5 critical ways a B2B data partner can help sales & marketing teams – Guru
Gurupandian Chandrasekaran is the Chief Growth and Product officer at Ampliz. He is a Growth-obsessed guy who has 12+ years of global experience in business/product strategy, entrepreneurship, sales & business development. He has expertise in Business Growth, Customer Acquisition & Funnel Development, Product Strategy, Enterprise Software (SaaS), Data Analytics & Customer Insights. In his session at B2B Binge 2.0, Guru walks us through the different ways a B2B data partner can help us scale revenue.
What do sales and marketing teams need?
It is pretty obvious sales and marketing teams of any company just need growth and growth just comes from more revenue and more customers.
There are different stages in the funnel, at the top you have the lead generation and you want to put as many leads as possible. Then you nurture it through your inbound marketing and other teams and then you want to close the deal. To make it even more obvious, you should have lead volume, so the more number of leads you put into the funnel, your funnel can get bigger. You can close more deals or you can increase the velocity which means the pace in which the lead moves through the funnel has to be expedited. So those are two ways in which you can make your funnel work better for you increase the size of the funnel or make it shorter and quicker.
How can a B2B data partner help? (5 Ways)
There are five critical ways a B2B data partner can help. Those are:
1. Insights (Know your lead)
If you’ve got a lead from a website form, an event you register or through signups, LinkedIn outreach anywhere anything you’ve got about a lead you can use those few data points to collect more intelligence about your lead. You can collect an email address through a white paper. But you need to know more about your lead. It can be an email, it can be just a company URL, it can also be an inbound traffic IP address any of this can be used to fetch more details.
So you can know more about if you have an email, the name of the person, the title the company, seniority, and the company’s URL. We can tell you the revenue, employee, industry. So you can build a complete profile. These are the insights that are the starting point of how you would want to work with the b2b data vendor.
2. New Leads (TAM)
Every organization wants a partner who could give those leads for the entire total addressable market (TAM). They need to increase the lead volume which is going into their funnel they want everybody in their total addressable market. They can classify it into different personas based on revenue, industry, title, seniority, location. They should use this customer profiles to create different personas using a lot of leads in their total addressable market. So they never short of leads. So that’s the second way in which any b2b data partner can help you and this is a very common way you go.
3. Append (No missing data)
This is an area where most data partners don’t offer this upfront. So sales and marketing people should be aware of using this knowledge to ask them for it. For example, you have a lot of databases and you’ve been doing business for five years. You have built a database of 10,000 or 100,000 contacts or companies. A lot of this information is missing, it’s incomplete and when you try to work on these leads you have incomplete data which means your time spent on it is increasing. So your funnel is not getting shorter anymore. Your lead priority and qualification rely heavily on a lot of data points. So the more data points you have, the more you can prioritize your leads.
Once you can append it which is missing data are no more missing data. Every field that you required for your prospecting, for your campaign needs is fulfilled. That leads you into the fourth solution which is enriching.
4. Enrich (Clean data)
Enrich is all about keeping your heart the database. Outdated information, wrong and incorrect data just a case in this last two months. This time has corrupted your database by at least 25% and this also means there’s a huge cost and complexity in just your customer acquisition efforts because you don’t know what email is wrong, you don’t know what title is wrong and the names are wrong. It all increases the cost and complexity and data cleansing and validation. It’s not like a one-time exercise; we just come and do it once. It’s a continuous process because there is always people change jobs, companies go out of business and starting up.
So this is an actual report from Neil Patel. He took some analysis from the last years like 2015, 16, 17 corporate data and it is growing by 30 to 40 percent every year for these companies. He took very SMB kind of data not like the big ones like oracle. Small ones 20 to 30 percent of your database will get dirty every year and look at that like in your database the number of bad records increases and with that your cost increases not just in maintaining or knowing what the bad data is but also in your campaign. It’s kind of goes downstream in all sales and marketing activities and this cost is very prohibitive. In the last three years this cost is just going up, it’s not going down.
