Marketing TechnologyData & AnalyticsHow to use buyer intent data for better sales and marketing alignment

How to use buyer intent data for better sales and marketing alignment

For marketers, harnessing the power of buyer intent data can mean better lead generation, increased conversions, and long-term customer retention.

Imagine you own a small sporting goods store, and one day, a new customer comes in and begins trying on raincoats. Your salesperson watches that prospective customer try on every raincoat your store sells, then heads over to ask the customer if they would like to buy a lantern. 

Or, worse still, the salesperson doesn’t say anything to the customer at all, just watches them try on your product and leave empty-handed. Not only would the customer most likely be confused, the sporting goods store would have lost out on the sale of a raincoat and possibly many rain-related add-ons, like rubber boots and umbrellas. 

Ignoring buyer intent data is exactly like watching a shopper peruse a store without offering any assistance. 

However, marketers who harness the power of buyer intent data, then share those insights with sales teams, facilitate conversations that convert browsers into long-term customers.   

Content produced in collaboration with G2.

What is buyer intent data?

Buyer intent data is all those little clues prospective buyers leave to show that they are interested in your product. Nearly everything a prospect does on your website gives some indication of who they are and what, specifically, they are looking for on your site and from your brand. 

For example, say a customer comes to your website and reads a blog post. Information around which blog post they clicked gives some pretty strong buyer intent data concerning which products and services that prospect might be interested in. 

For marketers, harnessing the power of buyer intent data can mean better lead generation, increased conversions, and long-term customer retention.  

How can buyer intent data work for marketers?

More and more, prospective buyers only speak directly with a sales representative toward the end of their journey. 

As customers increasingly opt to begin their research online, sales teams have come to rely on the efforts of digital marketing teams to help shorten the sales cycle. 

Triangulation has become key for making sure customers are getting the information they need at every interaction with your business. Triangulation is the coordination or alignment of marketing, business development, and sales across a single, named account.

Adopting a system that puts all your buyer intent data in one place and layers that data for customer insights gives your marketing team insights around customer behavior. 

Automation software also makes that buyer intent data easily accessible to other teams, which opens communication lines and ultimately shortens the sales cycle. 

Buyer intent data for lead generation

One of the major problems with inbound marketing is that even the best messages are often lost in overflowing inboxes. However, buyer intent data means that customers have come to you for the sole purpose of learning about your brand! Ignoring those interactions is akin to having customers knocking on your door only for no one to answer. 

Once customers have clicked on your site, read your blog posts, or signed up for your newsletter, make sure you’re following up with those nudges by using that buyer intent data to retarget on social media including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

But even if customers have yet to discover your brand, there are absolutely ways to use buyer intent data in order to connect with new audiences. Third-party buyer intent data, which is information about what potential customers are browsing or reading outside your company pages, is a great way to get your business on the radar of unaware prospects who are researching similar products online.  

Implicit data for conversions

So customers are knocking, and you’re opening the door to better conversations by retargeting on social media. What now? It is probably time to start scoring prospects based on their level of interest. 

Account scoring is a predictive model that identifies your target buyer demographic based on the specific actions they’re performing. It’s a layer between an operational strategy from intent data to the digestion of the intent data. Use buyer intent data to inform a major layer of your account scoring strategy. 

From there, adopt technology that offers sales alerts in the form of notifications via email, Slack, Chatter, and other mediums that alert key stakeholders in real time when a target demo company or a named account is performing a relevant sales action.

Implicit data for customer retention 

After using buyer intent data to touch base with leads, score accounts, and track the buyer journey, the only thing left to do is make sure you keep customers both coming back and exploring new products and services in the future. 

Buyer intent data can help not only land new customers but expand current customers’ interest in your brand. 

A successful land and expand strategy is all about getting a toehold in an account, then using it to sell additional products and services to the client. 

Use buyer intent data to identify current customers who are still shopping for products within your ecosystem. Sharing critical buyer intent information from existing accounts with the sales team, including accounts that are reading reviews or browsing your products pages, gives teams better tools for turning customers into fans. 

For more information on how your company can harness the power of buyer intent data, check out G2’s white paper, “Buyer Intent: How to Start Using Your Data Immediately.” 

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