Focus your account based selling with intent data

Guest post by Alex Greer, Senior Director, Head of Sales Development at Bombora

I once heard an SVP of Sales lead his opening remarks to a New Hire Training Class with this message:

“What keeps me up at night is not if we’re going to close the deals we’re in. It’s that there are deals out there where we’re not even in the conversation.”

Talk about instilling a sense of urgency!

When your business is looking to grow, especially a venture-backed business with extreme pressure to gather market share, it is absolutely imperative to be in, or better yet, drive and shape any conversation where a solution you offer is being evaluated.

And yet, so often when a salesperson goes into “hunter” mode and prospects into their accounts, they are either met with silence or terse replies of “Not right now” or “We just bought another solution.”

Why is that?

Focus Sales Activity on Buyers Who Want to Hear from You Now

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You are assigned a set of accounts. Could be 50, 100, 500 accounts.

You and your manager review your accounts and create an “A, B, C” ranking system.

The As are most likely the most eye-catching logos — the ones all your peers and executives will be impressed by if you enter a deal cycle and close them.

And so based on this A, B, C system, you prioritize your prospecting accordingly. That’s the right thing to do, right? Or is there a better way?

Enter Intent data.

Intent data is designed to solve two critically important pieces of the Account Based Selling (ABS) motion:

1. Timing
2. Relevance

How? By telling you:

1. If an account has recently shown significant interest by researching solutions online
2. What content and products specifically that account is looking

Bombora pioneered the quickly growing Intent data category when it spun out of Madison Logic in 2015 and has maintained its reputation as the market leader, thanks to (but not limited to) two key differentiators:

1. A curated Data Co-op of highly-trafficked B2B content publishers
2. Company Surge® data, which indicates not just any interest, but a true sign of increased content consumption above an account's own typical level of interest in a given topic

Now with Bombora’s new Outreach integration, sales reps can easily view valuable insights from its Intent data to understand which of their accounts are actively researching topics that pertain to their service or product.

Outreach’s ABS workflow incorporates Bombora’s Intent data to indicate an account’s online content consumption, giving sellers a window into which organizations are actively researching solutions to their biggest problems.

In turn, sales teams can use Intent-driven tasks to prioritize prospects based on who is most likely to engage in product conversations. Bombora’s Intent data integrates with Outreach to create high-priority tasks when accounts show buyer intent for specific topics. The tasks help account owners take immediate action, so they can focus on the right people at the right time.

Finding New Deals with the Intelligence of Intent Data

TOPO’s recent study found that 90 percent of the organizations using Intent data do so to prioritize accounts, give sales teams clear direction, find new leads, and identify the prospect's needs.

Sales reps who use Intent data eliminate guesswork and maximize their time on accounts that are ready to buy now. Sales teams can focus on leads that will generate revenue by sorting by Intent data filters or acting on Intent-driven tasks.

Intent Data in Action in Outreach

When sales reps pair Intent data with ABS in the right way, they can expect the response rates from potential clients to increase. The best way to achieve this is to customize sequences to automatically send a personalized message about the right product at the right time.

Here’s how the ABS workflow incorporates Bombora’s Intent Data in Outreach.

This is useful for well-established B2B sales businesses and newcomers to the industry alike. A potential client may be in the market to buy a product or service like yours, but they may not recognize your brand quite yet. Seeing their intent to buy before better-known competitors gets you a foot in the door and a relevant touchpoint to close the sale.

ABS is by no means a new method, but adding Intent data helps fine-tune existing systems so sales reps can better prioritize their workflows. Understanding which keywords target accounts are searching leads to more intelligent messaging. Directly referencing a searched topic within an email campaign, for example, gives reps the opportunity to highlight solutions to specific pain points they already know the buyer is feeling. Relevant and personalized touchpoints are more likely to elicit a reply, a meeting, and a sale.

Intent data unlocks insights into consumer behavior and highlights products and services they’re interested in. With access to this powerful information, you can now engage with prospects long before they make any major buying decisions.

For more information on how Intent data can increase effective workflow and target active prospects, download our new ebook Close Deals Faster Using Automation + Intent.

If you would like to try Bombora’s Intent data for free in Outreach, register here.