5. Contextual (Personalized Intelligence)
Fifth and the last is something that is taking up in the last five years. Your customers are getting exposed to multiple campaigns, companies and products which a side effect. It is decreasing attention spans. They don’t want to get any more emails and to make your campaigns more effective you have to do two things: you have to prioritize your leads and you have to personalize your communication or campaign efforts.
And for that you need custom intelligence, not off-the-shelf, you need more information which is the personalized approach to your business needs, technologies used growth rate. They may have a new office, new c-level executive traffic, funding, and countless other data points you can just keep going on that. So an example would be, a company has these like the entire database you just ask one question. What is the term they use and immediately you realized the second company is not using any CRM which means the priority is low like that you can keep adding more and more columns to prioritize and work on only the leaves that matter.
How do you choose the right data partner?
You’re not focused on selling to one market. The globe is your oyster. So you need global scale capabilities. Second, you need to have decent data standards and you also need to have a company which has custom capabilities. So this is an example of a place the global data set in each country. How many companies and contacts we have and in terms of personalization and scale. We have a couple of products in the scale side talking about hundreds of millions of data and then you have some in the personalization where we work on hundreds of data point which we take a couple of days to deliver which was more personalized and that’s where we position ourselves and that is how you choose to be a greater partner to work with.
AMA with Guru
The following is excerpts from the AMA session with Guru.
Can the growth equation be changed by specific data or data being more specific than generic?
Oh yeah sure I think like you know the more specific data points that you collect which are more important to the business that is very critical to you like for example like let’s say you’re a SAS company which sells to like engineers right so you would only care about those data points of how many engineers are employed with the client company right/ A similar company which is selling CRM wouldn’t be interested in that particular data point so the more specific you go to about your business and you have data points around that it’s gonna help your business tremendously.
Is data segregation very important to feed into the funnel?
I think the data segregation is one way of looking at the customer persona right think about it any product that you’re selling any service you’re selling right there is on the other side of it there is a particular person under the problem right so if you’re selling your CRM which means there are the VP sales with the problem so customer persona is the other side of the data point you’re collecting so the more problems and personas you solve the more data points you would need to have to personalize that.
How will inbound marketing work with a data partner like Ampliz?
So a lot of people think like date of partner cannot only help in outbound activities and odd embalm C outbound is very crucial like you know you have sales and phone calls and LinkedIn outreach campaigns where and data partner will help you tremendously but it is wrong to assume the inbound campaigns will not work because take for example your web traffic right? Anybody coming into your website if they have a form where you fill in like you know instead of having 10 fields you can just have one field with an email address and that is enough for you to quickly fill in the other details and quickly knows if this particular customer is a valid person to send other content or you can even tailor your content that is one example.
A second example could be just by the IP address you can collect more data points about this company and possibly tailor your next content delivery or even follow-up campaigns with it.
Should I only do our bond if I work with the B2B data partner?
Not necessarily and I think that explains my previous I explained this question outbound and inbound are just like you now the same marketing activities it just like a pull up push there is you can’t choose one over the other you need to have a balance of both depending on like and how your business is structured you need to have a little bit nuttier and a little bit full there so you need to use both these things and a B2b data partner like Ampliz with all kinds of customers who have outbound and inbound needs.
Is data decay real? How do I work to clean my marketing database?
The data decay is very real. Think about it as you know just read the news in the last two weeks about how many people have left laid off or move jobs right all those titles are gone so one if you have that contact in your database that is no longer valid, second you need to know who is the right person to get that so it is happening all around us and we need to be very very proactive in cleaning our databases and making sure we have the right data points to personalize our content and outreach activities.
What are the top three factors that you consider by qualifying a lead?
I think the top three factors again see this is you cannot answer this question generally so if you’re asking this question to the head of marketing at Salesforce he could be at sensing a very different question right? So it depends on who the company is it a start-up is it big companies an SMB and also from their own experience of what makes a good customer right so the more let’s say like you know if I’m starting out a company and I think like anybody from IP outsourcing industry is a good fit okay that is one filter and some particular title and this company has two three branches across the globe so those are three factors but these three data points could be completely irrelevant to somebody who’s selling SaaS. So it depends on your industry it depends on your experience of who have you sold to already do you want to have kind of have a customer who we can mimic and create another more profiles so we can collect more data around it so depending on that you have to have like three factors could keep changing.
