I am by no means an avid fisherman but what I do know is that how far you cast is not as important as where you throw the lure. The better you are at baiting the hook, the better your chances are at catching a fish. The best fishermen know where to fish and they know they’ll never catch a thing unless they have a line in the water.
Fishing helps bring into focus the critical need to find the buyers to you need help you get ahead in a competitive market. This can be done aggressively, by seeking them out, or passively, by hoping they will find you. Companies rely on outbound sales activity, sales prospecting, outbound marketing to unknowns and more recently, resource intensive inbound marketing to accomplish this. These tactics may ultimately help you find interested buyers for your solutions, but without good intelligence on where to target these efforts in the first place, it will require a lot of time and resources to realize significant success.
Fish where the fish are
To win, you’ve got to get closer to your buyers. If you’re not fishing in the right place, you’re wasting a lot of time and bait (i.e. content, messaging and solution matching). By understanding real buyer intent, you can find the right prospects who are in-market for your solutions today, which can lead to dramatically more efficient targeting, outreach and marketing campaigns.
TechTarget makes real purchase intent insight actionable for marketing and sales teams through our Priority Engine platform. Priority Engine is a SaaS-based data and marketing analytics tool that provides direct access to ranked accounts and named prospects actively researching enterprise technology purchases in specific markets. It’s a direct line to TechTarget’s huge enterprise technology audience, combined with purchase intent insights that help companies fill their pipelines faster.
Testing the water
It’s one thing to tell you that we are providing real purchase intent insights; it’s another thing to prove it. So I decided to put our tool to the test myself. I picked an account based on their activity and engaged them to see what path a sales pro might take to get in on a buy.
The prospect organization, a larger Automobile Insurance company, happened to be actively researching Security information and event management (SIEM) tools. In just a few weeks, I noticed their activity was increasing quickly, so I reached out and offered related outbound content to catch my contact’s attention.
Following is an overview of the exchange I had with the prospect:
(Steve): With your interest in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) I wanted to send you a quick note with some follow-on content. As a follow on to your engagement around the topics of Threat Intelligence and SIEM, here is some recent editorial that we‘ve published that ithink could be useful in your purchase research:
- What SIEM tools made your short list?
- The latest advances in SIEM products
- The top SIEM products: A buyer’s guide
(IT Prospect): Thank you – this is very helpful. We are currently finishing up the evaluation of one of the products, and all went great so thanks for the supporting info!
(Steve): Glad your product evaluation went well, and that TechTarget sites were helpful in your research. Curious have you narrowed it down yet?
(IT Prospect): Yes we narrowed it down to two vendors and decided to move forward with a Security Intelligence vendor we’ve been engaging with on your SearchSecurity.com site. (Proof this was an active buyer)
(Steve): Nice to hear. Yes, they’ve got great technology, and I can attest that they’re a great vendor partner to work with as we do a lot of work with them.
The story ends with this Security Intelligence company winning the business with the large Automobile Insurance Company.
Reel in buyers with purchase intent insight
The point I wanted to prove here is that the intent insights in Priority Engine are real, easy to use and can help you hook your line into more active buyers now. You have the ability to look up user activity from accounts on the rise and instantly leverage purchase intent about that user and their account interest. Imagine the power of having access to active buyers all the time?
I may not be the world’s biggest fisherman, but knowing where the fish are, who’s biting and what bait to use seems like a much better way to fish! That’s all for now on fishing analogies. Maybe next time I will take on golf…
To learn more about how Priority Engine can help fuel your pipeline, view this short video or contact us at [email protected].
About the Author
