revenue and geographic location might combine into a pretty standard ICP.

A sales team, or their company, might even settle on an ICP and rely on it for years—meaning that not only is their ICP built on superficial traits, but static ones, too.

But we know that the world is always changing. ICPs should be just as dynamic, in order to reflect the ever-evolving behaviors, strategies, attitudes and needs of your best customers (and your prospect audience).

ICPs can only become dynamic if they’re infused with meaningful, insightful data—data that goes deeper than surface-level firmographics in order to understand not only how a company looks but also how it behaves.

 

Exegraphics infuse dynamic ICPs with data

The demand signals missing from traditional ICPs already exist. We call them exegraphics.

Exegraphics are, in short, millions of pieces of information about a company that together build a comprehensive assessment of how that company ticks. Thus, they help B2B sales teams better understand what actually makes their best customers their bestthereby generating a much more powerful ICP.

(We call this an aiCP, for an AI-driven customer profile. At Rev, we utilize the power of AI to analyze where companies stand—and how they are shifting over time—from the value they bring to market to the functions of people within the organization.)

When companies first started aggregating consumer data in the B2C world, they focused on demographics. Learning the age, gender and ZIP code of their customers was a huge leap forward. But that leap could not compare to the leap of using psychographics. These enable retailers to predict when a couple is expecting a baby, or who is likely shopping for a new home, or any other of the uncountable predictors of customer behavior.

Exegraphics do for B2B what psychographics are doing to B2C: redefining the ways we can assess and understand our customer bases.

Think of it this way: if you specialize in HR solutions, you likely care less about a company’s headcount (firmographic) and more about where that company’s headcount is heading in the short-term future (exegraphic). Now, picture two prospects of equal headcount. What if exegraphics reveal that one is about to scale while the other is about to downsize? That knowledge, built from myriad individual data points, changes your RevOps strategy across the board.

And the whole of your RevOps organization stands to benefit.

 

Powerful data strengthens the entire RevOps team

RevOps teams need powerful data like exegraphics to build the strongest possible foundation for every GTM motion—not just in prospecting, but in retention, expansion and success as well.

With exegraphic data powering their ICPs, your RevOps team can: 

 

… better identify new market segments.

With a traditional ICP, you’ll keep targeting more of the same. Why would you go prospecting in new industries when all your best customers exist together in one?

For starters, because that’s how you open up entirely new customer segments. But there’s also high risk in venturing into a new market segment, with no guarantee of success.

Exegraphic-driven GTM motions minimize that risk when expanding into new market segments. They can target the prospects who share the right “fit” and “ready” characteristics with their best customers (even if one’s in aerospace and the other’s in medicine).

Analyzing new market segments for prospects with similar traits arms a GTM team with strategies to test surgically and precisely.

 

… test outbounding strategies on the right target accounts.

Whether in a new market or a familiar one, testing out new strategies and collateral costs less and leads to clearer results when your teams can target their absolute best-fit prospects. Exegraphics enable what we call a SWAT method: a small, skilled team can implement a test strategy, pivot on a dime and adapt based on real-world results.

This kind of strategy doesn’t work with a buckshot approach and little-to-no intel. You’d never know if a strategy failed because the strategy didn’t work, or because the prospects weren’t going to bite anyway.

Powerful exegraphic data can identify which prospects are most likely to engage, so you can get meaningful results—both in new customers and in tighter feedback loops—faster.

 

… improve and track their aim.

Our research at Rev shows that up to 2/3 of the leads in the average pipeline sit untouched. The average RevOps org loses well more than half of its best future customers, simply because the pipeline is clogged with less-than-ideal prospects. This is what happens when you cast a wide net: you catch a lot of fish, many of them not the ones you’re fishing for.

A strategy driven by strong data helps your teams improve their aim and track results over time, continuously honing the ICP based on actual results.

 

… strategically expand existing accounts.

Of course, an efficient RevOps organization isn’t just prospecting; it’s also expanding existing accounts. Exegraphic data demonstrates the qualities of your customers that have already expanded—and you can better understand what makes other accounts ripe for the same kinds of expansion.

After all, identifying which exegraphic predictors exist among your current customer base is far more likely to lead to new expansion than the superficial predictors we often use, like “highest spending,” “high activity” and “most friendly.”

Plus, creating aiCPs for each of your specific products or services can optimize a RevOps team for not only who is ripe for expansion, but what direction they’re ready to expand in. (Your team may even be able to speak to pain points that the customer doesn’t yet realize they’re experiencing!)

 

… stay ahead of churn.

Powerful data also assists with the opposite of expansion: identifying the early signals of a customer’s likelihood of dropping off.

Of course, churn happens for all kinds of reasons, many out of your control. Unless your company is brand-new, you’ve experienced it. Those lost customers are learning opportunities! Exegraphics can identify the shared traits of your lost clients just the same as it can your best ones—then anticipate the most at-risk customers based on those same trends.

Imagine your RevOps team being able to connect with those organizations—and work to resolve their pain points—long before they begin conversations to shift away from your product or service. This puts you in the proactive role of helping customers succeed, rather than reacting to their deficits once they’re too late to fix.

Being proactive in this way is a powerful approach for reducing churn and sticking with companies as they transition.

 

Final thoughts: The competitive edge of advancing how you use data 

Data is pervasive. It’s how organizations utilize and optimize that data that differentiates them from their competitors. It’s how they integrate data usage that connects them most efficiently with the customers that need them most.

We’re reminded of discussions around one of today’s worst baseball teams. The coaches, players, scouts and front office have access to essentially all the same data as every other team in the majors. But they don’t use the data coherently; they don’t mine it for all the value it contains; they don’t communicate it between departments and they allow old-school mentalities to override its lessons.

That baseball team is competing with the baseball equivalent of an ICP, ignoring the exegraphic-level data sitting on the tablets in the dugout. And the results show in the standings.

Data integrity matters to the success of all the GTM motions in a RevOps organization. What data is your team playing with—and are they maximizing its potential for optimizing results.

Curious to see the exegraphic data behind your best customers? Contact us and we’ll show you—and conduct a free ICP audit.

Everything you need to know about growth marketing

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Growth marketing is a multi-pronged approach to scaling profits, gaining an edge in a competitive market and driving tangible results with minimal effort. It’s become a respected and core marketing function because of its ability to open opportunities that create massive lift—with minimal effort.

This powerhouse strategy offers an efficient way to acquire, convert, engage, and retain customers over time and gives companies a significant edge in expanding their market share. 

In this blog post, we’ll explore everything there is to know about growth marketing—from what it entails to the strategies and tactics marketers use today. Get ready. Here we go.

 

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a holistic approach to marketing that focuses on experimentation and optimization. It is an iterative process that leverages data and analytics to identify and target high-value customers and optimize marketing campaigns for maximum conversions.

This is different from any other type of marketing in that it is highly focused on testing and optimizing. Instead of relying on intuition and guesswork, growth marketers constantly test and refine their campaigns to get the most out of their investment.

By testing different strategies and tactics, you can identify the most effective ways to reach your target audience. This type of marketing requires an understanding of analytics, data-driven decision-making and an ability to think outside the box.

Growth marketing involves several techniques, from social media marketing to email marketing and SMS marketing. It’s a great way to maximize the return on your marketing investment and is especially helpful for startups and small businesses that need to make every dollar count. (And let’s face it, in today’s economy, every company is measuring the impact of every dollar.)

 

Growth marketing vs. traditional marketing

Growth marketing is a relatively new concept, but it is quickly becoming the go-to approach for many businesses. So, how does growth marketing differ from traditional marketing? 

