We’ve all heard the terms “dark social” or “dark funnel” by now. Terms like this exist because so much of the buyer’s journey happens in places we can’t see. Most people aren’t waving a flag, shouting they’re in-market.
But intent data is meant to unveil those people right?
The problem is, most intent data vendors are only providing intent signals from one source. This means you’re only getting one, small piece of the puzzle, and a few outliers could not only throw your messaging and timing for a loop, but cause you to miss the accounts that are actually in buying mode.
Introducing LeadSift 360
We’ve always had a multi-source perspective on intent, but we just took it to another level. LeadSift 360 layers more than five data sources, so you get the vastest data, scored like the stock market, so you have noise-free lead generation, directly in your sales and marketing teams’ hands.
LeadSift 360 mines the public web, including job postings, social networks, leadership changes, public forums, technographics, and any other signal on the public web, and layers it with research-based intent. This type of intent is sourced based on prospects researching and reading content on publisher websites that may signal they’re in-market.
Having more data sources means you get a 360-degree view of the buyer’s journey. The intent data essentially validates itself by being cross-referenced with multiple sources, and scored accordingly.
In practice, that means you can be confident in your timing and messaging, beat your competitors to the punch, and scale revenue.
No more black box intent data
A lot of the skepticism around intent comes (rightfully) from not knowing how it’s defined, what counts as a signal, and scoring that is only ever arbitrary secret sauce.
So let’s break down how we’re doing things differently.
First things first, the intent data.
Attached to every lead you get, we tell you the event that triggered the event signal. Whether that’s someone engaging with your competitor, a custom keyword, or hiring for a relevant role, you deserve to have that intel to power your messaging.
Next, scoring.
We revamped our scoring to mimic the stock market. This way, large accounts aren’t automatically, artificially inflated, and small accounts aren’t left behind if they’re truly in-market. Directly in the LeadSift platform, you can actually see why we’ve scored an account the way we have. [Note: in the platform, scores are labeled cold, warm, hot, but in the data deliveries, numbers are there for granular prioritization.]
Other research-based intent providers often send out a lot of noise. This is because the nature of that data is broad and high volume. But this can be a good thing when paired with a more narrow source. By layering research-based intent and public web signals, with trend-based scoring, you can filter out the noise and end up with clear, relevant, actionable intent leads at your fingertips.
So, if you want to get started with noise-free intent data and scale revenue faster, you can try it free for 7 days.
HALIFAX, NS – LeadSift, a leading buyer intent data platform, is launching its newest product line: LeadSift 360.
LeadSift 360 will layer all of LeadSift’s existing intent data, mined from the public web, with research-based intent similar to that of competitors like Bombora and ZoomInfo. This will allow sales and marketing teams to have higher quality intent, and reach decision-makers in buying mode.
Not only will this data be layered for more data, with less noise, but each account is scored with trend-based scoring, and all scores are explained so clients can meaningfully prioritize their sales and marketing efforts.
With LeadSift 360, B2B technology companies are empowered to see the full picture of the buyer’s journey, taking the guesswork out of prospecting and creating space for tailored messaging every time.
“Being an intent data provider with our own proprietary intent signals, we are always compared to Bombora, the undisputed leader, and now more recently, ZoomInfo. And to be fair, one of the advantages some of our competitors have always had is the scale of intent signals. Millions of website visitors researching and consuming B2B topics. We had to do something about it.” says Tukan Das, CEO
“You can now get a consolidated and prioritized view of all B2B buyers across the entire web delivered to you every day. Whether they are researching the web about your competitors, reading an article about your industry, asking a question on a social media platform, making a new executive hire, attending an industry event. This means B2B tech companies can close revenue faster.”
About LeadSift
LeadSift is an intent data provider helping B2B technology companies identify in-market customers at the contact level and reach them with relevant messaging. Moving beyond targeting by static profile elements like title or company size, LeadSift shows you who is engaging with competitors, keywords, and events that are relevant to your company from the broadest intent data sources on the market. Learn more about LeadSift.
We at LeadSift are launching a new way to score accounts: Intentsity Score.
At LeadSift we track over 15 different types of intent triggers for all B2B SAS. And that gives us a volume of roughly, almost about a million daily intent data points. That translates to anywhere between hundred to thousands of daily leads for a typical LeadSift customer.
And when we have leads at this large scale, the obvious question emerges is how do we know which accounts to prioritize first? And that’s where lead scoring comes into the picture.
One way to approach this problem of lead scoring using intent data would be to base it on the net volume of intent triggers received over a period of time. The higher, the volume of intent triggers, the higher the score.
A net volume-based scoring system suffers from bias towards larger organizations. These organizations have bigger workforces and generate higher digital footprints. And thus, they always score high.
Another problem with a net volume-based scoring system is they treat all the intent triggers the same, but fundamentally, each trigger is unique on its own. To give an example, a funding trigger might be less frequent than an account engaging with the content. And yet the funding trigger might be more valuable in deciding the likelihood to buy than a content engagement trigger. Therefore, if you simply look at the net volume, it’s very easy to miss less frequent, but high-priority triggers.
