How Data Enrichment Can Generate Better Leads

Gina Goanta, Chief Data Officer, BNZSA

Data enrichment is an often-overlooked area of B2B marketing strategy. But why? It’s time consuming and doesn’t give the adrenalin hits of getting straight out in the market. But without it your marketing, business development and sales teams will really miss out.

Enriched data can give you:

Better content to really provide value to your prospects
A strong pipeline of prospects to nurture over time
Better qualified leads within your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Higher value customers with strong renewal potential

What is data enrichment?

Depending on the dataset you’re starting out with, it simply means adding additional data to your list of key accounts that will support your efforts from the prospecting stage through to sale.

Firmographics – key data about the company (HQs, company size, revenue, internal decision-making structures etc.)
Technographics – what technologies your key accounts already have in place, when they were purchased, when they anticipate renewal etc.
Intent – what signals key accounts are giving to indicate they are in-market
Contact details – who is on the buying committee and how to reach them
Custom information – depending on your product / service there may be specific things you need to know e.g., the number of invoices processed each year, number of potential users, what servers they use, and so on.

Best practices for data enrichment

Focus on actionable insights – it’s tempting to flood the database with everything you can find, but often it makes it hard for marketing and sales to wade through. Think about what data will add qualifying insights to help them take action or make decisions, then focus your efforts there.

Continuous improvement – too many people take a “once and done” approach, but we know that data can age pretty quickly. As well as keeping contact information and account structures up-to-date, you’d miss out on quick wins if you fail to stay on top of buying signals for your key accounts. Make sure you factor in some element of ongoing maintenance into any enrichment programme.

Respect data privacy – it should go without saying, but collecting personal data (especially contact information) can be problematic. If you’re going to include this in the database, be sure to give all of your users the right training to use data in a compliant way.

How we can help with data enrichment

Defining customer profile – our data analysts can help you study your sales data to define your Ideal Customer Profile. This could include the best industry verticals or best job functions to target, identifying what size or scale a company would need to take advantage of your product, or even understanding which segments or accounts have strong renewal potential.

Multiple third-party data sources – we leverage multiple data sources to ensure that we can enrich with the most recent, relevant and reliable data for your organisation’s specific objectives. We have access to over 81 million contacts globally, covering all industries across 90+ countries. Our third-party sources provide firmographics, technographics and intent.

Custom first-party data – our team of 10 researchers generate our own first-party custom data, supported by proprietary AI. We can also activate our huge native-language call centre capability to generate opt-ins or even to qualify all the way through to BANT/SQL level.

Ongoing enrichment – this can be tricky to deliver in-house because it requires many different skillsets at different stages. We have analysts, architects, strategists, developers and researchers, so you can access the right specialisms as and when you need them.

Compliance with global data regulations – our whole business is driven by data, so best-practice compliance is absolutely essential for us. Led by our DPO Maxim Olivier, we’re always up to date with the latest developments worldwide – whether GDPR, California, Australia or other jurisdictions.

Intent Data: Its Value to Sales, Channel, Marketing and Business Development Teams

By Saurabh Rastogi, Chief Product Officer, BNZSA

Intent data, ideally enriched with technographic, firmographic and trigger insight, has widespread applications across the broad demand generation machine. Earlier this year, BNZSA launched our Intent Activation Engine to ensure that we and our clients can fully leverage these insights.

Here I look at how Sales, Channel, Business Development and Marketing teams can improve their effectiveness and enhance business results by leveraging rich intent insights. This is based on my experience leading data and predictive intelligence programmes at Oracle across EMEA as well as with a number of BNZSA clients.

Sales

Many sales reps have changing or evolving territories assigned to accounts they might be initially unfamiliar with.

A rep with, say, 40 accounts typically focuses heavily on two to four accounts to make their targets. The rest can be largely unknown or ignored.

Intent insight can act as a filter on all 40 accounts on an on-going basis and proactively identify the best account opportunities at any point in time. Reps can then leverage the broader sales support machine – business development, marketing, partners etc. – to nurture and develop these accounts until they are ready to progress to the opportunity stage. This leads to responsible and effective territory management which drives improved sales productivity.

Reps can also set up programmatic intent alerts on key accounts so they are on top of the evolving requirements within these accounts.

As proof, an Oracle rep told me, “I’m more successful now because I prioritise and focus on the accounts in my territory that I know are at the right stage of need and maturity. I know what to position and who to talk to”.

