Outbound is not an easy job.
Everyone knows you need to know your audience, write engaging messages, and reach out to them when they are in the buying window. (Duh?)
But nothing is as simple as that.
You may have a lot of data: session duration, ICP criteria, and every touchpoint with accounts that you’ve stored in CRM.
But your marketing team are struggling to know which accounts are qualified to send to sales. And the sales still don’t know which accounts they should prioritize, when the best timing to reach out is, and what to include in the pitch.
Truth is: you don’t need more data – You need insights.
Intent data is the one.
It tells you who are interested in your products, which product they are interested in, where they are on the buyer journey, and when they are ready to buy.
Combined with your ICP, you’ll have a clear vision of which accounts to reach out to, when to reach out, and what you should include in a personalized pitch.
If you are tired of wasting your time building an outreach list that doesn’t convert, this is your secret weapon.
Here are 5 steps to activate your intent data and make your outreach easier
1. Re-visit your Ideal Customer Profile
If you are selling down jackets, you won’t put Thailand as your main market.
That’s one simple use case of an ICP.
An ICP is a portrait of the audience you would like to sell to. A well-defined and updated ICP is the essence of every business. To define your ICP, you need both standard attributes and non-standard attributes.
Standard attributes include the basic firmographic and technographic data of your ideal customers – industry, location, employee size, company revenue, tech tools they are using, to name a few.
These standard attributes build the skeleton of your ICP.
To make it more vivid and accurate, you can add non-standard attributes to pinpoint the unique challenges faced by customers from different marketing segments.
Here’s a framework to define your ICP:
- List all your specific market segments.
- Choose 10 key customers from each segment.
- Find things that they have in common. For example, challenges, pain points, metrics they are being measured on, goals, and tech tools they use.
- Link them to your solutions. Find out which products of yours can contribute to their goals.
But is that all?
According to a Gartner research, you need to gather qualitative, quantitative, and predictive data to keep your ICP up to date.
Intent data gives you the power of predictability based on collecting real-time website activities. And that leads us to Step 2 of this framework.
2. Define which activities are “buying signals”
B2B buyers only spend 5% of their time talking with sales. But it doesn’t mean you are in the passive role.
Generally, activities that show a strong buying signal include:
- Checking your pricing page
- Unfinished form sign-ups
- Checking certain product pages
Together with IP-mapping, you can easily reveal company names behind these activities. In this way, your sales team knows whom to reach out to even though they never come inbound.
You can further track these key actions to predict their next moves and reach out to them earlier than your competitors.
Let’s take a look at some secondary buying signals:
- Read your blogs and download an eBook
- On-site duration is more than 1 minute
- Multiple visits within a short period of time (let’s say 2 weeks)
For some companies, these activities signal a learning intent, and the marketing team will send them to nurturing or retargeting campaigns instead of passing them on to sales.
But is it the case for your business?
If your business is for B2B online learning and you’ve published extensive use-case-based eBooks, downloading an eBook is a strong buying signal.
So, it’s time to have a company-wide discussion and define certain key activities to track.
3. Rank the buying signals
To act faster on high-value accounts that are ready to buy, you can divide revealed accounts into different segmentations based on Urgency Levels.
(Here’s an example of how PayFit implemented an Intent Signal Project to increase the conversion by 83%.)
These 3 factors can help:
- Relevancy: Did they perform the key activities you’ve set up in Step 2? If they did, make sure to reach out to them immediately.
- Recency: When is their last visit to your website? Reach out to them when the interest is not lost. You know, hit the iron when it’s hot.
- Frequency: If an account has checked your website several times within a week, what are you waiting for? Call, email, and connect with them on LinkedIn!
You can also use this diagram to diagnose your conversion barriers and learn how to act on revealed accounts using intent data:
4. Set up the segments
After Step 2 and 3, you’ve defined what high intent, medium intent, and low intent ICPs are like. You can use filters to create segments accordingly within the tool.
Furthermore, you can also create segments for each targeted market.
For example, you can create one segment for mid-market accounts in France, and another segment for enterprises FinTech accounts in the DACH region.
In this way, your sales team can only focus on the high-value ICPs within their targeted region to increase efficiency and avoid wasting time.
By integrating with Slack and Microsoft Teams, your sales team can receive the notifications when an ideal customer within their targeted region gets revealed in real-time. You’ll never miss a beat.
5. Contact the buying committee
Till now, you have built a well-structured targeted account list fully based on your website visitors.
Your sales team can ditch the cold outreach list now. The next step is to start reaching out.
To whom?
As more employees are involved in the buying process, it’s vital to reach out to more people in one organization – apart from decision-makers and C-levels.
Albacross partners with leading contact detail providers. So you can contact more employees within the revealed company, effortlessly.
Learn From the Best: How PayFit Gained A 83% Higher Conversion with Albacross’s Buyer Intent Data
All ideal buyers visiting the website are low-hanging fruit.
But to maximize efficiency, sales need to prioritize the highest intent and determine the perfect outreach approach.
PayFit categorizes its website visitors into 4 tiers of intent based on the firmographic data, technographic data, and their on-site activities.
And they call it the “Intent Signals Project”.
By doing so, sales can focus on the right accounts at the right time. Here’s how it looks like:
- Tier A+: Ideal buyers that have visited the pricing or demo pages and have not converted.
- Tier A: Ideal buyers that have not visited the pricing or demo pages nor converted, but have engaged.
- Tier B: Ideal buyers that have not visited pricing or demo page, converted, or engaged, but have spent 2+ min on website.
- Tier C: Ideal buyers that have not visited pricing or demo page, converted, or engaged, and have spent less than 2min on the website.
The strength of buying intent signals determines how quickly (and urgently) the sales need to reach out to them. For example, Tier A+ signals require immediate reaction so that the buyers’ interest isn’t lost.
Apart from uncovering new accounts from their website, PayFit also enriched their existing accounts in Salesforce using Albacross intent data. This also helps them track the buying signals of the accounts they have already reached out to but haven’t been closed yet.
With the Intent Signals in place, PayFit increased its outreach conversion rate from 6% to 11%.
Your time is precious. Use Intent Data to increase conversion, faster.
Outbound takes a lot of time. And you don’t always have a satisfactory conversion rate to pay back the time (and effort) you’ve spent.
The game-changer here is not to stuff more “leads” to your funnel, but to be selective and find high-quality accounts that both fit your ICP and show buying intent (or a strong tendency to buy).
This is how (and why) Buyer Intent Data comes in place. We hope this 5-step framework gives you the insights you need to craft an outbound strategy that truly fuels your revenue.
Yutong Nan
Content Marketer
Passionate about MarTech trends, Yutong is on the mission to help marketers understand the benefits of Intent Data and how to use it to achieve better results.