The age of generating mass amounts of sales leads a month is dead. Rising from the ashes is a new era of quality over quantity. In fact, 70% of businesses state that they prefer quality leads over high numbers in generation alone.
But the big challenge is this: marketers must now explain to their executives why the 20 leads they now get are more valuable than the 500 they used to get. Marketers have known (at least subliminally) for years that the expectations being placed on them are not realistic. This issue stems from the fact that the first wave of data-driven marketers was focused solely on outcomes, which led to inflated numbers without context. However, revenue intelligence is here to change that.
How? Revenue intelligence enables go-to-market (GTM) teams to drive more quality leads versus large numbers that are not likely to convert. By providing contextually relevant insights into buying behaviors much earlier in the process, GTM teams can drive better business results more efficiently.
Here’s how marketing teams can leverage it to make better, data-informed decisions:
How the Gold Rush for More Leads Backfired
Marketers have known for years that the expectations being placed on them are not realistic, but they are often unable to convince the rest of the C-suite that long-term investments generate short-term results. It all started with the rise of data-driven digital marketers who tried to take traditional marketing metrics and apply them to entirely new behaviors and channels. This led to inflated numbers without context due to a focus on outcomes.
This rush to use data to emphasize marketing’s value backfired and set an unrealistic expectation that can be challenging to overcome. As a result of current economic conditions, marketers have had to do more with less, so time and money spent on effectively researching market dynamics and behaviors is often deprioritized in favor of lower-cost options.
Fortunately, new technologies have created an opportunity to learn more about a buyer, even before they entertain a vendor. Marketers can now get in front of a buyer with solutions much earlier in their buying process and focus on lead quality over quantity, unlike the early days when all that mattered was driving high numbers of leads. However, marketing leaders have been unable to convince executives that long-term marketing initiatives generate short-term results, and more importantly, why an action-based approach to an individual’s unique buying journey will generate better results in the long run. To communicate this crisis, GTM teams can leverage revenue intelligence to analyze pre-purchase data, behavioral trends and other metrics to better understand the specific needs and motivations of an individual buyer.
Prioritizing Quality Over Quantity
In a digital world, the view into a prospect’s behavior is often limited to clicks and keystrokes, but revenue intelligence expands that view to include actual online discussions and interactions. With deeper insight into a prospect’s peer influences and the intent derived from peer-to-peer conversations, GTM teams can segment their target account list and allocate their time and resources to focus on leads more likely to convert.
Revenue intelligence can also help determine their Total Addressable Market (TAM), or market demand, and Total Serviceable Market (TSM), the portion of that demand that they can realistically serve. For instance, a company that sells primarily to large businesses may have thousands of accounts in their TAM, but only a percentage of those will be in their TSM. And taking into account the economic climate, only a small percentage of that TSM may be in-market at a given time.
Say an organization has 40 likely buyers, but executives still expect marketing teams to generate 200 leads a month – the math doesn’t add up. Rather than generating higher quantities of leads, teams could instead use qualitative buyer journey data to focus on the buyers that are most likely to convert. Account-based marketing (ABM) strategies are a great first step and far better than a “spray and pray” method. But despite being action-based over volume-driven, ABM is still an ‘if this, then that’ approach where every prospect’s action has a defined reaction. It doesn’t provide a depth of insights like revenue intelligence does to empower GTM teams to make more informed decisions.
The next step would be incorporating revenue intelligence, which enables teams to shift their focus from tracking meaningless clicks and keystrokes to uncovering high-value, contextually relevant insights into prospects’ online buying behaviors – even before initial outreach. By understanding the source of these signals and observing how potential buyers interact with and engage with peers, teams gain a far more accurate predictor of a future purchase than ever before.
With these contextually relevant insights, marketing teams can identify and prioritize accounts more easily and accurately, enabling them to connect with prospective buyers quickly and efficiently. Revenue intelligence empowers businesses to allocate their team’s time and resources to focus on leads more likely to convert. It’s a powerful tool that can help businesses close more deals when marketing teams can identify and prioritize the right buyers at the right time.
The Key to Unlocking Business Growth
To better support business efforts to drive long-term revenue, marketers must focus on quality leads over quantity. Revenue intelligence is a powerful tool that enables marketing teams to leverage data to get in front of the right people at the right time with the right message. Gathering data about buyer behaviors is a valuable tool for creating an understanding of customer journeys. This, in turn, helps GTM teams identify the best ways to reach and engage customers at each stage of the journey.
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