At its core, traditional marketing focuses on creating and delivering messages that appeal to potential customers. It can involve anything from radio and television ads to billboards and even direct mail. Growth marketing, on the other hand, takes a more holistic approach. 

Rather than focusing on single messages, growth marketing looks at the overall customer experience to identify areas for improvement. This includes everything from product design to user experience and even customer service. 

The primary purpose of growth marketing is to increase a business’s metrics and user engagement. To that end, growth marketers will use data and analytics to measure their campaigns’ success and adjust accordingly. This helps them get the most bang for their buck, leading to more conversions and sales. 

In short, growth marketing is a far more efficient way of getting customers. Its focus on data and analytics makes it a more efficient approach than traditional marketing, and its ability to track metrics gives businesses a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

 

Key components of growth marketing

We just touched on a few things that growth marketing does, but let’s get more specific and dive into the “how.”

 

A/B testing

A/B testing is a crucial component of growth marketing. It compares two versions of a website ad, or other marketing assets to determine which version performs better. This testing allows marketers to quickly identify the most effective version of a marketing asset and optimize their campaigns for maximum performance.

When creating an A/B test, focus on testing the elements that are most likely to influence customer behavior. This could include the headline, images, call-to-action or other features likely to impact customer behavior.

Note that A/B testing isn’t a one-and-done process. You should continuously test and refine different elements to identify the most effective combinations.

 

SEO strategy

You want to make it as easy as possible for your buyers to find you, and that’s where SEO comes in. SEO involves optimizing a website for search engines, such as Google, to ensure that it appears at the top of the search engine results page. 

It requires an understanding of how search engines work and how to optimize content for maximum visibility. This involves a combination of on-page optimization (content optimization and keyword research) and off-page optimization (link building).

SEO is an iterative process, and it’s important to test and refine different strategies to make sure you’re always ranking the highest you possibly can. It’s also important to keep up with the latest trends and best practices to ensure your website remains competitive. And trust us—this is key. The world of SEO is always changing.

 

Data-driven email campaigns

An email is a powerful tool that allows you to reach a large audience with highly-targeted messages. Email campaigns help to build relationships with customers, drive conversions, and promote products and services.

Data-driven email campaigns combine the power of email with data analytics to create highly-targeted and personalized messages. This type of marketing involves segmenting customers based on their behavior and preferences and creating messages tailored to their needs.

It also allows marketers to identify the most effective messages and offers for a given audience, increasing engagement and conversions and building customer relationships.

 

Personas

Personas are an important part of growth marketing. They are fictional representations of a target customer and are used to help marketers understand the needs and behaviors of their target audience.

This is used to create content that resonates with a target audience and to identify the most effective messages and offers for a given customer segment. This type of marketing requires understanding the customer’s needs, motivations and behaviors.

Building your personas allows you to create highly-targeted and personalized campaigns. By understanding the customer’s needs, marketers can create messages and offers tailored to their target audience.

 

Ad copy

Ad copy is a critical component of growth marketing. It’s the text that appears in an advertisement and is used to communicate a message to potential customers.

When creating an ad, focus on creating a compelling message that resonates with your target audience. Ad copy should be clear, concise, and persuasive and focus on the product’s or service’s benefit.

Test different ad versions to identify the most effective messages and offers. 

 

How to build a growth marketing strategy

To build a meaningful (and impactful) growth marketing strategy, you need to first have an intimate understanding of your customers’ journey, from how you identify them as a prospect to when they make their purchase—and even beyond. It’s what will guide how you interact with them and how you iterate to optimize results.  

Your growth strategy should be all about optimizing the customer journey. (After all, that optimizes your funnel too.) So, without further ado, here are the steps you should take to build your growth marketing strategy.

 

1. Determine your goals

The first step in creating a successful growth marketing strategy is getting clear on what you want to achieve, your goals. What do you want to accomplish? Do you want to increase your customer acquisition rate? Increase your conversion rate? Increase your customer retention rate? Or all of the above?

Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. SMART goals will help you track the progress of your growth marketing efforts and ensure you’re on track to achieving your desired outcomes.

2. Understand your ideal customer profile and personas

An ideal customer profile (ICP) defines the types of companies you sell to, the ones that are most likely to become your most valuable customers. This is a step a lot of company’s gloss over (and pay for down the road).

The misstep? A lot of companies define their ICP using only firmographics. The problem there is that firmographics alone are superficial. We find that companies that include exegraphic data into their ICP have a better picture of who to target—and how to talk to them.

From there, it’s also important to understand the personas within the companies you’re targeting. A persona is a fictional character that represents your users and buyers. Knowing who they are is vital in creating strategies to reach and convert them effectively.

When building personas, you should focus on your target customers’ needs, motivations, goals and pain points. This will help you understand their needs and empathize with their pain—which will serve as a solid foundation for building trust.

 

3. Map your customer journey

The next step in creating a successful growth marketing strategy is mapping your customer journey. Your customer journey is the path your customers take from when they first become aware of your company to when they make a purchase. By clearly defining the journey and the stages within it, you’ll be better poised to serve them at any given time.

The customer journey typically consists of the following:

  • Awareness stage: Your customers become aware of your product.
  • Consideration stage: They’re considering whether or not to purchase your product.
  • Decision stage: They’re deciding whether or not to make a purchase.

At each stage of the customer journey, your potential customer will have different questions. At the awareness stage, they may ask questions like, “What is your product?” and “How does it work?” At the consideration stage, they may ask, “Why should I buy your product?” and “What are the benefits?” At the decision stage, they may ask, “How do I purchase your product?” and “What are the payment options?”

Understanding the questions and objections they may have at each stage will help you proactively address them, making the entire experience smooth. The other element to take into consideration is how to reach them during each stage of their journey.

It takes time to really understand where to effectively (and efficiently) reach potential customers during each phase of the journey. So, test. You may find that social media is great for awareness and that email is better for consideration, but other channels may work more effectively for your audience.

 

4. Build creative and intentional content for every stage of the journey

Next, create assets and content that will resonate with your potential customers at each stage of the funnel, from awareness to decision. And remember, the content needs to be compelling enough to move them to the next stage.

At the awareness stage, you should focus on creating content that will help introduce your product and get your customers interested. Include blog posts, videos, infographics and even podcasts. 

At the consideration stage, you should focus on creating content to help your customers understand why they should purchase your product. Case studies, product demos and customer testimonials work great. 

For the decision stage, create content that helps your customers make a purchase: sales pages, special offers and even payment options.

 

5. Go live

Once you’ve created your campaigns, it’s time to launch them. This is where you’ll start seeing results from your growth marketing efforts.

When launching your campaigns, ensure that they’re well-targeted. Target the right audience based on your ICP, and make sure the campaigns resonate with them. Additionally,  make sure that your campaigns are well-timed. 

 

6. Test, test, test

Testing is what growth marketing is all about. You should test different elements of your campaigns, such as the copy, the visuals, the timing and the channels. This will help you see what’s working and what’s not and adjust accordingly to drive the results you want.

When testing your campaigns, track your progress. Make sure that you’re tracking your metrics, such as customer acquisition rate, conversion rate and customer retention rate.

 

7. Repeat

Repeating the process is the last step in creating a successful growth marketing strategy. Growth marketing is an ongoing process, and it’s important to test, optimize continually and repeat. It continuously improves your campaigns and ensures they’re effective.

 

Final thoughts

Creating a successful growth marketing strategy can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right tools and techniques, you can create a successful growth marketing strategy that will help you acquire, convert and retain customers.

If you’re looking to make the biggest impact possible on your growth marketing strategy, start by getting clear on who you’re targeting. Afterall, if you’re targeting the wrong ICP from the beginning, you’re spending resources—time and money—on accounts that will never close or will churn quickly.

