As our Priority Engine platform has grown, we’ve started to have Priority Engine User Group meetings in multiple cities so that marketers can understand the use cases, successes and challenges that their peers are having with the tool. Last week, we had our first such meeting in San Francisco, following up on our successful meetings in London.
Following are the clearest points from the discussion.
Deliver better account and contact intelligence directly to inside sales teams
While most of our early successes with Priority Engine have been driven by high tech marketers using Priority Engine to fuel top of funnel MQL and nurture capabilities, several user group attendees focused on the ways in which they are using Priority Engine account prioritization and contacts to contribute to the efforts of the inside sales team. Here are some of the ways our customers are specifically doing this:
- A startup customer delivers weekly a prioritized list of active accounts and prospects to his SDRs drawn from Priority Engine. The list is prioritized based on their activity on a tech pain point that drives demand for their product. This narrow focus and prioritization helps the reps devise effective talk tracks and email copy.
- Another tech customer, whose SDRs are organized by vertical, has set up a Target Profile for each aligning industry segment. Each week, Priority Engine sends a new list of top accounts, details on their account activity and new contacts to the leader of each vertical team for follow up.
- Several marketing leaders that were working with their inside sales teams mentioned the importance of delivering the account and prospect data in an easily consumable format to insure sales usage. One customer creates a 1 sheet PDF “account playbook” with account intelligence, buying team contact information and purchase intent insight, essentially an account cheat sheet to help the rep quickly craft an effective entry pitch based on the account’s actual research activity.
- Another marketer works with the SDR manager to schedule call blitzes against each account that sees a spike in activity on a particular topic.
Build nurture lists based on the recency and relevancy of activity
Attendees’ email nurturing strategies were all quite different based on their brand strength, product value and end goals. But several mentioned they simply judged the success of Priority Engine based on an increase in engagement metrics (CTR, open rate, etc.) they saw with its contacts. One vendor commented that due to long sales cycles and current holes in attribution, front-end engagement rates are one of the most important indicators of performance.
One of the more sophisticated marketers talked about how he used strategic list segmentation to drive results. He initially used Priority Engine to acquire contacts for their general nurture. As their experience deepened, they refined their streams based on 1) what Priority Engine could tell them about an account’s current installed technologies, 2) competitive installs (drawn from their own lists and HG Data through Priority Engine) and 3) their alliance partners’ customers. They also built drip campaigns off of Priority Engine for event recruitment, by creating lists of contacts that are the most active within a specified geographical location.
Promote your content within environments where prospects are researching
With so much advanced talk about the intricacies of managing data and nurture strategies, marketers continue to see core value in promoting their branded content outside of their website and their own nurture streams based on the powerful signal that action creates. Several marketers mentioned how they’ve built a successful outreach based on intent signals in Priority Engine such as:
- A hyperactive account that has yet to engage with their content
- Accounts who have downloaded a competitor’s content
- Priority Engine accounts who have downloaded editorial content from a TT web site.
One of the marketers said that the only contacts they send directly to sales are those that had downloaded a piece of content from a content promotion campaign because they offered the highest conversion rate of any contact group.
Looking forward – Using Priority Engine to address advanced database building and targeting needs
The discussion focused on ideas that even beginners could get to right now, but also discussed a few of their more aspirational goals. They want to use Priority Engine to:
- Inform their persona structure
- Revive dormant accounts
- Build their ABM lists
If you are interested in participating in a future Priority Engine user group, please reach out today.
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