Is Ampliz a GDPR compliance company?
Yes, so the idea for GDP is all about obtained at a minimal level where is non-intrusive data collection right so what we do is we work with vendors and we work on public sourcing of data points and we have an opt-out mechanism always to make sure like people was there with us and they can remove it because the more we collect from sources like LinkedIn and other public mediums and company websites that are constantly being curated and made sure that the people who are in it are aware of it so we are completely GDPR compliance company.
At what point of a company’s growth should they consider partnering with the B2B data company?
So I think the right answer for this is you could actually have a data partner throughout your journey even if before you have your first customer – even if you had 10,000 customers right it depends so let’s let me throw some factors here think about how big is your marketing database your team thinks about like if you have just one founder working to sell something even you could benefit from having 20 leads in your funnel in an email personalize campaign – or find their LinkedIn profiles right if you just focus on content and you have two pages in your website right – good content even then it is good to know who is coming to your website and I am talking about the simplest of use cases right and then you grow to have one to ten hundred sales and marketing folks then you need for data grows along with your databases.
How Ampliz helps marketing teams?
As I said right we can start with the five solutions that pitch is for marketing like think you go to an event and throw know who came and gave you a business card or I mean now you can’t do physical event so let’s think about our whitepaper downtown 100 emails how do you know who they are number one and then if somebody closes and you know one particular customer is a good one can I get more leads from my addressable market that’s the second use case and then if you’ve been in business for a while you have a huge database to enrich enhance and even append so which means no more missing fields no more blank fields no more outdated data everything is cleaned up and the last which is taking up more than the B2B data partner industry is I need more specific tailored intelligence to my business right let me give an example let’s say you’re selling to e-commerce companies right you want to know more specifically how many products are they selling it have more than five products maybe there have a greater need to sell to you or you sell to them right so those are the specific data points that you want to collect so that it becomes easy for you to prioritize and personalize.
If I purchase a dataset, what exactly am I getting just information or qualified leads with it?
So we have different product offerings generally most of the video data partners if they are a little refined what they will tell you is they will be clearing the data sets so you would be getting a company or a contact record depending on the structure and anything else would be extra intelligence and they would also have a kind of a upsell opportunity or they would have another service where they would tell ok we are going to take this lead campaign and work on it to make it even more qualified so depending on the data partner you can choose all these services.
What happens when it (data) gets changed? How do I tackle that?
So I think since the idea is you need to map your database by some primary identifier, so a primary identifier for a contract would be emailed a phone number and name definitely and for a company, it would be you are a lot of company name or location a mix of those factors so let’s say you have a contact in the company who you’ve been chasing a suddenly he change jobs right so you shouldn’t have that company marked you so that you know this contact is gone some but now you think of it as two leads for the same company you can get a new person in that road that’s one lead and the second lead is you’ve been looking with somebody for like six months and this person is moved to another company means you can take that opportunity and go talk to him in the new company as well right so the way to think about it is you have a contact and a company they could be working in the same it could be the same field until he does not change jobs when he’s if you think of it as two leads to nurture.
How do I validate a data partner?
So validating data partner I think like you know you should start by kind of understanding what is their breadth and depth of coverage number one – you should always request for a small sample and check their efficacy because they could have let’s like for us also right we have 460 million but we may not be the best for some customers because they want a specific niche of ten thousand customers where we don’t have enough data so you should always request for a very specific sample in your database and see they have the coverage and it’s kind of like a kind of a catch game right the more data partner collects the more data changes so you have to play catch-up always you have to understand that a data partner or data industry is not about selling data it’s about selling the convenience of having it right. So customers to understand that data partner should keep working to improve the data set so asking for a small sample understanding more about how they collect and process this data would help a lot in for you to kind of as I said prioritize and personalize your campaigns.