Let us help you avoid that. Contact us, and we’ll build you a free AI-powered ICP and even give you a free list of target accounts that fit your profile.

Stop the random tactics and optimize your demand gen

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Frozen, slashed, cut, trimmed, tightened—no matter which word you hear, this is what happens to demand gen budgets in the current economic environment. And this reality is forcing demand gen organizations to rethink the way they operate.

“Our budgets are roughly 75% of what they were in 2022,” reports Kendrick Shuler, Outbound Marketing Manager at Tipalti. “Yet we still have very similar lead goals. We actually increased booking numbers.”

Plenty of demand gen teams are experiencing cuts in areas like media spend, testing and investment in new programs. They also see stronger asks for ROI analyses, particularly for larger spends, and increased scrutiny on the dollars going out the door.

This new normal forces demand gen teams to operate as lean as possible—and the high-performing ones are claiming this opportunity to improve.

“The silver lining is that both we and our clients are being forced to look hard at what we can do better,” says Howard Sewell, President and Co-founder of the Spear Marketing Group. “‘Optimize’ is the term for the day. What can we make more efficient? If we’re not going to spend on new technology and new programs, what can we do better to generate better results?”

When demand gen organizations were flush with resources, we could afford tactics that today might feel reckless and random. Now, with expectations holding steady (or increasing!) while budgets are shrinking, it’s time to hone our approaches.

That’s why we turned to Howard and Kendrick for their insights and experiences. Howard’s agency specializes in demand gen, primarily with B2B technology companies, and he’s been in the agency business himself for 25 years. And Tipalti provides AP procurement and payment automation; Kendrick’s teams sell mainly into finance functions globally—customers and prospects who experience this economic climate as keenly as anyone.

In talking to these two experts, we look at multiple ways to optimize demand gen strategies for a more restricted resource environment—a reality that requires more certain decision-making (and the ability to pivot) ever earlier in the sales cycle. Ultimately, we hear how this leads them to create stronger, more focused approaches to demand gen.

 

Scrutinize your CRM to shorten the sales cycle

Demand gen organizations don’t just have to produce more with less—they often have to produce more quickly with less, too.

This means that demand gen teams are learning to practice greater scrutiny. They have to find the biggest bang for their bucks—and they can’t always wait 12 or 18 months to see some well-nurtured leads pay off.

This reality has generated what Howard refers to as more sales-oriented tactics. Where can you find the active buyers? How can you accelerate the pipeline? How do we generate revenue in the short term?

“One of the things that we’re preaching as an agency, and that clients are doing more aggressively, is looking at the leads we already have,” he says.

It takes more effort (and more money) to identify buyers who are making decisions in the short term when those buyers have no brand awareness and no relationship with your company. Your CRM database is a curated selection of leads who already have heard of you, because you’ve been nurturing them. It’s a list you can hyper-segment to prioritize where you spend your resources.

“We’re following up with syndicated content leads. We’re refreshing the data and following back up with individuals who came into our system a couple years ago. We’re squeezing out every last drop of juice from our campaigns,” Kendrick says. “It’s making us dig a little deeper, get a little more creative. Ultimately we are evolving as an organization to see through the noise and pick and choose campaigns that will work really well.”

 

Dig into data to ID a good investment early—and recognize the limitations

Everyone claims that their organization is data-driven. The differentiator, as always, is how an organization uses that data, and how they evolve those uses over time. In today’s economic climate, demand gen has shifted from full-cycle analyses to trying to identify strong ROI early in the cycle.

Howard again points to the increasingly short-term nature of demand gen goals, and how it creates challenges for assessing them. “If you’re generating a lead today that isn’t going to close for 6, 12, 18 months, at what point in the cycle do you say Wow, that was a good investment?” he says.

“It’s going to be very difficult to measure anything right now on down funnel metrics because you’ll be waiting a good long time before those numbers come to the fore,” he adds. “It’s a tough chore, when people are taking their sweet time to make purchase decisions.”

Some of the short-term metrics demand gen teams are using include lead-to-op conversion rates, total ops, total bookings and engagement with Sales. Yet these metrics, while certainly insightful and beneficial, provide an imperfect look at how the data will look after a full long-term sales cycle.

“These aren’t the full picture,” Kendrick says. “You can influence ROIs. You can influence ops to close. LinkedIn and Facebook bring in leads, but they don’t often close leads because they’re so top of funnel. But we’re still looking at these key metrics and analyzing our programs based off them.”

 

Reimagine short-term KPIs as assessment opportunities

Since short-term demand gen goals are an imperfect predictor, we wondered: what KPIs are most helpful to today’s demand gen orgs? Are there ones that teams are paying more or different attention to than they did in the past?

“I know there’s a school of thought that the MQL is dead,” Howard says, “and that we’re also supposed to be looking at opportunities and pipeline now, but we work with some very large clients for whom the MQL is very much alive. Especially in this climate, it’s a metric that still has significance as a leading indicator for how a particular program or message or ad test is performing.”

Leads are converting at a much lower rate and a much slower rate than they were even just a year or two ago, Howard adds. This is why so many leaders focus on those short-term stats like total ops and total bookings—which Kendrick identifies as the ones management tends to care about most, alongside ROI.

“But when I’m trying to improve my programs,” he says, “the KPI I care about is where is the biggest room for growth.”

Put differently: he identifies the biggest weaknesses in a campaign, and how he can help improve them.

For example: the sales cycle duration is just too long on syndicated content to see a genuine ROI. So Kendrick’s team is working on nurturing those leads across different channels, educating the Sales team on what exactly those leads do in order to enter the system (in order to improve their follow-up) and providing the Sales team with tips from their vendors.

Rethinking KPIs to create a more optimized demand gen function is itself one such growth opportunity. It’s an edge where such edges are precious: the stark truth is that there is no magical KPI for demand gen orgs, when ROI is ultimately where it’s at.

“It’s a struggle in any kind of attribution model to prove ROI in a very short-term window,” Howard says, “because those leads just aren’t going to convert.”

 

Final thoughts: Test everything, collaborate with everyone

Demand gen as a whole is in largely uncharted space. Reduced budgets, combined with longer sales cycles, would challenge even the hardiest among us. But rather than this climate forcing us to do without—these experts take the view that these restrictions allow us to do more with what we’ve got.

Howard’s advice: Test everything.

“What we’re all going through is an opportunity to take a close look at all the programs and content and ads we’re running and figure out how to make them better,” he says.

“Every LinkedIn ad and every Facebook ad should be a test. Every subject line should be a test. I would look at the nurture programs. What can we do to better segment those? Are they working? Are they pulling people through the cycle? Those leads that you have in your database were paid for long ago. So make them pay and do what you can to move them along the journey. So, I think there’s a lot of opportunities to be had, things you can do to get through this.”

Plus, we’re not in this alone. Kendrick’s advice: Collaborate with everyone.

“We’re really trying to integrate our Sales and Marketing departments, make sure we’re collaborating as much as possible,” he says. “We want to make sure that what we’re doing is working for the Sales team because that’s the ultimate goal. And they’ll be the first ones to tell us if a program is not working. They’ll scream it from the rooftops. So make sure just to talk with them and know what they are saying about your programs.”

Because, in the end? As Kendrick says: “We’re all focused on one central goal.”

6 tips to optimize lead handoff between marketing and sales

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You have one hour. Yes, just one hour to follow up with leads and secure the best chance of speaking to key decision-makers and converting them into customers—at least, that’s what a study from the Harvard Business Review found.