To address these shortcomings. We designed our new scoring system and we based it on two key components. The first being a statistical model that looks at trends in intent volume rather than the net volume. And the second being a rule engine that assigns higher scores upon finding less frequent, but high-priority triggers.
Let’s take a look at each of them in more detail. The statistical model analyzes 90 days of intent data volume to quantify trends in it. It generates a baseline of usual intent volume and compares the most recent volume against the baseline to compute the intensity of the trend.
How you’d score is similar to Z-score that calculates a values relationship to the mean of a group of values. The score generated by this model is essentially a measure of the upward or downward trend in intent volume. Through this model, we can also generate insights like, “An account received X percent or higher or lower intent volume in the last 30 days than the usual 30 days volume.”
The second component of the new scoring technique is a rule-based component. In this, we look at the last 90 days data to find the occurrence of high-importance triggers. A few examples of high importance triggers are an account receiving funding, or an account seeing leadership changes, or an account entering a new partnership.
Upon finding these triggers, the scoring model factors them in to assign high scores to these accounts. This helps the scoring model to generate insights like, “An account received a high score because it received funding in the last 90 days”.
To sum up our new Intentsity Score, at its core, uses a statistical model and rule-based engines to analyze trends in intent data volume and score accounts.
A higher Intentsity Score would generally mean a higher chance of the account being in its buying journey. From a BANT sales, lead qualification perspective, the Intentsity Score addresses the need and the timing piece.
We are very excited to launch this and would love to have you try it.
The B2B data space is evolving at break-neck speeds and with it spanning wider and wider, data privacy is an increasing concern for consumers, businesses, and the people whose job it is to use that data.
One of the hardest parts is that people don’t know where to start. What is GDPR? How do I make sure the data I’m using won’t get me in trouble? How will this impact how I market and sell my solution?
After recently digging into our own compliance and completing a Legitimate Interest Assessment (LIA) for GDPR compliance, we reached out to data providers, marketing automation tools, programmatic advertising companies, and outbound sales tools to get their expertise on how GDPR affects B2B tech teams and what they can do to make sure everything’s compliant.
We interviewed leaders from B2B data and service providers to gain their perspectives on compliance. Answers range from what GDPR means for buyers and sellers now, how to make sure your data providers are up to standard, and how to effectively market and sell in a B2B landscape while remaining compliant.
Keep in mind, this article isn’t written by lawyers, but by providers who know the ins and outs by being compliant themselves, and ensuring their customers do the same.
For the sake of honesty, there are a few shameless plugs, but what can I say, it’s written by marketers across the industry. We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t shout out our products at least a little bit.
So, what is GDPR?
GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is a set of rules to give EU citizens more control over their personal data. It aims to simplify the regulatory environment for business so both citizens and businesses in the EU can fully benefit from the digital economy.
Data Protection regulations outlined by GDPR include:
Right of Access: you may request access to your personal information and obtain a copy of personal information.
Right of Rectification: you may request to change, update or complete any missing data processed about you.
Right to Erasure: you may at any time withdraw your consent to the processing of your personal information. In this case, if there is no overriding legitimate interest for continuing the processing of your personal information and the personal information is no longer necessary in relation to the purpose for which it was originally collected, we will erase your data.
Right to Data Portability: You have the right to receive personal information in a structured, commonly used format.
Why is GDPR compliance crucial for B2B organizations?
Kicking our interviews off, we talked to Intentsify’s David Crane. Step one is covering why GDPR (and compliance in general) are not only important from a legal basis but help build a business customers want to work with.
“What’s good for customers is good for business. Unfortunately, as marketers, we’re often unaware of how secure (or insecure) data is when we capture, transfer, or use it. As it turns out, it’s often not all that secure. Not long ago, hackers gained access to information on 150 million users of Under Armour’s MyFitnessPal app. Soon after, Marriott announced a massive data breach, potentially affecting 500 million people. Identity theft is estimated to cost American consumers alone more than $16 billion annually” says Crane.
“When target audiences lose faith in our ability to safeguard their interest, they’re far less likely to interact with our marketing engagement efforts, much less do business with our companies.”
– David Crane, Intentsify
“This all reverberates throughout the digital marketing space, hurting our organizations as well as our customers. When target audiences lose faith in our ability to safeguard their interest, they’re far less likely to interact with our marketing engagement efforts, much less do business with our companies.
Back in May of 2018, an Economist article succinctly corroborated the link between marketing practices and data privacy laws, stating the GDPR was the result of marketers’ (via their advertising tech) “insatiable hunger for personal data.
Businesses across the globe have largely failed to self-regulate. And the marketing industry’s pursuit to acquire as much data as possible, as quickly as possible, has put prospects and customers at risk. It’s for reasons such as these that government-implemented data-protection regulations are on the rise.
