Our most successful B2B tech marketer clients build their relationships with sales with regular, value-focused communication. These marketing teams clearly answer the question of: “How can we demonstrate impact to Sales every week?” One way we see them doing this is by helping to prioritize and enhance the MUST DO lists of the sales organization.
Almost all our successful B2B marketing clients participate in regular meetings with sales leadership to stay coordinated. Sales VPs at these companies understand marketing’s value better because of these interactions. Because good marketers focus on driving Sales progress at scale, they don’t let the relationship descend into one-off requests for “help.”
Helping to enhance and rank sales account lists is an effective way to support improvement “across the aisle.” They can make this contribution because of advances in data-driven insight. By obtaining verified, topically-relevant market insight, marketers can support their sales counterparts’ decision-making about which accounts to focus on first. Sales leaders know that effective prioritization of reps’ efforts is a HUGE issue.
Think how much faster a sales team could generate pipeline if they could use true market data to prioritize and enhance:
- A sales team’s list of 10%, 30% and 50% opportunities. Which ones should they focus on?
- A list of companies and government entities with >500 employees in a country. Which ones are in a buy cycle?
- A geographic territory of accounts. Who to call first?
- An SMB sales push. How can we cover this territory most efficiently?
- A list of accounts associated to a competitor or a strategic technology partner. Who do we have a chance of winning with?
- A new rep’s account list. Where should I start?
- All the companies that are potential targets of an industry-specific VAR or industry sales team. Which ones do I go after now?
Through TechTarget’s Priority Engine, IT marketers are prioritizing and enhancing account lists like these based on the actual online research activity of IT buyers. Priority Engine delivers data on prospects actively researching enterprise technology purchases across TechTarget’s extensive network of more than 140 technology-specific sites. It rolls up that data to the account level so that customers can rank accounts and deliver contact-level insight about their interests. Priority Engine helps marketers have conversations like:
“We ran the accounts in your pipe at 10%, 20% and 30% against Priority Engine and here is a prioritized list of those accounts that TechTarget can show are doing pre-purchase research on our technology area. For each account, marketing can now provide each Sales rep:
- What sub-topics the account is reading about, so the reps have better insight to move the opportunity along;
- New contacts at the account that have been active on the critical topic to fill out our picture of the buying team
With these “Prioritizing and Enhancing a List” capabilities of Priority Engine, are able to deliver unique, fact-based value to Sales that drives faster contribution to pipeline. In example after example, this success is proving Marketing‘s contribution and making them more important to Sales.
If you want to see a sample report of what Marketers can deliver to Sales with the Enhance and Prioritize capability, please send a request to [email protected].
This is the first in an on-going series on practical ways that Priority Engine can help marketers get out in front of pipeline development and begin consistently delivering more value to Sales. If you have ideas, questions or disputes, please contact me here – I’d love to bat this around with you!
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