Of course, this one-hour rule only really applies if your lead handoff process prioritizes highly-qualified leads that are, in fact, ready and able to buy. Unfortunately, at many companies, that’s not always the case. Low-quality leads make their way to sales, and some of the most qualified leads fall through the cracks.

Sound familiar? If so, this blog post will give you 6 tips to optimize your lead handoff process by getting your marketing and sales teams working together more efficiently. We’ll also share how you can use AI technology and exegraphic data to find the best-fit leads at the top of the funnel.

Let’s begin!

 

What is lead handoff between marketing and sales?

Lead handoff is the transfer of marketing-generated leads to sales for further follow-up and potential conversion into customers. It’s a critical step in marketing and sales alignment and must be handled carefully to ensure that no prospective customer falls through the cracks.

You see the issue? Lead handoff is a particularly challenging process for sales and marketing teams to get right. It’s time-sensitive. It needs to be highly efficient. And it requires shared definitions for terms like “marketing qualified leads” and “sales accepted leads.”

 

When is a lead qualified for handoff from marketing to sales?

There are several criteria that marketing teams should consider when deciding if a lead is worth passing along to sales. These include things like the contact’s engagement with marketing campaigns, their level of interest in products and services, their budget and their timeline for making a purchase decision.

It also helps if marketing and sales teams have shared definitions for the following terms:

  • Marketing qualified lead (MQL)
  • Sales accepted lead (SAL)
  • Sales qualified lead (SQL)

Marketing qualified lead

A marketing qualified lead is a contact who has engaged with marketing in meaningful ways, usually through marketing campaigns or content. The marketing team decides if the lead meets the criteria for qualification and passes them along to sales as an MQL.

For example, if someone attends a marketing webinar, they might be classified as an MQL because they have shown interest in marketing content and may be ready to learn more from sales.

 

Sales accepted lead

A sales accepted lead (SAL) is a marketing qualified lead that the sales team has accepted for further consideration. This means marketing has done their job, and now it’s up to the sales team to nurture the lead through the sales funnel and convert them into a customer.

To qualify a SAL, sales usually relies on information that marketing shares during the handoff process. This could include contact information, form responses or marketing content the lead has engaged with.

For example, a sales team at a marketing tech company might receive a lead from marketing that has expressed an interest in their marketing automation product. The marketing team could pass over the contact information and any engagement data showing which marketing content they engaged with and how often.

However, the sales team will still need to evaluate whether the lead has the potential to be a good fit by also considering things like whether the lead fits their ideal customer profile and whether the lead has the budget for a new marketing automation solution.

 

Sales qualified lead

A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a lead that sales reps have determined to possess the potential to become a customer based on how they’ve responded to sales outreach activities. 

For example, the lead may have responded positively to emails or calls from the sales team. They may also have asked several questions about the product and submitted a form for a demo request.

If your lead handoff process is properly optimized, marketing will send sales only the most qualified leads that meet the agreed-upon criteria for a SAL. This way, marketing ensures that sales isn’t wasting time on low-quality leads that won’t result in closed deals, allowing sales reps to focus on more productive tasks that can shorten the sales cycle.

 

6 ways to improve your lead handoff process

Every company is different. So, you’ll need to experiment to find the most efficient way for your sales and marketing teams to perfect lead handoff. Still, there are some basic principles and strategies that you can implement right away.

 

#1 Establish a shared definition of a SAL

The definition of a SAL in the previous section is just a starting point. Your sales and marketing teams should agree on what leads will qualify as a SAL for your company specifically. To achieve this goal, sales should provide marketing with set criteria for what makes a qualified lead, including customer pain points, unique interests and budget size.

For example, sales can tell marketing that qualified leads need to have at least $10,000 in budgeted spend for their marketing efforts, or they need to have expressed a serious interest in the product. 

Knowing these criteria upfront will help marketing focus on creating and distributing content that appeals to qualified leads instead of wasting resources trying to attract leads who aren’t likely to convert.

Once marketing has identified the qualified leads, they should provide sales with the lead’s contact information, background info, interests, and information on whatever factors could influence a purchase decision. 

These insights will give sales a jumpstart in engaging the leads by allowing them to tailor their conversations around topics relevant to each lead.

 

#2 Automate lead scoring

Automating lead scoring can help reduce the time marketing and sales teams take to evaluate lead qualification. Lead scoring is the process of assigning numerical values to leads based on their behavior, allowing marketing and sales teams to prioritize leads that are more likely to convert. 

Lead scoring typically takes into account a wide range of criteria, such as website visits, page views, email interactions, social media activity, and lead data like industry or job title. At Rev, we like to add a bit more rigor to this process by using exegraphic data. What’s that?

Exegraphic data is data on the factors that represent how a company operates and behaves. It can provide insights into a customer’s motivation, interests and other external factors influencing their buying decisions.

For example, by looking at the exegraphics of your best customers, you may find that businesses are most likely to buy from you when they’re in the process of expanding their marketing team or have recently hired a new CMO.

With that information, Rev’s Sales Development Platform automatically prioritizes the targets that best fit your ideal customer profile. That way, sales can quickly identify and contact the most promising leads.

 

#3 Use a CRM that streamlines lead handoff

In addition to lead scoring, you can also automate lead handoff by using a CRM (customer relationship management) system. If you’re unfamiliar, a CRM is a marketing tool that helps sales and marketing teams store, manage, monitor, analyze customer information and track marketing campaigns.

Using a CRM, marketing teams can collect and store leads’ information in one place and automatically assign those leads to sales reps based on individual lead criteria. 

For example, marketing teams can automatically assign leads based on lead scores, the marketing campaign they were generated from, or their position in the sales funnel.

Rather than manually transferring lead information from marketing to sales, a CRM system makes it easy for marketing teams to set parameters for what type of lead should be assigned to different sales reps. 

This automation helps marketing and sales teams create a seamless transition from marketing efforts to successful sales conversions.

 

#4 Regularly analyze lead performance

Measuring the long-term lead performance is essential to ensure your process is working and that marketing and sales teams continue improving how they guide leads through each stage of the sales funnel.

Common metrics to track and evaluate during this analysis include:

  • Marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) ratio
  • Average sales cycle length
  • Sales conversion rates

If any of these metrics are lagging, it could indicate a need for better marketing and sales alignment. Similarly, understanding which marketing channels lead to the most successful conversions can help marketing teams focus their efforts and ensure that leads from certain channels get handled with the utmost care.

 

#5 Implement feedback loops between sales and marketing

Communication is critical when it comes to marketing and sales alignment. Sales teams should provide marketing departments with feedback on which lead sources are most successful and which marketing messages resonate best with leads.

This feedback can and should be incorporated into marketing campaigns moving forward. It can also help marketing teams target their efforts more effectively by focusing on lead sources that are proven to work.

To make this process easier for marketing and sales teams, it’s a good idea to set up automated feedback loops. This way, marketing and sales can stay in sync with each other’s efforts. 

For example, marketing can set up automatic reports to know when marketing campaigns or channels have generated a high volume of SALs. 

 

#6 Continue to optimize the process

There will always be room for improvement when it comes to lead handoff. To keep the process efficient, marketing teams should continually review their lead sources and campaigns to identify areas for improvement. Similarly, sales teams should review their qualifying criteria and methods to find ways to better qualify leads.

For example, at Rev, we recommend companies continue updating their ideal customer profile (ICP) as their client base grows. Why? Because your ICP is rarely static. It evolves as the market changes, your company grows in size and scale, and when you attempt to expand into new market segments.

Using Rev, you can create a dynamic model of your ICP (we call it an aiCP). This model considers changes in your customers’ exegraphics, firmographics, intent, and more to ensure you’re marketing and selling to the right customers. 