Now, we all know that these new regulations can place extra burdens on us as marketers (cleansing databases, revising opt-in language on landing pages, adjusting data-transfer processes, etc.). However, in the long run, the GDPR and other data privacy regulations like the CCPA will do businesses more good than harm.”
So, in what ways have new privacy regulations been good for businesses and consumers?
Here are just a few positive results of new regulations according to Crane:
1. “They encourage account-based focus—Account-based marketing (ABM) requires marketers to focus their efforts, resources, and budget on fewer accounts and individuals. It shuns spray-and-pray email tactics and high-volume lead gen goals—both of which require marketers to scrape as much personal data as possible and are averse to data privacy. Data regulations and good ABM strategies strive to create quality prospect interactions by being customer-focused. This demands that marketers be respectful of prospect data and gain trust.
2.They cause businesses to focus on the metrics that matter—Recent and upcoming data-privacy regulations provide good arguments for marketing teams to shift goals down the funnel to focus on metrics like sales pipeline and revenue growth, rather than top-funnel lead volume, which encourages gathering as much contact-level data as possible.
3.They improve prospect and customer data quality—The fact that the GDPR requires consent for specific uses of data will lead to an improved understanding of prospect needs. In other words, marketers will gain more specific, accurate prospect data with which they can further qualify, nurture, and convert leads into opportunities.
4.Enhance program transparency—Regulations certainly create barriers to marketing-funnel entry. But this is a good thing. This barrier acts as a filtration device, limiting the amount of bad data that can muddy your database and skew your program measurement, analysis, and optimization. With a cleaner database, you’ll gain a better understanding of which engagement tactics are resonating with your target audiences.
5.Increase marketing (and sales) efficiency—When prospect data is of higher quality, your team doesn’t need to waste as many resources trying to convert leads that should never have been in your database, to begin with. You can reallocate time and effort to more strategic, revenue-driving activities.”
Intent Data and GDPR
How to find compliant contact-level data
Next, we talked to Crane about GDPR in the context of intent data specifically. This is his wheelhouse and he did not fail to give great insights. Here’s what he had to say.
“There are a few ways to find and use contact-level data, some more compliant than others,” says Crane.
“For example, some data providers will get you names and email addresses among intent-identified accounts using their own contact databases. This, however, is a gray area of compliance (and I’m being lenient here), because you don’t know if or how exactly these contacts opted into providing their information.”
Crane also proposes some solutions and services that provide data that is compliant, more transparent, and ethical in approach. Two compliant options he suggests are:
LeadSift—Since LeadSift’s tech derives data only from public sources, such as social media platforms, they have identified legitimate interest, a pillar of GDPR compliance, therefore they can provide intent data at the contact level.
Intentsify’s demand gen solution—While Intentsify’s intent data is purely account-level data, their demand gen solution allows you to distribute your branded content among intent-identified accounts, and targeted personas can then opt-in to providing their contact info to access the content. Not only is this GDPR compliant, but it also shows a further level of intent.
Questions to ask your third-party data provider
At LeadSift, we just went through the process of making sure we’re doing the right things. This means double and triple checking our data and processes and completing a Legitimate Interest Assessment (LIA) to make sure we’re doing all we can to be compliant.
That’s why we answered the next question in-house and asked LeadSift Co-founder and CEO, Tukan Das, about how to make sure the data you buy fits the bill.
“The most important question to ask your data provider is if they are processing and sharing any personal data with you? Personal data from a B2B perspective includes first name, last name, email, phone, LinkedIn, social IDs, etc. If they are dealing with personal data then ask them where they are collecting the data from and ask for the lawful basis of them collecting and processing the data?”
“If they have explicit consent from the data subjects (i.e. professional contacts) ask them how they collected the opt-in and any additional context (terms of service etc.) around it. If they don’t have consent – then they’d probably use legitimate interest as their lawful basis to process the data (most third-party providers would fall under it). Ask them to provide a detailed LIA for their data collection and processing.
In addition to a completed LIA, ask them if they can support blocking of contacts and also providing a full-trail of the personal data they have stored on the contacts in a human-readable format.”
If these boxes are all checked, you’re probably good to go. At the end of the day, transparency is key here.
What are the compliance implications of account vs contact-level data?
Back on track with Intentsify’s David Crane, we also pulled in Metadata’s Logan Neveau, we talked about the difference between buying and using company vs contact data under the lens of compliance.
“Both types of data are important. As my old colleague and friend, Scott Vaughan would often say (almost ad nauseum, but important nonetheless): ‘Companies don’t buy anything, people do.’ Despite the fact that I liked to debate this by saying ‘Well, companies do buy things, but people sign the checks,’ Scott’s point is absolutely correct—account-level data doesn’t mean much if you can’t find and have conversations with the right people.” says Crane.
The trick to acting on contact-level data under GDPR is understanding that the privacy regulations are highly focused on the rights of the individual, so you have to be vigilant along every step of the data’s journey through your business.