Channel

The Channel problem is the sales problem amplified. ISVs/vendors and partner organisations tend to be small with a relatively unsophisticated level of demand generation. They also have relatively large market segments to cover. Demand generation is largely sales-driven and advanced segmentation is usually not on offer. Intent filtered Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) accounts, with topics to discuss – augmented by rich firmographic and technographic data – makes the channel much more effective. Reps working the channel can now be laser focussed on a limited number of accounts for the best conversion. This data can be either sourced directly or indirectly provided through the larger product organisation.

Business Development

All of the out-bound campaigns executed by business development groups need quality account lists as a starting point. Historically this has been primarily firmographic data, which has contributed to campaign inefficiencies and indifferent results. For various out-bound campaigns at Oracle, I saw an uplift of three to five times when campaign lists were selected using intent. More leads were generated, lead-to-opportunity and opportunity-to-close conversion rates were better, deal size was larger and the time to close was shorter. All campaigns can be supported programmatically so that data driven account selection becomes the business norm.

Marketing and Advertising

For advertising the use case is quite direct by deploying intent signals for specific topics to target accounts digitally or on social media. This can be done programmatically, so digital targeting always leverages dynamic intent data.

For marketing, intent-based segmentation can help to identify the best accounts for event and webinar engagements and focussing on engaging these across the business, rather than to cast a wider net with inferior results. Account Based Marketing (ABM) can leverage intent insights on focussed key accounts to develop ABM plans, prioritise accounts and allocate budget. For the first time, marketing can bring data-based insights to Key Account leaders and have an account-specific viewpoint rather than rely entirely on inputs from sales.

Intent insights can also be used to inform topics for content development which can be used for campaigns, website, SOMO and sales outreach.

In summary, intent data enables all elements of the marketing and sales process to effectively align internally, to focus effort where and when it is best applied to deliver measurably improved results.

BNZSA launches complete end to end buyer intent data activation solution

BNZSA’s Intent Activation is the most complete end-to-end solution to identify, track and activate Intent data for B2B sales and marketing professionals

Leading B2B IT marketing agency, BNZSA, today launches the BNZSA Intent Activation, the most complete end-to-end solution to identify, track and activate buyer intent data for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

For the first time ever, BNZSA’s Intent Activation connects all the disparate tools available to deliver the most accurate buyer intent data, with the highest possible lead qualification and industry standard GDPR compliance.

“BNZSA’s Intent Activation seamlessly blends best-in-class data input sources with a bespoke series of proprietary offerings – comprising buyer committee identification, intent, firmographic and technographic insight, to prospect engagement – delivering supremely accurate buyer qualification to produce ‘the best leads money can buy’.”
BNZSA CEO, Brahim Samhoud

“At the heart of the BNZSA Intent Activation is a combination of data and digital capabilities with inter-personal engagement. No one else offers this. There are intent vendors, technographic vendors, firmographic vendors, contact vendors, digital agencies and tele- agencies. Some provide pieces of the puzzle, but none does everything – until now. No other offering provides B2B sales and marketing leaders with so many different execution options.”

BNZSA is the only company that offers a customisable and flexible Intent solution to B2B sales and marketers, depending on their needs, budget and execution abilities. Uniquely, the BNZSA Intent Activation realises an end-to-end value journey through information enrichment via broad-based Intent, firmographics and technographics, to digital warming through social media, content syndication, email, display and PR, to local language phone based BANT qualification.

The BNZSA Intent Activation comprises a series of proprietary sequencing tools.

BNZSA Intent Data Pool is a database that receives billions of Intent records weekly from the best Intent providers globally, and other sources.

BNZSA Tech-Lab is built on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing in 12 languages combined with Machine Learning and Knowledge Graphs. All records are categorised and combine all data points to analyse Intent potential and selects only those records that are relevant. There records are matched with client TALs for advanced re-targeting and adapted nurture tracks. The remaining selected data is further filtered by criteria specific to clients’ needs

BNZSA OmniDatabase is a database that holds millions of records and is connected to half a dozen outside sources to enrich the data with full firmographics and technographics. It is constantly enriched by a dedicated in-house data research team.

BNZSA Pipeline is the ultimate value-add where BNZSA’s local language demand generation teams engage digitally and physically with prospects based on the received information.

The output is a predetermined number of highly qualified, information-rich leads who have already been engaged with, are delivered to client-side inside sales and marketing teams for immediate activation.

To fuel the BNZSA Intent Activation, BNZSA is working with a number of companies with complimentary solutions to build a partner ecosystem to deliver third party data, techno- and firmogaprahics in addition to its proprietary first party insight data.

“The combination of best-in-class technology intelligence, digital engagement and phone qualification by BNZSA provides clients with the most actionable qualified leads possible. This accelerates sales cycles and increases conversions,” Brahim added.

To learn more about our Intent Activation offer, you can explore our product page, or reach out to our VP Communications, Clive Savage.