Once marketing and sales teams better understand their ICP, they can collaborate more efficiently on defining which leads marketing should prioritize most for handover to sales.

 

Final thoughts

Lead handoff can be challenging to get right due to the complexity of timing for follow-up and defining the criteria of a qualified lead. However, with the right strategy, marketing and sales teams can collaborate to develop an efficient system for managing leads while also increasing visibility into lead quality and conversion rates.

Want to ensure you’re targeting and passing the best leads to your sales team? Contact us, and we’ll give a free audit of your ICP and use exegraphic data to show you the leads most likely to become your next best customers!

9 steps to craft your perfect go-to-market strategy

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A well defined go-to-market strategy is the difference between a successful launch and a flop. It outlines your product’s target market, customers, channels, pricing and more—and makes sure that all teams are aligned and working together.

Creating and perfecting a go-to-market (GTM) strategy that works for your business is essential. It optimizes the way your business stands out from the competition, reaches more customers and increases revenue. Not only does it help you effectively communicate your value proposition and product offering, but it also helps bring customers closer to you.

Whether you’re new to building a GTM strategy—or you’re ready to refresh any areas of your existing one—this blog post is for you. You’ll get a close look at the critical components of go-to-market plans, the steps to create one and tips to help you make the most out of your strategy. 

 

What is a go-to market strategy?

A go-to-market strategy is a plan to introduce your product or service to the market, reach customers and generate sales. It outlines the steps you need to take to get your product or service to market and the tactics you need to use to make it successful.

GTM is a critical part of a successful business plan. It outlines how a business will make its products/services from concept to reality and create an effective path to market, fully ready for launch. It’s here in the GTM strategy that most companies create the process for identifying, segmenting, and targeting potential customers and the tactics and strategies marketing, sales and customer service will use to reach them.

Strong GTM strategies also include a combination of market research, product positioning and pricing, and orchestrated plans across marketing, sales and customer service. The comprehensive approach is what enables your product/service to reach the most potential customers.

 

Why do you need a go-to-market strategy?

You might already be doing several things that are part of a comprehensive GTM strategy and wondering why you need to formalize your efforts. Here’s why you need it. 

  1. Position your company against competitors: A well-designed GTM strategy ensures that you understand how you compare to your competitors. Through this process, you’ll gain insight into the key differentiators you should play up in your messaging to customers and prospects, giving you the edge with customers and any new markets you decide to enter.
  2. Create a unified inbound and outbound strategy: Far too often, companies run inbound and outbound efforts independently. With a GTM strategy, you can tightly align the two to reach more ideal prospects. You’ll also be able to create campaigns that are well-tailored for the individual needs of each potential customer segment, and regardless of how they enter your funnel, you’ll know they’re getting a consistent message from your team.
  3. Achieve your business goals: A GTM strategy gives you a roadmap of where your business wants to go and how it will get there. By positioning yourself correctly and understanding your customer base, you can adjust as needed to achieve success quicker than the competition. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to make accurate predictions and decisions that drive your business forward faster. 
  4. Reduce marketing costs: By evaluating your competition and crafting an effective inbound and outbound strategy, you can save high costs on marketing efforts. You’ll be able to focus resources on campaigns that are more likely to yield results instead of wasting money on activities that won’t drive growth. 
  5. Understand your customers: A go-to-market strategy enables you to deeply understand your customers, their needs and their pain. This data can be used to tailor your products and services (and your sales and marketing efforts) to meet their specific needs, which can help you increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

Components of a GTM strategy

If you’re still reading, you’ve seen the vision of what a GTM strategy can do for you and your business. Now, let’s drive into the components you need for your strategy.

  1. Product market fit: Your GTM strategy needs to ensure that your product has market fit. You’ll do this by talking to customers, conducting research and keeping a pulse on your market. It’s not enough to have market fit. Make sure your product also has a key benefit that differentiates it from the pack.
  2. Target audience: You understand how your product works—and you need to understand how your target audience could benefit from it. Knowing the ins and outs of your target market and potential customers can give you actionable data to inform the direction of your  marketing campaigns and product distribution plans.
  3. Competition and demand: You’ve got competition. (Louder for the companies in the back who think they don’t.) You shouldn’t ignore it. Get intimately familiar with how you compare to them, and what sort of demand they’re seeing compared to what you’re seeing. This assessment will help you understand if/where you need to invest in product development to stay afloat—and where you can invest in product development to take the lead.
  4. Distribution: Your GTM strategy should consider how your products will be distributed to customers. It includes understanding where potential customers are located and determining the most efficient way to get the product into their hands (or network, or database…. You get it.). 
  5. Pricing: Let’s not forget pricing. Your pricing should be based on the outcomes your product can create and its ability to solve customer pain points. Consider how you can price your products and services to maximize profits while meeting customer expectations. 
  6. Promotions: Promotional activities, such as advertising and public relations campaigns, are necessary for the success of most GTM strategies. It’s all about creating awareness of your product and aircover for when sales teams start outreach. 
  7. Measurement: Last, but certainly not least, you need to track and measure the performance of all GTM functions. This will help you understand where to double down and where to divest. 

 

How to build a go-to-market strategy

Whether you’re launching a new product or expanding into a new market, having an effective go-to-market strategy is vital for any business looking to increase its reach and stay ahead of the competition. So, if you’re ready, let’s get to it.

To help alleviate the confusion around GTM strategies, we’ve created this comprehensive guide on creating an impactful GTM strategy that increases visibility and drives sales and conversions. Here are 9 essential steps for creating an effective GTM plan for your products and services.

 

1. Get clear on your ICP (ideal customer profile)

Every company should have an ideal customer profile (ICP), which clearly documents what their dream customer looks like. This document helps the entire organization understand whom they’re selling to and why. It helps the company narrow their focus and invest their energy on the right accounts. Most ICPs include details like industry, company size and geographic location. But, that’s not enough anymore—and the companies with strong GTM strategies know that.

So, stop and really think about the characteristics that your best customers have. Are they early or late adopters? Do they have a growing or shrinking IT workforce? This level of detail that goes deep to uncover how companies operate, is called exegraphic data. And while your current ICP may have only included demographic and technographic details, you’ll change the game (for the better) by bringing exegraphics into the fold. 

Lastly, don’t be like other companies. Don’t let this doc collect dust. It should be a living document that’s adjusted to account for your product’s evolution and changing market conditions.

 

2. Craft a value proposition for messages

Your value proposition should be crafted to clearly articulate your product’s or service’s main benefits and how it will solve a customer’s problem. Your value proposition should be clear and tailored to your target market. It needs to be eye-catching and easy for customers to understand.

Concisely explain your product’s unique features, how it differs from competitors and how it will meet customers’ needs.

When crafting your value proposition, consider the core benefits that differentiate you from the competition and create a clear message that resonates with your target market as they browse your website.

Tip: Use customer reviews and testimonials to support your value propositions.

 

3. Test your messaging

Once you’ve crafted your value proposition, it’s time to test it. (After all, they need to resonate with your target audience.) You can test your messaging online and offline, with customers and prospects. Test variations of the value props to see which show the most promise. 

 

4. Optimize ads based on messaging tests

Once you’ve tested your value statements and determined a winner, you can start optimizing your ad campaigns. Afterall, advertising is a critical component of any go-to-market strategy as it helps to build awareness, generate leads and ultimately increase conversions.

Using the results from your messaging tests, you can create ads that target the same audience with more relevant copy and visuals. Be sure to use up-to-date data when optimizing your campaigns, so they’re consistently delivering the best results.