Metadata’s Logan Neveau had a similar thing to say concerning the countries GDPR applies to, “You have to be 100% confident that every single person who’s going to see your ad is not a European Union citizen.”
He dives deeper explaining, “They don’t hold double citizenship. They’re not on vacation, and they’re not using a VPN because the VPN can screw with where they’re actually located. So it’s practically impossible. By default, everyone should be treated as if GDPR applies to them if you want to be safe from a legal perspective.”
When it comes to targeting at the contact-level using email addresses from an ads perspective, Neveau says “When you want to target contacts you don’t get to see the Personal Identifiable Information (PII), it’s hashed, encrypted, and passed directly to the API for the data set to Facebook or LinkedIn. So we’re not exposing any PII until you opt-in and you consent saying let’s have a conversation, then we can unmask who that person is.”
What’s allowed and not allowed within GDPR compliance?
Now that we’ve talked a bit about the implications of GDPR compliance, we can dive into what we can do with data.
“First, I’m not a lawyer, and any business dealing with these issues should have an attorney look into their specific circumstances. That said, here’s the main, high-level stuff to know from my perspective as a marketer.” explains Crane.
“There are six ‘Lawful Bases’ by which organizations can acquire and process personal data in the European Union. The two that matter most to marketers are consent and legitimate interest (the other four bases will rarely if ever, affect marketing efforts).
Obtaining consent should be the primary legal basis by which marketers use personal data. This largely means requiring contacts to opt into a specific use of their personal info. Specifically, the GDPR states that consent should be given by:
“Clear affirmative act establishing a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her, such as by a written statement, including by electronic means, or an oral statement.” [https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/contents]
Silence, pre-ticked/checked boxes, or inactivity does not, therefore, constitute consent. That said, if you or any vendors you work with ensures that all contact-level data was acquired through such compliant means (typically by a clear opt-in or double opt-in process), you should be able to contact them via the normal marketing channels, as long as such uses were clearly stated when the individual opted in.” explains Crane.
How will these laws affect data providers moving forward? How will this shape the future of intent?
Crane says “I think data-privacy regulations are good for the industry as a whole, including data providers (at least the diligent, ethical ones, which are the ones you want anyway). Any data provider that can’t perform under such new rules is simply less equipped to support their customers’ needs. Consequently, they won’t succeed. That’s just capitalism working as it should, and it’s good for marketers, businesses, consumers, and society in general.”
GDPR and Outbound Sales
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. Data is only as good as its action plan. So now that we know what it takes for intent to be compliant. How does GDPR impact the processes intent ebbs and flows into?
Does GDPR mean you can’t do Outbound Prospecting?
“It doesn’t!” says Predictable Revenue’s, Sarah Hicks, “But it does mean you have to play by the rules.”
“GDPR requires permission from the individual to collect, store, and use their personal data. That means that if you’re purchasing lists from a data provider or having someone research/scrape to find data for you – you need to make sure that data is GDPR compliant.”
How can SDR’s still be compliant with their email outreach?
Hicks explains that “Article 47 of GDPR states that ‘direct marketing purposes may be regarded as carried out for legitimate interest.’”
“Outbound prospecting falls under the umbrella of direct marketing in this context. If you have researched a company and/or buyer persona and write a one-to-one email to a prospect expressing relevant ways you can help them solve an issue or achieve a goal – that probably counts as legitimate interest. What you can’t do under GDPR is send out mass, spray and pray outreach via email. This blog post can help you determine whether your outreach meets the legitimate interest criteria.”
How will laws like GDPR affect outbound activity in the future?
This industry changes quickly and without remorse. It’s important to not only consider how your outbound sales activities are compliant today, but how SDRs can be compliant without interruption moving forward. Here’s Hicks’s advice.
“Data security and privacy laws and regulations are becoming increasingly strict. Each region has its own set of privacy acts that are being amended and added to all the time. At the moment, the EU and California have some of the most extensive data privacy regulations in place with GDPR and CCPA, but Canada is close behind with new regulations proposed. As individuals spend more and more time online, they become more concerned about their data security and privacy, and the legal and regulatory systems in countries are catching up.
There are certain business development thought leaders that believe that cold emails will be made completely illegal within the next decade and some that cold calls are a thing of the past thanks to increasingly tight regulations and personal attitudes that find these methods of communication invasive. I think it’s totally plausible that, in future, SDR/BDR activity will be limited to 1 to 1, researched, customized, and relevant outreach. “ says Hicks.
Outplay’s Sathyanarain (Narain) Muralidharan goes on to explain “A multi-channel outbound sales strategy is really a powerful way to work within the rules of GDPR. The key is to get permission from a prospect before sending them an outbound sales email.
Once you have your account list, it is always a great practice to warm the prospect up via various channels like social media, and even channels like text messages and cold calls. A multi-channel sales engagement platform like Outplay lets you execute such a sequence at scale across your team of sales reps to ensure you operate within the rules of GDPR.”
