account-based buying signals
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Account-Based Buying Signals
How to tell which companies are most likely to buy based on website activity
Adapted from a presentation from Adam Greco, Senior Partner at Web Analytics Demystified and Shari Johnston, Director of Demand Generation Demandbase
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Executive Summary The B2B buyer’s journey has shifted radically over the years,
and smart digital marketers use this to their advantage.
B2B companies can use web analytics to predict who will
buy by learning to read the “digital body language” of web
visitors, and by pinpointing exactly who those visitors are.
Website engagement is the single biggest predictor of buying
intent, making it possible to predict a company’s odds of purchasing
well before they reach out to your sales team. With the proper
tools, predicting which customers are most likely to buy is simply
a matter of honing in on their website behaviors. We say “simply,”
but of course there is an iterative nature to the process, as well
as a tactical strategy you must first adopt and then customize
to your company’s specific needs. Boiled down to its simplest
elements, honing in on visitor behavior looks something like this:
1. Start tracking who is looking at your website now.
2. Wait a month or two (and keep tracking).
3. See who turns into a buyer.
4. Assess which elements of your website had the biggest impact and which sources and keywords drove the most buyers.
With this information and over-time analysis, you’ll gain
necessary insights and progressively structure your
website to attract and retain paying customers.
Account-Based Buying SignalsHow to tell which companies are most likely to buy based on website activity
Adapted from a presentation from Adam Greco, Senior Partner at Web Analytics Demystified and Shari Johnston, Director of Demand Generation Demandbase
• Focusing on the power of identity and learning to read your target accounts’ digital body language when they are browsing
• Using website engagement as the single biggest predictor of buying intent. Tracking named accounts through customizable data that specifically benefits your sales team, and by setting alerts when active sales opportunities are happening
•The Demandbase Cheat Sheet for getting started
Takeaways include:
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In today’s B2B marketing world, there is an overwhelming amount of content available to prospective
buyers from websites, social media, blogs, forums and so forth. Accordingly, buyers are more educated
and sophisticated than ever before. They know how to quickly and easily navigate the Web to find the
information they need, and their journey starts well before they consider engaging
with a sales rep. By the time a prospect contacts you directly, even through
a form, he is deep inside the pipeline of decision-making. But if you
don’t have the tools to help you analyze these potential customers,
they might not even make it to your sales shortlist.
A 2011 Demandbase survey showed that company websites
were the number one online source of new leads, and research
from International Data Corporation (IDC), a global provider of
market intelligence, indicated that customers spend 50% of the
buying cycle looking for or engaging with content. With half of their
time spent this way, it’s vital that you are feeding prospects exactly
what they are looking for. We can’t emphasize the importance of this
enough: targeted content delivery to potential buyers needs to be a focused
marketing strategy for your company.
Given that not a single B2B sale happens without a visit to your website somewhere along the buying
process, it’s crucial to invest in content, because it’s a main source of future revenue. You need to reach
prospects in a proactive way, rather than passively waiting for them to reach out to you. But how do you do
this when 95% of your web site visitors are anonymous?
In the traditional model of meeting customers in person, facial expressions and body language helped
us figure out what interested prospective customers. But in the global digital era, you get that information
from prospects’ digital body language—what they search for, the pages they visit, the links they click on. If
you’re listening in the technological sense, you can hear what your leads are saying with every click.
Introduction
In a complex sale, the buyer’s journey is 70% complete by the time he’s ready to engage with a live sales person.
Source: SiriusDecisions
“Out” the Silent Majority for Better Marketing and Higher Revenue
Most visitors to your B2B website—in fact, about 95%—are anonymous because they haven’t yet identified themselves through a form submit. One of our customers, a large enterprise network storage organization, calls these invisible visitors “the silent majority.” Before using Demandbase, this company had no way of identifying the large number of people browsing their
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Using this sort of predictive analytics
approach, you too can predict your company’s
future revenue based on website viewer
behavior in the present.
This white paper is predicated on the idea that website engagement
is crucial to predicting the buying intent of prospective accounts
who are browsing on your site. Let’s dig a little deeper into the
stats around this:
CI Insights Inc. (formerly Experient), has over 13 years in the
business of customer intelligence consulting, conducted a study
on engagement scoring with sales predictions, analyzing 400,000
accounts over a 24-month period on how customers engaged with
website pages, email data and attendance at offline events. Out of this
study came one important finding: website engagement with high-value content
increased the likeliness to buy. For example, a prospect that took the time to watch a
product demo video turned out to be four times more likely to buy than one who didn’t.