 

5. Understand your buyer’s journey

The buyer’s journey is the process by which customers become aware of, evaluate, and purchase products or services. Everyone involved in your GTM strategy needs to know what the buyer’s journey looks like as if it was the back of their hand. It’s this level of obsession that will empower everyone to spot friction and come up with innovative solutions.

As you dive into the buyer’s journey, think about the questions they have at each stage, what they’re looking for and how you can solve their problem. Creating content that resonates with your target market at every stage of their journey is important and increases the chances that they’ll stick around until the end.

 

6. Build awareness and brand demand with inbound and outbound methods

Building awareness is essential for any successful go-to-market strategy. You must reach your target market with the right message on the proper channels.

Inbound marketing methods such as content marketing, SEO and social media are effective ways to engage with potential customers—they’re looking for you. Outbound methods such as email, print advertising and direct mail can help you reach a broader range of potential customers.

Mixing inbound and outbound methods helps you create brand recognition, generate leads and build customer relationships.

 

7. Optimize your sales pipeline

Your sales pipeline is the process by which prospects move from leads to opportunities and ultimately become paying customers. Optimize your sales pipeline to maximize conversions while reducing costs.

Think about each step of the process and ensure it’s as efficient and cost-effective as possible. Consider automating specific steps, such as follow-up emails or lead qualification. Also, look at ways to measure the success of each step to identify any areas that need improvement.

Often, the first step in optimizing pipeline is making sure that your prospecting team knows who to contact and why.

 

8. Strategize ways to tap into your current customer database

Your existing customers are likely your most valuable source of revenue. To maximize your ROI, consider increasing existing account value by upselling or cross-selling products and services.

Also, consider what incentives you can provide for current customers and how to engage them with relevant content. These incentives should include discounts, free products or services, exclusive content and other offers to encourage customers to purchase more from you.

 

9. Adjust and iterate as you go

No go-to-market strategy is perfect the first time; adjustments must be made based on feedback and data analysis to get the best results. As you go along, keep track of the successes and failures so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

Make sure to track key performance indicators (KPIs), such as leads generated, conversion rate, cost per acquisition, etc., to measure success. And, be prepared to make changes quickly if something isn’t working—after all, the best go-to-market strategies are constantly being optimized.

 

Set your GTM strategy up for success

A GTM strategy will help your team march in unison in the right direction. But if you made even one wrong assumption at the very beginning of your launch, your team will go wildly off course and not reach your goal.

One of the most common missteps? Having an incomplete picture of who your ideal customer is. Let us help. Rev’s AI-powered Sales Development Platform can tell you the hidden characteristics that make your best customers your best—and find you others that look just like them. Our platform can show your demand gen team which accounts to target and give your SDRs a prioritized list of accounts to contact.

Contact us, and we’ll get you started with a FREE ICP audit so you can understand the deep and more meaningful characteristics of your ideal customers.

Lead generation vs. sales prospecting: Key differences, examples and strategies

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They’re not the same. But you’re not wrong for thinking that the goals of lead generation and sales prospecting sound similar.

While both strategies aim to generate new customers, lead generation focuses on generating large volumes of leads, while sales prospecting focuses on targeting and converting specific, high-quality prospects.

Easy to understand, right? Maybe. But you’re also not wrong if you think you’d benefit from a deeper understanding of how lead generation and sales prospecting work and what makes them different.

In this blog post, we’ll look at some key differences between lead generation and sales prospecting, including examples to help illustrate these concepts. We’ll also discuss how exegraphic data can help integrate the two processes, allowing you to focus more time and energy on developing high-quality leads and closing more deals.

Let’s get started!

 

Leads vs. prospects

Before diving into the intricacies of lead generation and sales prospecting, it’s important to first understand the difference between leads and prospects.

Leads are individuals that have shown some interest in your product or service. They may have visited your website, signed up for an email newsletter or engaged with your company on social media.

In contrast, prospects are individuals who have been identified as potential customers and are actively being pursued by your sales team. They may be entirely new to your business and still trying to understand what you offer.

Of course, both leads and prospects are essential to the success of your business. So, you’ll want to ensure your company has a strategy that effectively targets both and engages them in meaningful ways.

How do you do that? We’ll help you begin brainstorming some ideas by looking individually at the definitions of sales prospecting and lead generation, as well as examples of how you can apply them in your B2B marketing and sales processes.

 

What is sales prospecting?

Sales prospecting is a short-term strategy focused on finding, qualifying and closing deals with prospects in a specific market segment. Sales prospecting is typically performed by sales teams who use various techniques such as cold calling, cold emailing or social media outreach on platforms like LinkedIn.

Sales prospecting can be particularly challenging, as it involves navigating complex buying processes and competing with other vendors for the attention of busy decision makers. However, there are several strategies that sales professionals can use to make their prospecting more effective.

 

B2B sales prospecting examples and strategies 

At its best, prospecting is a powerful way to build your pipeline and generate revenue from new customers. However, it can also be time consuming. According to a Crunchbase report, the best sales reps spend around 6 hours a week researching their prospects. But, if you’re doing it incorrectly, it can be an inefficient process.

For example, many sales reps rely on lead lists purchased from outsourced lead generation services as a starting point for prospecting. But since a lead generation service may not accurately understand your ideal customer, these leads may not actually be interested in purchasing your products or services.

Fortunately, there are now many innovative tools and techniques that can help you prospect more effectively. One strategy is to leverage exegraphic data on your best customers to update your ideal customer profile (ICP) and identify the most promising market segments.

For example, let’s say you sell a solution that helps IT companies manage their software licenses. To improve prospecting, you could look at exegraphic data and discover that you have the most success converting IT companies that have recently merged with another company.

With that information, your sales reps can focus their outreach efforts on the prospects that best fit this characteristic, personalize their messaging to speak to specific pain points and improve the likelihood that they can convert those prospects into customers.

Learn more about how to succeed with sales prospecting:

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is the process of finding new leads that match your target market, building brand awareness, and nurturing leads to influence their interest in your products or services. 

Marketing teams are typically responsible for this process, as lead generation activities involve various digital marketing strategies such as email marketing, social media advertising, content marketing and more. For 91% of marketers surveyed by Ruler Analytics, lead generation is their most important goal. 

But lead generation is not just about finding new leads—it’s also about qualifying those leads and ensuring they are who you want to focus your sales efforts on. For example, some lead generation strategies may attract many unqualified leads, such as unsolicited email blasts. But these leads may require a lot of time and energy to sift through and qualify and, ultimately, may not be worth the effort.

 

B2B lead generation examples and strategies

To avoid wasting your time on unqualified leads, you need to have a strategy for determining the characteristics that make a lead worth pursuing. Again, this is where exegraphic data comes in handy.

Let’s go back to our example of selling a solution that helps IT companies manage software licenses. Since you’ve already used exegraphic data to determine that your best customers tend to be those that have recently merged with another company, you’re already on the right track to creating an effective lead generation strategy.

Your next step would be to brainstorm and create content that would generate interest from IT companies in this scenario. For example, you might create:

  • A whitepaper with tips and best practices for successfully integrating two separate IT systems. This could include real-world examples of how other companies in similar situations have successfully merged their IT systems and recommendations for avoiding common pitfalls.
  • A webinar that walks IT professionals through the process of planning and executing a successful IT merger. This could include an overview of common challenges, sample timelines and budgets, and tips for successfully communicating with stakeholders throughout the process.
  • A blog post that offers tips for managing software licenses and IT contracts during company mergers, including recommendations for creating systems to track and monitor expiring licenses, negotiating renewal terms with vendors, and understanding the importance of data security and compliance.

In exchange for the value provided in that content, you can request contact information, which you can then use to start building a lead database to nurture with marketing materials.