GDPR and B2B Advertising
Speaking of evolving industries, as many of us know B2B advertising changes constantly. Specifically, as we move away from the use of cookies and evolving Google regulations, maintaining compliance and what marketers can do with ads change constantly. To give us a better picture of what’s happening and what to do about it, we asked Metadata’s, Logan Neveau.
From an advertisement perspective, how will laws like GDPR and CCPA impact B2B marketers?
“The B2B advertising landscape for most of the ABM tools has all been very display focused. There’s a ton of data that you can get within a Display Side Platform (DSP) particularly on cookies and individual user tracking. But with Google’s changes coming to get rid of the ‘cookie-pocalypse’, paired with GDPR, it’s really hard to get that granularity and that visibility. So companies like 6Sense, Demandbase, and Terminus, which have all that intent data based on ad interaction data risk losing that visibility and those signals because you won’t be able to track third-party users via cookies on Chrome” says Neveau.
“Now that we’re working from home, IP is harder to track. And honestly, in GDPR, if you pair it with anything else, it’s no longer uniquely identifiable. So there’s a gray area in GDPR. Is it PII or is it not? Well, I don’t know. It depends. What’s the context? And so there’s hesitation to use IP addresses.”
How will Display Advertising be impacted?
“It’s already been impacted because you can’t target by specific PII signals. The only thing that makes it different is when you’re on Facebook and LinkedIn, you have accepted their terms and conditions, you have to be anonymized yourself in a display environment you have not,” explains Neveau.
“Right now the only way to target someone in a display network is by IP address. So if someone from within this IP address is visiting, show me that. We have lost individual-based targeting and display in the EU because of GDPR.”
How do you see GDPR impacting advertising outside of intent?
“Immediately when GDPR went into effect, you could no longer target an individual user on display in the EU. It’s IP address only so now you’re targeting an entire company. But, in a closed environment like social media, users have logged in, they’ve consented to share their information with Facebook or LinkedIn, platforms know who users are. Because of this, we can still target an individual user within social media. These walled gardens are going to become immensely more valuable in B2B marketing to continue to retain your targeting.“
Neveau goes on to say, “The downside about this is that LinkedIn knows where you work because you’ve told them so they can say, ‘hey, this account has seen your ad X and Y amount of times.’ Facebook or Quora does not. You can still target individuals there, but you can’t report in an ABM fashion. That’ll be quite scary soon because that is one of the metrics that a lot of these ABM platforms report, penetration on these accounts.
So we shouldn’t set up our marketing to drive clicks and impressions, we shouldn’t be reporting on an account-based lift, because it’s not in our favour, it’s only going to get worse. So instead, we want to say, ‘we’ve gotten impressions and clicks in front of these accounts, go ahead and send that to your sales team,’ but don’t hang your hat on that metric. There are holes in those numbers that you could drive a bus through. Use it as a leading indicator, but you should be rolling out, ‘we drove this many qualified inbound requests, we now have a first-party relationship with that user 100%.’”
Key Takeaways
When buying data, have open conversations with your provider about where it’s coming from.
Data privacy and compliance are good for everyone. For providers, it improves data quality and holds everyone accountable to the metrics that matter.
Compliance at all stages matters. It’s not just about how to acquire data, it’s about using it in compliant ways.
GDPR and other regulatory bodies aren’t going anywhere. Figuring out a compliant strategy now, and being adaptable as regulations evolve is the pinnacle to success.
Want to read how we use our own data in a GDPR compliant way?
How Siemplify Generates 60% of Revenue with LeadSift
As intent data becomes a staple in B2B marketer’s stacks, actionability becomes more and more challenging. It’s reported that 67% of marketers struggle to activate their intent data (The B2B Marketer’s State of Intent Data). And what good is data without a plan to use it? How do you build a multi-channel intent data strategy?
We sat down with the team at Siemplify to cover how they integrate intent data throughout their sales and marketing processes, for a multi-channel approach. They’ve built intent throughout the funnel so the data is prioritized and activated continuously, and they have the results to back it.
Rather than looking at it as a challenge, some marketers are using intent data as the glue to connect multi-channel marketing strategies and let them feed their sales efforts.
Multi-channel strategies are all about understanding where your prospects are, and meeting them there.
Let’s dive into how Siemplify does multi-channel powered by intent, how they optimize, and the numbers proving it works (hint: 60% of revenue identified early by intent).
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Where intent fits in Siemplify’s stack
For marketing, Siemplify uses Marketo for almost all of their marketing operations including email nurturing, automation, and connecting their content syndication programs. For ads platforms, Google AdWords is the go-to.
On the sales side, Siemplify generates reports through Salesforce CRM to get a visual on the top accounts, top leads, and any intent-driven leads that may not have made the cut but are still worth contacting since they’re been engaging. All of their outreach is done through Outreach.io.
Bizible for tracking.
LeadSift is their only intent data source. Since the data is provided at the contact level, they use it across sales and marketing in a number of ways such as lead generation, scoring indication, ABM lists, and more (we’ll get to that).