Website Engagement Is the Single Biggest Predictor of Buying Intent
site. You can’t market to the unknown, so they decided to partner with Demandbase to “out” the silent majority and identify them by industry, company name and size, and more. They then built a demand-generation engine to create compelling experiences for the 95% in order to drive more conversions and, ultimately, more revenue. By microtargeting visitors with personalized landing pages for key industries, our client saw the following astonishing results:Most visitors to your B2B website—in fact, about 95%—are anonymous because they haven’t yet identified themselves through a form submit. One of our customers, a large enterprise network storage organization, calls these invisible visitors “the silent majority.” Before using Demandbase, this company had no way of identifying the large number of people browsing their site. You can’t market to the unknown, so they decided to partner with Demandbase to “out” the silent majority and identify them by industry, company name and size, and more. They then built a demand-generation engine to create compelling experiences for the 95% in order to drive more conversions and, ultimately, more revenue. By microtargeting visitors with personalized landing pages for key industries, our client saw the following astonishing results:
•30%liftinproductdemoplay
•39%liftindownloads
•83%liftinnavigationtotheirdeeperproductpages
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At Demandbase, we tested this theory by taking a sample of closed accounts from Q3 2012 to see if
website activity really did predict future revenue. We pulled data for a 6-month period prior to the close
date, and in every single case we saw a spike in Web traffic shortly before a purchase was made.
Before the days of Web marketing, trade shows were often the best way to meet leads. All lead gathering
took place in person. If someone walked up to your booth at a trade show and expressed interest in your
products, you asked them a number of vital questions right off the bat:
1. What’s your name?
2. What company do you work for, and how big is it?
3. What industry are you in?
4. Are you familiar with our products?
5. What problem can we help you solve?
The Power of Identity and Reading Digital Body Language
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STEP 1: Identify the Unknown Using Demandbase and standard analytics tools, you can identify the silent majority browsing your website by company size, industry, name and more. Below is a visual example of how you can identify one potential customer. Reading the data, you know that this person works in the high-tech industry for a company (Symantec) that has over 10,000 employees.
Using Demandbase and analytics tools to pinpoint who is on your website and how they are behaving makes the website—traditionally a marketing tool—much more exciting for your sales organization because it has real selling potential. Your sales team will learn exactly who is visiting the site and how often, and receive customizable reports that can be tweaked to their needs:
Armed with this data, you can open up a productive line of communication between sales and marketing that is often missing in B2B. You can zero in on exactly which companies are looking at your products, and then act on the information in a proactive way.
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STEP 2: Track Named Accounts Named accounts, often called key accounts, are the accounts your company is most interested in targeting. Imagine being able to see which named accounts view your key conversion pages or your most valuable content.
Earlier, we talked about defining the analytics to describe which accounts are looking at the various pages on your website. Now, let’s take this a step further and talk about tracking visitors who view specific information, especially pricing information. Tracking in this way provides crucial insight, because if a prospect gets as far as your pricing page, he is deep inside the funnel, serious about your product, and possibly ready to reach out to you.
Using Demandbase, you can hone in on your named accounts, analyze specific pages they are spending time on, track which pages lead to success, and make decisions about which landing pages to send people to during campaigns. Plus, you can view pathing reports of how visitors from a particular company (or industry) navigate your website. All of this data not only helps inform the sales team, but also helps the marketing team refine and restructure the website in an effort to make it a more strategic tool.
Demandbase uses IP identification to name
accounts. We can classify your traffic by
audience type and provide enterprise information on that subset of your
traffic. Once you have this information, it’s easy to
pass it along to your web analytics tool.
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STEP 3: Track Visitor EngagementEven more powerful than analyzing which of your pages a particular company looks at is Demandbase’s
ability to assign visitor engagement points. By tracking an account’s engagement score, and combining
that score with the company’s overall analytics, you can begin to gauge which companies are exhibiting
high interest in your products.
Engagement points work this way:
•Ifanaccountviewsaproductpage,youassign2points(forexample)
•Iftheyviewthepricingpage,25points
•Iftheywatchademovideo,50points
The first step is to name as many website visitors as possible to get that silent majority down to a minority.
Once you’ve identified as many accounts as you can, the second step is to get them to visit your pricing
pages. The third and final step in this process is to look for relationships between named account activity
and sales success.
By analyzing this activity, you can indicate spikes in named account visits or pricing views, and then better
predict future buying behavior. This analysis can also help guide future salesperson hiring strategy and
website flow.
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STEP 4: Set Alerts for SalesDemandbase’s visitor engagement metric allows for
customization of the web analytics tool to alert sales
whenever a named account surpasses a particular
threshold—for instance, when a certain number of
customer engagement points are reached.
