While many demand gen marketers are using intent data to drive better campaign outcomes, it’s been more challenging for partner and channel marketers to incorporate intent into their complex go-to-market (GTM) motions. The channel marketing team at 8×8, a leading unified communications and contact center cloud provider, has cracked the code on using account- and prospect-level intent data to supercharge partner demand generation. We recently sat down with Dan Streeter, Channel Marketing Manager at 8×8, to hear their story.
8×8 is charting the course for success
8×8’s partner ecosystem is a critical element of the company’s growth strategy. In 2020, the 8×8 channel team started exploring where intent data could fit into their strategy and how it could benefit their partners. They invested in TechTarget’s Priority Engine platform to help their partners identify and engage with in-market buyers.
Over the past four years, 8×8 has evolved from giving partners intent data and hoping they action on it to creating turn-key programs that can be pushed out to the partner community at scale. So far, they have seen stellar results, including building $1.5 million in monthly recurring revenue pipeline from their intent-based initiatives.
Use cases for intent data in Partner Marketing
Throughout their intent journey, 8×8 has uncovered many creative ways to use intent data to build partner pipeline. Here are six use cases that partner and channel marketers should consider.
Use case 1: Account targeting
Some of the lowest-hanging fruit for intent data in partner marketing is account targeting. A common tactic in the partner world is account mapping – a partner shares their customer list and the vendor collaborates with them to build a target account list to pursue together.
Account-level intent data makes this process more effective. As a vendor, you can take your partner’s customer list, compare it to a list of accounts showing purchase intent and focus your collective energy and your joint campaigns on companies that are in market for your solutions.
Prospect-level intent data takes account targeting to the next level by helping you:
- Pinpoint the individual buyers doing pre-purchase research.
- Identify their specific behaviors.
- Arm partners with buyer insights on who to engage and how to tailor their message.
Dan from 8×8 highlights the importance of enabling your partner’s sellers when providing them with intent data:
“Partners or the channel is just an extension of your sales team – treat them that way. You wouldn’t just give your sales team data without telling them where it came from, how it was generated, how they should follow it up.”
You can also use account- and prospect-level intent data to build target lists for joint marketing campaigns. For example, you can identify contacts at in-market accounts in a specific geographic region and invite them to a co-sponsored field event.
Use case 2: Account re-engagement
Another way to help your partners identify potential opportunities within their customer base is to use intent data to understand which deal registration accounts are still in market. Revisit your partner-sourced pipeline, identify opportunities that have stalled or moved to closed-lost and compare this list against a list of accounts showing purchase intent. Provide this intelligence to your partners to help them identify customers who may be ready to re-engage.
Dan shares:
“Partners might register an opportunity, but it has been rejected, stalled out or moved to closed-lost. If we can see that they’re actively doing research, there might be an opportunity to open that back up.”
Use case 3: Pipeline acceleration
A key success metric for 8×8’s channel team is sales-qualified lead (SQL) acceleration to close. In addition to using intent at the top of the funnel, you can leverage this data to advance mid-funnel opportunities through the sales cycle. Look at your open partner pipeline to identify accounts where you may need to reach more members of the buying committee or adjust your message to better resonate with key stakeholders. With prospect-level intent data, you can uncover additional contacts at the account and tailor your outreach to align with their specific areas of interest.
Use case 4: Personalization
Another powerful use case for intent data in partner marketing is personalization. Every marketer knows that relevant and timely messaging is crucial for engaging prospects. You can achieve better outcomes when you supply your partners with intent signals and make it easy for them to personalize their outreach.
8×8 takes things a step further by automating the creation of co-branded, personalized content that speaks to the topical interests being researched by buyers at key accounts. They also leverage Priority Engine’s IntentMail feature to automatically create tailored emails for each individual contact, making it easy for their partner’s sellers to reach out with highly relevant messaging.
Dan elaborates:
“From an end-to-end perspective, we’re hitting all the right points. We’re using intent data to find out who’s interested. We’re identifying the right contacts. But on top of that, we’re providing a piece of content that specifically speaks to the interest of that customer and is co-branded for the partner.”
Use case 5: BDR-as-a-Service
One of the key challenges facing partner marketers is converting top-of-funnel interest into registered opportunities, especially when working with partners who have limited marketing and sales resources and expertise. If you have a mature business development organization, you can collaborate with this team to effectively engage top-of-funnel leads from joint programs like webinars or events.
8×8 also provides prospect-level intent data to their partners and their business development representative (BDR) team to fuel outbound activity during virtual blitz days. They saw fantastic results from this approach, generating a week’s worth of registered opportunities in a single day during their first event.
Use case 6: Cross-sell/Upsell
Many partner marketing teams are tasked with supporting customer expansion in addition to new logo acquisition. If you have multiple products that you can sell to your current customers, you can use account-level intent data to uncover which customers may be actively researching other relevant solutions. Layering in prospect-level intent data helps your partners identify the specific customer contacts to engage and tailor messaging that will resonate with them.
Dan advises:
“When we tell our partners that their account is actively doing research online around new technologies, it becomes a lot more interesting to them because it looks more like an opportunity to sell more.”
Resources to help you get started with intent
For more insights into the 8×8 channel team’s crawl-walk-run approach to intent data and practical advice on where to start your own journey, watch the recording of How 8×8 Leverages Intent Data to Fuel Joint Campaigns. To learn more about intent data, check out our Resource Center for a wealth of educational content. We also invite you to learn more about Priority Engine, the industry’s most powerful Prospect-Level Intent™ data.
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