“LeadSift has been incredibly easy to work with. They’ve been truly like a partner in that anytime we have questions, need help, or even suggestions on how to optimize intent streams they have been very flexible and eager to help and that has gone a very long way.”
– Christopher Mitchell, Demand Generation Manager, Siemplify
How to set up intent streams
Siemplify started with foundational keywords related to their solution then evaluated results weekly. They would check which leads didn’t fit their ICP and optimized for this by making changes or removing keywords that didn’t bring in relevant leads.
They’ve built two intent streams. One is keyword-focused and the other is competitor-focused. The intent campaign focuses on the keywords that will most likely signal positive buying intent, like ‘SOAR Vendors’. This is the ‘main’ campaign and the one that helps identify in-market buyers.
The leads that LeadSift sends over are scored according to the type of trigger that caused them to be sent in the first place, leads that have engaged with keywords directly (engaged with industry news) are given a higher score, than similar leads in the account that aren’t showing intent at all.
Siemplify applies a relatively small score based on each intent signal, roughly about the same as a web page view. But they aggregate them at the account level and apply some relatively simple score modifiers to try and differentiate between organizations that are considering SOAR vs 1 person that is very interested.
Here’s an example:
They use a roll-up within Salesforce to pull all of the LeadSift scores from all contacts to the account level, and then add a multiplier based on the number of individual people who are showing intent. So 10 people with 1 or 2 intent signals each will score higher than 1 person with 10-20 intent signals.
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How Siemplify does multi-channel
“We’re able to layer intent data on top of everything else we’re doing top of funnel”
– Christopher Mitchell, Demand Generation Manager, Siemplify
Starting with ABM campaigns, Siemplify gives content syndication vendors a list pulled directly from LeadSift intent data to target accounts that are actively showing intent to buy. This allows them to better allocate budget and gain a better ROI from content syndication programs since they are focusing efforts on more relevant accounts.
When it comes to leveraging intent with ads, Siemplify has set up automation so that leads that signal positive intent are automatically synchronized over to Google AdWords with the intention of getting Siemplify’s offer in front of the prospect with some top of funnel messaging. Where they can find a match on their ad platforms they adjust the bids for AdWords slightly higher to help get better placement.
LeadSift is built into Siemplify’s scoring. Leads get extra points if their account is showing intent. From a marketing perspective, they also provide this data to the SDR team so that if an account shows intent but isn’t on their target account list (TAL) or a lead is showing intent but hasn’t reached the MQL threshold, they still know those are relevant leads and accounts to prioritize, prospect into and follow up on.
Siemplify dives into the granularity and visibility of knowing specifically which keyword or competitor each lead is engaging with for purposes. They are able to put together strong value propositions based on specific keywords leads are actively engaging with so they can be sure their messaging hits the nail on the head every time.
“LeadSift helps us identify better opportunities for strategic marketing and in most cases are informing us of a buyer’s intent before anyone else”
– Mike Hardwicke Brown, VP Demand Gen, Siemplify
The next step will be implementing intent data into their marketing nurture program so leads showing intent towards certain custom keywords are put into an expedited track or sent specific emails based on topic engagements.
The Results
“We started using LeadSift 3 years ago when we were a younger company, trying to figure out how to strategically use intent data,” says Mike Hardwicke Brown, VP of Demand Gen at Siemplify, “LeadSift came forward as a potential partner and delivered on that promise. They have implemented multiple feature requests and in several cases done some pretty significant product development to help us solve our problems. It’s what most vendors promise and few deliver.”
LeadSift lives across Siemplify’s sales and marketing funnel, tying the two departments together with intent-driven leads and the power to nurture them through the pipeline with relevance and value.
Today, with LeadSift identifying intent signals in over 60% of Siemplify’s opportunities before they are created, LeadSift aids in driving over 60% of their pipeline and revenue.
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Every business has a marketing strategy (or so we hope). Here at LeadSift, one of our favorite marketing approaches is our Show me the Data podcast. We sit down regularly with leaders at successful B2B businesses and ask them to share their secrets and their data. Intrigued to see how event marketing adapted to the ground falling out in 2020, we spoke with four directors of demand generation. We’re sharing their key event marketing strategies and how you can action them in any format.
The guests featured in this article are:
Veronica French, Director, Demand Generation at Replicant.ai
Veronica French, Director, Demand Generation at Replicant.ai
Event Type: Intimate Events with Seasoned Executives
Key Strategy: Leverage LinkedIn Event Pages (and Your Networks)
It’s exhilarating to be hired on with a young company, especially one that’s already performing. There are no proven methods or ingrained tactics. The atmosphere is daring and creative.
When Veronica stepped into her role as Director of Demand Generation at Replicant.ai in early 2020, she was prepared to experiment. Replicant.ai powers customer service conversations with natural voice AI. After her initial deep dive on the business, her demand gen team tossed out the typical ABM playbook.