When someone expresses interest in your product,
a faster reaction means a higher probability of sales
success. In fact, Salesforce.com research showed
that minutes make a huge difference. This type of
proactive sales behavior showcases your company
as intelligent, progressive and driven—attributes
that customers find impressive and professional.
Here’s an example of how you can customize
web analytics data to the exact specs required
by a sales representative. Susan, the sales rep,
can quickly view a list of her targeted named
accounts and see which paths those accounts
are taking and how often they are visiting the
site. Sales reps appreciate this type of no-
nonsense, segmented information.
Segment Website Behavior for Named Accounts
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STEP 5: Make Your Website as Relevant and Customized as Possible to Each VisitorYou can’t easily build a custom website targeted to each unique person or industry that visits you online.
But by using Demandbase with other advanced online marketing and testing tools, such as Test and Target
by Adobe, you can create rules around what content is displayed on your home page, depending on who
is looking at it. For instance, a visitor from the high-tech industry will see a case study related to their field,
while a visitor from a healthcare company will instead see a healthcare case study. In this way, you take
streamlined advantage of your time with visitors. At Demandbase, we found that conversion rates were
higher when we used rules to help personalize our website to each unique visitor. Before personalizing in
this way, we had a high bounce rate on our homepage; after, our bounce rate decreased substantially.
STEP 6: Proactively Initiate Chat Sessions with Named AccountsOne of the most effective things that our customer Salesforce.com did
was integrate Demandbase with proactive chat. Getting a prospect
to complete a form is great, but eventually a real conversation
must be had in order to close business. Most chat vendors
have a rule hierarchy, so, for example, if a prospect is on
the website for over five minutes, a chat box pops up.
Salesforce began by opting for a chat box to pop up
when a visitor hit the pricing page. Over time, based
on their analytics, they refined their model, creating
intelligent pop-up chat timing for named accounts
displaying particular behaviors, and have been able
to greatly increase their conversion rate as a result.
Setting up pop-up chat rules requires a deft hand. Too
much of a “push” to talk will turn off customers. The trick, as
Salesforce.com learned, is to place pop-up chat opportunities at
just the right time for that particular customer.
“A form completion is interesting, but not
nearly as interesting as identifying the company that looked at 32 pages but didn’t convert yet.”
— Jason Stewart, B2B Marketer and
Marketing Technologist at Demandbase
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1. Research to understand what is triggering your buyers’ intents.
2. Create a list of tools that will help you optimize to buyer behavior.
3. Understand which types of accounts you should monitor.
4. Hone in and engage your target audience, customizing your tactics as you collect more data.
5. Integrate with analytics tools.
6. Create sales alerts.
7. Test and target landing pages.
8.Keepaneyeonthefuture, constantly revising and refining over time.
While B2B marketing priorities have stayed the same, marketing tactics have changed a great deal. By learning to read digital body language and to “out” your silent majority of web visitors, you can better predict who will buy and proactively reach out to them, instead of waiting for them to come to you.
Demandbase Cheat Sheet: What A Marketer Needs to Get Started
Web Analytics Demystified: B2B RecommendationsLooking into the future of B2B marketing through
website content, we’ve learned a few lessons:
•Don’tgiveuponthesilentmajority:the
unknown95%ofyourwebsitevisitors
•Don’twaituntilit’stoolatetofigure
out which companies are interested in
your products
•Listentoyourprospects’digital
body language
•Usealloftheinformationatyour
disposal to help close sales
“Your website is a lead-churning machine, and you want to be constantly optimizing it.”
— Adam Greco, Web Analytics Demystified
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Demandbase is the first real-time targeting
and personalization platform for B2B,
transforming the effectiveness of marketing
programs and Marketing’s ability to impact
revenue. While personalization tools have long
existed for B2C, until now, none were geared
specifically to enable B2B marketers to make
online interactions more effective, delivering
the right message at the right time.
Without the use of cookies, Demandbase’s
Real-time Identification service bridges the
gap between known and anonymous web
visitors by identifying and segmenting the
companies visiting a website, and providing
detailed, targetable business attributes in
real-time. Demandbase integrates with other
sales and marketing tech nologies to deliver
unique intelligence about web visitors, and
better attract, convert and retain the right
customers. Enterprise leaders and high-growth
companies alike use Demandbase to drive
better marketing performance.
Founded in 2006 and used by more than
1,000 companies, Demandbase is
headquartered in San Francisco, California
and funded by Adobe Systems (NASDAQ:
ADBE), Altos Ventures, Sigma Partners,
and Sutter Hill Ventures.
San Francisco HeadquartersDemandbase, Inc.
301 Howard Street, Suite 1800
San Francisco,CA 94105
415.683.2660
Demandbase Support415.683.2660
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