
Building Intent Into Your MarTech Tool to Add Customer Value
Why add intent data?
In 2011 there were just 150 MarTech companies. Today there are over 8,000 companies competing for our attention. So how do you stand out in an ever-growing crowd?
You innovate. You provide more value for your clients. Here’s RevOptimal Founder, Will McCartney’s take.
“We define success as providing valuable solutions for our customers. With the LeadSift Intent API integration, we’re able to maintain a reliable and consistent intent input into our scoring models to maximize the value for our users.”
So how do you make sure you’re ahead of the curve while not only adding these benefits for the end-user but ensuring the quality matches the value you hope to provide?
This is where intent fits in. MarTech vendors are adding intent data directly into their tools to differentiate themselves from competitors. Intent data helps their customers identify, prioritize, target, and tailor messaging, directly to the prospects that are actually looking for help with a problem they solve. Here are just a few ways intent is being leveraged in MarTech tools:
- Intelligent personalization: sales enablement and marketing automation tools add personalization tokens based on a prospect’s specific intent triggers. If your customer knows a lead is engaging with sales OKRs, they can automatically tailor messaging with a surrounding value prop.
- Seamless enrichment: CRMs, conversational intelligence tools, and contact databases can enrich their customers’ prospect and customer data with their relevant intent data so a deeper understanding of the buyer’s journey and added actionability.
- Real-time prioritization: MarTech tools (like RevOptimal) allow customers to dynamically prioritize their leads based on their buying signals. This means prioritization alerts that adapt alongside the buyer’s journey for the most effective prioritization and targeting.
We sat down with Will to learn about the state of RevOptimal pre-intent features, how that evaluation process went, what implementation looked like, and the results customers are getting today. So you can make sure you’re in the A-class among nearly 10,000 other MarTech tools.
Before the integration
Before adding intent to their platform, the team at RevOptimal would work with each customer to identify their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), build a target account list based on that definition, and then the customer could prioritize their outreach based on the ICP fit score.
They needed a solution to elevate the prioritization solution. In-market buying signals provide actionable, real-time data so their customers can prioritize the accounts that matter most.
If you know who’s a fit, how do you determine who’s actually looking for you, so you can reach them ahead of your competition? This is where intent fits in.
When evaluating an intent vendor, three key factors played a role.
First, is data quality. “Compared to other providers, the coverage and quality for B2B SaaS companies is really strong. That, paired with contact-level data is a key differentiator” says Will.
Second, the API needed to be reliable, and performant. The cost of things moving too slowly or being error-ridden from the start is too high to risk an API they couldn’t trust. “This allowed us to service our clients quickly, and accurately”.
And I might be biased but saving the best for last was the team behind it. “We enjoy working with the team at LeadSift. We’ve found them to be great partners and helpful in supporting our mission to help our clients generate revenue”.
Right in the feels.
Intent implementation
Getting the ball rolling was relatively simple. Once the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed, RevOptimal and LeadSift’s Tech and Customer Success teams jumped in to do a technical onboarding. This helps us understand how the data will be integrated, and how we can support them along the implementation process.
Following that comes a few weeks of API testing and ironing out parameters to make everything connect the way it needs to based on the use case. Then, connecting LeadSift intent with other analytics and data points to build the product that is now in customer hands (and pipelines), it only took 8 weeks to establish the minimum viable product (MVP).
“Implementation was easy due to the consistency and quick support. There was a time where we had trouble passing parameters, and within an hour we were on a call with the Head of Product to help us figure it out and get things running smoothly for our client”.
From a developer’s perspective, they let us know that the implementation structure was intuitive and straightforward. The ability to control pagination parameters meant they could pull intent signals with greater granularity while controlling costs. The cost structure that grows as you grow gave them the flexibility to build while saving costs, and scale as they add customers.
“That’s something that is awesome for us, being able to pull intent data as we need it, not just on an automated recurring basis”.
If you’re wondering about the endless possibilities with this data, you can see the API documentation here.
“With intent data built-in, we’re now able to inform our customers not only which prospects fit their ICP, but also which ones are likely in-market for their solutions”.
Here’s what that workflow looks like:
The RevOptimal team works with the customer to build a training data set for their ML-based ICP scoring model. This data can include anything from CRM data, to target account lists.
Next, they build the intent profile. This is made up of a set of signals relevant to the customer’s business solution including competitors, event attendance, hiring, and custom keywords that each play a role in the buyer’s journey.
Now that the foundation is built, RevOptimal monitors for intent signals then scores them based on fit.
From here, on any given day, customers can log into the platform and see ICP fit accounts that are showing intent in real-time, then pull the leads within those accounts to fuel their ad targeting, ABM campaigns, and outbound sales.
At the forefront, RevOptimal helps customers with account prioritization, intent data plays a key role in the machine learning models that determined when one prospect should be prioritized over another. LeadSift intent data is used as an important piece of the puzzle in uncovering revenue opportunities and prioritizing prospects for their clients.
“ICP analytics and intent combined means our customers not only know who they want but also who wants them. That overlap is the key we’re able to uncover for our clients”.
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If you’re looking to add actionable insights for your customers, stay a step ahead of competitors, or ideally, both, what’s holding you back?