“We want to keep our market broad as we gain learnings and see what’s working for different accounts, different industries, different personas,” Veronica told us.
They build intimate experiential gatherings for roughly 500 companies that their sales reps are already getting to know. The gatherings are bespoke and ad hoc, the two-part agenda featuring an interactive experience and thought leadership. A key strategy is that the events never contain a sales pitch– the moderator only briefly mentions Replicant as the sponsor. This keeps everything high-level and intimate.
The pilot targeted 30 executives, fifteen showed up. They hoped to scale to 100 attendees for a chocolate tasting.
Five hundred people registered!
The stats:
500 registrants
80% legitimate leads
250-300 new net contacts ($30/lead)
200 direct connections
30 meetings ($300/meeting)
10 opportunities ($1,000/opportunity)
How did Veronica’s team blow their targets out of the water? A series of tactics you can easily use for your own strategy.
Replicant utilized the LinkedIn Event Page. Then gave team members a simple call to action: “Invite all the folks you’re talking to on LinkedIn.”
“We relied on our cumulative network, based off of all of our account reps and senior executives. Invitees can also see who else has registered. So there was a snowball effect where we saw senior C-level executives from giant airlines, giant food industry companies who registered,” Veronica shared.
Only 200 registrants divulged their personal addresses to receive chocolate kits, but Replicant didn’t let the remaining 300 dissolve into the abyss. They manually invited the registrants to the calendar event with a zoom link and countdown alerts. They also reminded them that the thought leadership piece was worth showing up for even without the chocolate. It worked.
The following events have been a huge hit. The agenda starts with coffee tastings, barbecue classes, cocktail mixology, and the chat goes crazy. By the time the thought leadership piece begins, everyone is friendly and ready to dive into deeper material. With event marketing like that, it’s clear why Replicant is seeing major ROI.
Key Event Marketing Strategy: Start with the Customer
Tyson Wigfall’s marketing team maintained its roughly 50% demand generation when it transitioned from live to virtual events. Breakthrough is an end-to-end practice growth platform for physical therapists. His first key strategy to successful event marketing is something that should be central to any product, service, or event, but is sometimes lost in the process.
“Start with your customer in mind. What is it that they want to know? Typically we’ll ask our customer base or our prospects what they’re looking to learn,” Tyson told us.
Breakthrough’s events feature topics that help their clients attract more customers and increase their revenue. Like many of our interviewees, thought leadership is the secret sauce to Breakthrough’s events and Tyson builds a running bank of experts to contact at the right time.
Breakthrough has quarterly summits with at least six speakers and event sponsors and partners to manage as well. Tyson’s second key event marketing strategy is allocating the responsibilities to a dedicated event coordinator.
“Someone internally has to own the event as a core accountability,” he told us.
Through multi-channel marketing, Tyson’s team elevates the speakers and the topics, carefully demonstrating the value attendees will receive. Marketing strategy begins broadly and then highlights specific sessions as the date gets closer. Short video interviews with speakers and one-click registration make it easy for people to show up.
The stats:
600 registrants per quarterly summit
50% fit the ideal client profile
55% of attendees come from email database
45% are net new
15% want to learn more about Breakthrough (20-30 people in the ideal customer profile)
Seven figures were in the pipeline after the last four events
“But ultimately, the goal of the virtual events is more downstream and long-term. It’s the thought leadership we’re building. I think if you’re just looking at the amount of people that you move all the way through to sales, then you’re going to do the wrong things during the event.” -Tyson Wigfall
Tyson’s team is certainly doing something right with seven figures in the pipeline after just four events.
Hana Jacover, Director of Demand Generation for Madkudu
Event Type: Web Series
Key Event Marketing Strategy: Think Beyond Current Limitations
Marketing is about standing out in a sea of same-ness. How do you show prospects what it feels like to work with you or use your product? Why do you know best what your clients need?
Hana Jacover’s key strategy is all about obliterating the box that competitors play in. Hana is the Director of Demand Generation for Madkudu, the data science platform for marketers which works within your data stack to help you work more intelligently.
Hana’s team was seventeen episodes into their weekly “Marketing Operations Confessions Web Series” and we were intrigued to learn more. More specifically, why not just create a podcast?
“This is a new experiment. So first and foremost, I needed the flexibility to create it or allow it to be whatever it needs to be… to remove some of those guard rails,” she told us.
Marketing Operations Confessions amplifies the voice of its marketing operations audience. Not by trying to control or become that voice, but by giving a mic to speakers who have a hot take on something their audiences know well. Speakers are passionate, sometimes up and coming, and sometimes industry legends. Every episode is a confession and often stirs up a conversation or catalyzes a debate.
“We don’t want to infiltrate the marketing ops community. We want to facilitate any of the conversations that are happening, we want to align ourselves with the thought leaders and the existing communities and work with them,” Hana told us.
