In one word – yes. The recent advances in AI and predictive analytics in the marketing industry have triggered an evolution of capabilities. As marketers, we can now bridge the silos of people intelligence and account intelligence to provide a truly powerful digital engine that generates revenue in a fast-growing environment. This engine will not only deliver high-quality leads through more powerful segmentation that reaches the white space but also drive significant improvements in sales productivity. The combination of these two outcomes will spark a chain reaction that will transform into a higher marketing contribution – and accelerate its impact.
In the B2B space, the ability to contribute significant revenues has slipped away from marketing and led to high CMO turnover. The next generation of CMOs will be those who have a business vision that prioritizes orchestration of smart marketing technologies.
The Realities of Modern Marketing
According to SiriusDecisions, 67% of the buyer’s journey is now completed digitally before a prospect is ready to speak with a human. An engaging and personalized omnichannel digital experience that differentiates a company is essential to success in this “pre-human” phase. It is essential for marketing to identify the digital spaces and deliver experiences through digital ecosystems that go well beyond the vanilla to relevant and engaging – whether you are a long-time customer or a brand-new prospect visiting a company’s site for the first time.
Marketing will not succeed by creating generic experiences. Recent studies show that human attention span has decreased to just 8.25 seconds. That is 8.25 seconds to ensure that a returning visitor finds the right content to know where they are in the buying process. It’s 8.25 seconds to prove to a new prospect that your company can add value in their industries and with their use cases. Even for B2B technology players with long sales cycles and complex buying groups, personalization is key to making the most of this precious time – ensuring that the right stories, images, and next steps are brought to digital visitors to capture their attention.
Marketing must have the right level of account intelligence to deliver a digital experience – from web to chatbots to social – that enables visitors/prospects to self-select, self-educate, and identify themselves for their intended buying journey. This will increase the likelihood of prospects engaging with digital content to hook their interest and ensure that sales are always “invited to the party.”
With these realities in mind, I have chosen to invest in two areas of marketing technology:
- Account-based revenue platform
- Revenue intelligence management.
Account-Based Revenue
The first key component, an account-based revenue platform, will allow us to maximize data, enabling us to see a buying intent of an account – and analyze all interactions in real-time that customers and prospects have on digital properties – in first and third person. This powerful data allows us to position the customer at the center of everything we do and provides a digital mechanism to better understand who this prospect is and their anticipated buying journey. Being able to see and leverage intent data at the account level will take things to the next level. Marketers cannot afford to miss these advantages. Account-based revenue technologies have now reached a level of maturity that marketing teams should use to advance digital growth or risk being left behind. As one commentator noted, you’re either at the table or on the menu. Marketers must take advantage of these technologies to keep their seats at the table.
One area where account intelligence pays dividends is lead and account prioritization. Certainly, we have been using lead scoring for some time for this purpose – initially based on profile and then tracking behavior – but this has been done at the individual level and subject to assumptions made by marketing teams. Here’s a single example of the limitations of lead scoring: if you had six people from the same company, each with a single interaction, they would be considered six individual leads with not enough interest to be rated high enough as MQL and sent to sales. Thanks to AI, we can now finish assessments at the account level – and what a different view that is. Now, the resulting view is of six people from a company interacting with your digital properties: a buying group. That’s something to pay attention to. And imagine, if the six people from a company belong to your targeted segmentation with a high propensity and intent to buy. Bingo! You now have a programmatic way to beat the odds and start hitting the jackpot.
This platform allows us to segment accounts into four levels of engagement and builds playbooks for each stage, which is essential for delivering engaging content. Some are still at an early learning stage and have, therefore, primarily worked through marketing, but some are so much hotter that the playbook is heavily in sales – so we can interact immediately.
You have probably gathered by now that I assume a level of maturity in your adoption of marketing technology. To date, I am astonished by companies that have not connected their marketing automation system with their CRM or those that do not have a strong means of connecting different data points between systems. If that is you, stop. AI is not (yet) the key for you. Instead, focus your energy, skill, and time on developing a closed-loop marketing system. You will be able to maximize technologies in the spaces of predictive analytics and revenue intelligence once you have a strong backbone of marketing analytics to drive a culture of continuous optimization.
Revenue Intelligence
The next key component of this digital puzzle is people intelligence. Here, we see the challenge that the direct sales model poses to the marketing’s goal of contributing to revenues: visibility of CRM data. The majority of major B2B software players who have leveraged a direct sales model as their primary way to penetrate the market have not put energy into incorporating the right level of prospect/customer contacts into their CRM. It’s a bleak sight to see sales teams spending their valuable time manually entering contacts and activities instead of selling. And what’s even worse, most salespeople do not capture this data. Often, this strategic prioritization is made at the expense of marketing’s ability to understand the customer landscape and track interactions throughout the sales cycle.
Solving this problem is where our investment in the revenue intelligence space comes into play. This marketing solution allows this user data to be absorbed automatically, with AI-driven insights added to identify key members of the buying team and understand what level of penetration we have.
We have begun to weave the digital thread of marketing through the combined capabilities of these two digital marketing solutions. Now, we truly have data-driven segmentation across accounts and within the digital landscape. With this real-time insight, we will now be able to quickly move high-quality leads with the right level of buying intent so that sales can prioritize and close the deal. This data also keeps marketing accountable. Is marketing producing the right type of leads with the personas that need to be influenced, or do we need to make a course correction?
The predictive analytics resulting from the empowerment of AI combined with the right matrix of processes, roles, and responsibilities will empower marketing to provide a powerful revenue-generating engine: a new digital marketing setup made entirely of data completely in real-time that is motivated and deployed in an agile manner to provide timely marketing insights. In this way, marketing can continuously evaluate its impact on revenue and pivot quickly from assumptions and decisions.
It’s no secret that ideas – not technologies alone – are what drive real change. This requires a new mindset and a shift in how marketing teams are organized and measured. AI should be at the forefront of these strategies and entrusted to provide insights and business results that will help marketing teams innovate and make strategic decisions to grow the business. You need a digital thread.
My vision is to bring marketing processes into the digital age. The two platforms I have described in this article will set the stage for digital transformation so that I can accelerate the contribution to revenue creation for growth. It all comes down to one question: why try to guess what prospects are searching for when data can show you what actually converts?