As you can see, lead generation is a long-term strategy that requires consistent effort over time. However, as you identify and nurture more leads, your lead database will grow, which helps to fuel sales prospecting efforts.

Learn more about how to succeed with lead generation:

Lead generation vs. sales prospecting: 5 key differences 

Now that you have a better idea of how sales prospecting and lead generation work individually, let’s look at some key differences between these two strategies.

  1. Lead generation is focused on generating new leads to be nurtured over time. In contrast, sales prospecting focuses on identifying potential customers who are already interested or show signs of potentially being interested in your product or service.

 

  1. Lead generation focuses on generating large quantities of leads that can be converted into prospects. In contrast, sales prospecting aims to identify specific, high-quality leads that are likely to convert into customers.

 

  1. Lead generation is a long-term strategy for building a quality base of potential customers to drive sales. In contrast, sales prospecting is a short-term strategy for finding, qualifying and converting the prospects who are most likely to buy your solution.

 

  1. Lead generation involves using a variety of tactics, such as social media ads, content marketing and email marketing. Sales prospecting typically relies on more traditional outreach methods such as cold calls, cold emails and in-person meetings.

 

  1. Lead generation tends to be the responsibility of marketing teams, while the sales team typically drives sales prospecting. However, there are some cases where lead generation and sales prospecting can be combined to create a more seamless process that benefits both teams.

How to use AI to integrate lead generation and sales prospecting

With the help of platforms like Rev, it’s possible to integrate lead generation and sales prospecting, consistently engaging the type of high-quality leads and prospects most likely to convert into customers.

Rev’s Sale Development Platform uses AI technology to help businesses identify the companies that display similar exegraphics to your best customers and, therefore, are likely to be interested in your product or service.

With this information, your marketing teams can improve their lead generation efforts by better understanding what type of content will resonate best with your target market. Similarly, your sales teams can use this information to know which prospects to prioritize when prospecting and tailor their outreach to speak directly to each prospect’s unique pain points.

Want to see how exegraphics can help your company generate more revenue? Contact us, and we’ll conduct a free ICP audit and give you a free target account list, so you know exactly who to target to generate quality leads and succeed with sales prospecting.

7 steps to effective lead management

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Lead management isn’t a totally new idea, especially in the demand gen world. But, as your business grows and scales, you’ll need to make sure everyone understands what it is so they can follow the process you’ve built. Empowering your team with visibility into your lead management process not only creates a smoother experience for your team and for your customers, but it also positions your team to give you extra support in refining the evolving workflow. Extra eyes will help you see your blindspots.

 

What is lead management?

Lead management is efficiently acquiring, nurturing and converting leads into customers. It’s the common thread running through every marketing program and tactic. After all, the shared goal is to make a sale.

As a marketer, you likely depend on a variety of channels to generate leads, from online ads to trade shows and everything in between. Chances are, the leads you collect will enter in different phases of the funnel depending on their “fit” and “readiness” to purchase. That’s ok. It’s normal. The important thing is that you’re set up to nurture the leads down the funnel, regardless of where they start.

There’s more than one way to nurture a lead down the funnel. In fact, most companies implement a process that’s tailored to their business and their personas. Customizing your lead management to meet your unique context and your customers needs will help you close more deals.

 

Why is lead management important?

There are several reasons. Let’s dive into them. 

  1. Increases sales efficiency: Lead management primes leads and increases the efficiency of the sales process. With lead management, you’re making sure your prospective buyer is getting the information they need to make a purchase: they need to trust you and have confidence in your solution. When that foundation is built, your sales team is better able to pitch them and make a sale.
  2. Optimizes each stage of the funnel: With a formal lead management process in place, you’re able to see where leads are getting stuck in your funnel—and you can fix it. You can also see where customers are converting quickly, and infuse more of that goodness into your process.
  3. Builds relationships: Lead management is also important because it helps businesses build better relationships with their future customers. When you have a pulse on your customers needs and wants, you can target them with copy and content that speaks directly to them, solves their challenges and earns their trust. Providing this value through each stage of the funnel (and beyond) is key.
  4. Keeps your team aligned: When any team within your organization is out of the loop, a lead can fall through the cracks—at any point in the conversion process. A formal lead management process ensures that all teams are on the same page about how a lead moves through the funnel and the strategies that are being deployed to maximize lead conversion.
  5. Produces better lead quality: Lead management can also help you get better lead quality. When you know where your best leads are coming from or what assets are fueling velocity through the funnel, you know where to invest more. (The opposite is also true.)

 

7 steps to effective lead management

Lead management is essential for any business looking to maximize lead conversion and ROI. Again, lead management comes in all different shapes and sizes—so make yours your own. However, if you’re just getting started (or looking to refresh yours), here are the 7 steps you should include.

 

1. Bring in the leads 

You can generate leads through a variety of channels: online ads, events, SEO, webinars, content syndication and more. The important thing to remember here is that you’re targeting the accounts that fit your ideal customer profile—beyond the superficial markers of industry, company size and geography. Leading demand gen teams are relying on exegraphic data—insights into how companies execute their mission—to bring in the highest quality leads possible.

With exegraphics, you’ll also gain a better understanding of your ideal customer and their current pain points. This will give you the insight into the subjects you touch on when you’re building content or designing assets.  

Your lead generation process should also include a way to track leads and measure the success of your campaigns—and areas that need to be adjusted.

 

2. Score and prioritize leads 

Companies score their leads so they can quickly identify and prioritize the most qualified leads for conversion. 

To score your lead (and to get visibility into how likely they are to convert), you’ll assign each lead a numerical value based on qualifying markers (ie. geography) and their activity (ie. interaction with your website). The value of each marker or activity should be weighed according to how much it really signals the lead’s likelihood to convert. Then, add them all up and assign the score to your lead.

However, here’s the thing: lead scoring isn’t a one-time process. You have to regularly review lead data and adjust scores as you learn more about what activities or profile data makes the lead more “ready.”

 

3. Assign leads to sales reps 

After scoring and prioritizing your leads, the next step in lead management is assigning the leads to the appropriate sales reps. This is an important step. If you don’t have a smooth process in place for lead hand-off, your leads will fall through the cracks.

Many teams rely on lead routing software to ensure that leads are assigned to the right sales reps according to specific criteria: lead location, lead industry and lead score.

 

4. Convert qualified leads 

Once you have assigned leads to the appropriate sales reps, the next step is to convert them. This is the process of turning leads into customers. To do that, it’s important that your sales team respond to leads as quickly as possible and with helpful information  about how you can help them solve their problem. 

At the end of the day, the key to successful lead conversion is to provide a great customer experience. This means providing the customer with all the information they need to make an informed decision about your product or service.

 

5. Nurture leads that are not quite sale ready 

Not all leads are ready to make a purchase right away. Some leads may need additional nurturing before they are prepared to make a purchase. You’ll need to nurture those ones.

You can nurture leads by providing them with additional information and resources to make an informed decision. It includes providing them additional content, such as blog posts or videos, that covers industry topics and information about your product offering. 

Nurturing leads is a great way to build relationships with potential customers and increase your chances of converting them into paying customers. This step is also an ongoing process.

 

6. Evaluate your lead management process 

Regularly evaluating your lead management processes allows you to identify opportunities to level up. 

Start with your data. What does it tell you? Evaluate the number of leads you’re generating, the number of leads converting, the average time it takes to convert a lead—and what channels and tactics are driving the highest conversion.

You should also evaluate the effectiveness of your lead scoring system. If you find that you’re passing along “qualified” leads that really aren’t ready for a chat with sales, you’re preventing sales from talking to leads that are ready. Or, if you’re not passing along leads that are ready, you’re leaving room for your competitors to swoop in.

 

7. Make necessary changes to make the process more efficient and effective 

You should be making changes to your lead management process as you identify areas that need to be fixed. However, be mindful that it often takes a bit of time to really identify the changes that need to be made. If you just implemented something new, you may need to wait a bit and collect some data before you iterate again. (Of course, this depends on what the issue is. Some changes you might need to make yesterday.) 

 

The bottom line

As a demand gen leader, lead management starts at the very top of your funnel. Above the funnel, even. You have to first understand your ICP and ensure that all your lead gen efforts are targeting the companies that fit your profile.

That first step can’t be overlooked. It will change your entire trajectory.

With Rev, you can bring MQLs into your funnel that have the same characteristics as your best customers. We make this possible through our AI-powered Sales Development Platform, giving you confidence that the leads you bring in will be primed and ready to engage. Contact us to learn more.

How (and why) RevOps teams use exegraphic data, with Intelligent Demand’s Nicole Davolt

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RevOps teams are under enormous pressure to grow their companies, and to grow them efficiently. Even C-suites are feeling this pressure. When they do, they turn to Nicole Davolt, a RevOps strategist at Intelligent Demand.

“We align their tactics, their technology and their people into a strategic growth strategy and a program that allows them to acquire, retain and expand revenue with their best-fitting customers and prospects,” Nicole says. “But really, we just exist to help tame the complexity of modern B2B growth.”

An expert growth partner helps companies and RevOps teams align Sales and Marketing (and others within an organization) to deliver better overall customer experience, as well as improve the prioritization of operations within the sales pipeline.

To that end, we dove into conversation with Nicole about exegraphic data—how it functions, how it changes the way revenue teams can think about targeting accounts, and how it can improve precision, streamline operations, maximize resources and harmonize often competing teams within your organization. 

 

Exegraphics: The behavioral traits of companies

Before companies can improve the precision of their targeting with exegraphics, it helps to understand how exegraphics work.

“I like to think of them as psychographic traits for B2C, but now for B2B,” Nicole says. “Instead of those psychographic traits about an individual, exegraphics are traits about the business and how a business behaves.”

Whereas more traditional firmographics include traits such as industry, size, and revenue, exegraphics examine hundreds of other, more behavioral, traits like: Are companies early adopters of technology? Are they hiring a larger sales team? Are they expanding their marketing teams? How do they operate on the inside and on the outside?

“Exegraphics let us get a more complete picture and a more holistic view of an account,” Nicole says. “When you look at just firmographics, you might have tens or hundreds of thousands of accounts that fit that profile. When you’re conducting an account-based campaign, you need to narrow those down to who will fit your ICP best and who acts just like your best customers—the ones that you would want to clone out hundreds of times if you could.”

Whereas doing this “by hand” would be practically impossible, the AI-driven model behind exegraphics assesses hundreds of aspects to build out an image of what makes those customers the best—and identifies (and ranks) others that resemble them.

Nicole points out that the answer in identifying top prospects does not lie in plucking single exegraphic threads; it’s the composite pattern-matching that creates a more meaningful customer profile than humans could reasonably accomplish alone.

In short: “Exegraphics give us more confidence in building our ICP,” she says.

 

Prioritizing accounts to get to market faster

Building a quality ICP is an early step—not an end goal. For Nicole, the real power of exegraphics comes into play for prioritizing all those accounts that match your ICP.

“Clients understand generally what their ideal client looks like,” she says, “but they don’t know which ones to go after, how to go after them and who to pay special attention to.”

As an example, Intelligent Demand had a client with a target account list upward of 65,000 accounts—and they lacked the resources to tackle that entire list. So the agency assessed the client’s best customers with Rev’s AI-powered Sales Development Platform and compared them to the prospect list, in order to whittle it to something not only more manageable but more impactful.

Exegraphics trimmed that list to about 10,000 accounts—and then Nicole used them to help rank the remaining candidates.

Then, “Do we want to spread your budget evenly like peanut butter across all these accounts?” she asked. “Or are there certain accounts we want to pay more special attention to? Who do we prioritize for a specialized one-to-one outreach, one-to-few, and one-to-many? Let’s look at how closely they correlate to your best customers.”

Exegraphics (in combination with intent and campaign engagement data) identified the 200 accounts best matched to the ICP, with the highest likelihood to engage.

As Nicole puts it: “Exegraphics enabled us to get to market faster and be able to make smarter decisions at the beginning of the campaign, when we had limited amounts of data.”

 

Three data sets playing together: exegraphics, intent and campaign engagement

Nicole referenced intent and campaign engagement data above, and that they play well with exegraphic data to prioritize accounts. Here’s how she explains them as distinct approaches to understanding prospects:

  • Exegraphics are like the personality traits of an account: more fixed, and slower to change. “My personality traits don’t change drastically in a short amount of time,” she says. “If an account is likely to be an early adopter of technology or is in a high growth mode, they’re likely to be in that same mode six months to a year from now.”
  • Intent and campaign engagement data examines what an account is interested in. “What are they searching? Which kind of articles are they reading? What are they looking for? Are they in market for something that I have to sell right now?” These data sets are ever-changing.

When these data sets intersect, an ideal customer becomes an ideal customer right now (and thus a high priority for sales and marketing outreach). 

 

Maximizing limited resources

A common theme in RevOps teams that Nicole works with is this: Teams struggle with limited resources. How can they use this exegraphic data to maximize the resources that they do have?

Nicole provides these three insights into prioritizing a team’s resources in addition to prioritizing their prospects:

  • Get discovery out of the way. “Sales teams don’t have to get on a phone call to uncover the things that you can’t normally see,” she says. “We’re able to see them through exegraphics.” For instance, Intelligent Demand generally looks for clients with a certain level of marketing maturity—and exegraphics helps the Sales team assess the marketing maturity of an account directionally before even reaching out.
  • Determine your talk track. We all know that prospects have different personas that we talk to throughout the sales cycle, and many organizations have standard talk tracks for them. But how to know which ones to lead with? Exegraphics enable a team to step into conversations with high confidence that they’re using the most applicable talk track because they already understand certain behaviors (and thus certain pain points) within the organization.
  • Align Sales and Marketing. The process of using exegraphics to select accounts can actually bring Sales and Marketing teams together. “Historically, you have Marketing teams pick certain accounts for certain reasons, and Sales teams pick certain accounts for certain reasons,” Nicole says. Exegraphics help both teams hone those lists in tandem, without it being a matter of stepping on each other’s domains—instead, Sales and Marketing alignment becomes about identifying the accounts most likely to succeed with limited resources to target them. “It opens up the conversation and gives teams data points to be confident in the accounts they’re selecting, as well,” she says.

 

Final thoughts: Creating harmonious RevOps teams

Each step of Nicole’s exegraphic discussion comes back to prioritization:

  • Identifying what traits matter most to your ICP
  • Choosing the accounts most likely to purchase
  • Selecting other relevant data points
  • Maximizing limited resources

Exegraphic prioritization enables more than just a smoother, more efficient pipeline, though. It also creates more internal harmony within RevOps.

“When we’re aligned on a target account list, especially for an account-based campaign or an account-based play, there’s less handoff between Marketing and Sales,” Nicole says. “There’s more of What are we going to do at the same time, together? What activities are we going to do at each point in the customer life cycle to work together to get them to the next phase?”

While Marketing and Sales may each take the lead at various points, exegraphic data-driven foundation aligns them on a continuous, parallel path—for the good of your RevOps team as well as your customers.

Interested in hearing the full conversation with Nicole Davolt? Watch it here.