Sounds like a spicy podcast, and…
Hana also wanted people to register and attend live. The conundrum was that she also wanted to ungate the episodes afterward. So, how do you get people to carve time in their schedule for what can be accessed un-gated and un-scheduled later on?
Incentivize.
Madkudu does this a few ways:
Each season, there’s an enticing give-away for attendees (ahem, Yeti Cooler).
Session incentives (they’ve experimented with a $25 lunch card).
The guests themselves!
The guests’ unique perspectives are what the show is all about after all. Live attendees interact with guests and ask questions, something obviously unavailable in a replay. When sourcing speakers, Madkudu does so with the intention of leveraging their following as a key marketing strategy. That means some attendees are already loyal fans of the speakers.
“We look for people who have a large following and are very active. We also give them the tools to actually promote the session,” Hana said.
Another winning strategy? Encouraging people to sign up for multiple sessions at once. This unlock saw average registrations leap from 45 per single session to 376.
The Web Series Stats
240 average weekly registrants
15-18% average attendance rate
50% of registrations are qualified conversions
40-50% of attendees are qualified conversions
$700k in the pipeline in the last two quarters
“Now we’re just looking for ways to expand. Can we do a panel? Can we do a live Marketing Ops Confession as things open back up? How can we work with partners to constantly be making it bigger and bigger?” -Hana Jacover
Madkudu’s web series broke free from event marketing constraints. If you’re also a rebel, we’d love to hear what you’re up to!
Jordi Capdevilla, Vice President of Marketing, ForceManager
Event: Virtual Summit
Key Event Marketing Strategy: Get Your Teams Excited
Force Manager is the leading mobile CRM for field sales teams with a presence in 36 countries and headquarters in major global cities.
Right as the world shut down, ForceManager set an audacious goal to host a virtual summit for its customers in six weeks. Rather than sending people fleeing to dark corners of their home workspaces, the tight timeline galvanized ForceManager’s 120 person staff. Twenty to thirty people became deeply involved in the project, including the CEO and marketing and inbound teams. They really showed up for the summit’s promotion phase.
This team spirit was the summit’s key event marketing strategy that presented itself organically.
“When everyone inside the company buys in, it makes a huge difference for the marketing team. It means you’re doing a good job, and the external promotion gets much more fun.” -Jordi Capdevilla
“Everyone can be a marketer, not just marketing. Everyone has great ideas. A lot of our ideas have come from other teams.” Veronica French agrees.
ForceManager drove people to the virtual summit through multiple channels, especially social media ads– mainly LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and Instagram. They also sent emails to existing customers since that was what the summit was all about: showing up for them in an unprecedented moment and responding to their needs with empathy. Turns out, their prospects needed the same.
The Data
9,977 summit registrants
80% net new leads
2,721 MQL from the event
500 free trials for small teams
500 MPS survey results
40 meetings
10 opportunities
Another key strategy to drive ROI was making the content relevant long after the date it ran, for what they hoped would be a year and a half. When we spoke with Jordi only a few weeks after the summit, ForceManager was seeing just how effective this strategy was.
10,000 viewers had accessed the summit’s content since the date it launched!
“The people that spoke and the people that attended got, in conduct, to be partners. The value of the exponential reach of the event goes beyond the event itself. So we have people talking about us and our work, and it gives us opportunities beyond that event through people that didn’t know about us before,” Jordi explained.
Turning your attendees into ambassadors and champions is a major hack for event marketing. Of course, that means that the event itself had to be buzzworthy.
Key Marketing Strategy: For Virtual, Put More Time Into Nurturing the Post-Event
Outreach IO is the leading sales engagement platform. Outreach IO’s field team did almost 225 events in 2019 which drove 15% of the year’s demand generation. Their 2020 goal was to up their team’s demand gen to 25%. Harmony’s team didn’t sway from this target when the world went virtual, they merely added one more tier to their five-tier funnel.
One of their biggest events was an industry conference in San Diego that nearly doubled year over year. They anticipated 3,000 in-person attendees; with a lower barrier to the virtual event, they hoped for more. They smashed their target of 7,500 and ended up driving 13,000 people to the event.
For targets further down the funnel, the field marketing team is curating interactive, small gatherings: comedy shows, celebrity chefs, and even an executive book club for sales VPs.
What stood out with our interview, though, was Harmony’s focus on the post-event. When comparing the virtual touchpoint to an in-person touch point, Harmony’s team scores them as a digital touch similar to a webinar.
“You don’t make that sincere connection as you would in person. So the velocity of conversions through the funnel is much slower, you expect pipeline being generated further out. Rather than in 30 days, you’re probably generating pipeline of 90 to 120 days. You gotta expect that and do more from a follow-up and nurturing standpoint to still drive your pipeline,” Harmony told us.
This key strategy is one that marketing teams can action easily into their strategy.
Ready for Action
These directors of demand generation are master adaptors. Here’s how to integrate their key strategies into your own event marketing:
Start with your customer. What do your customers and prospects need? Poll your networks, speak with your clients, have questions ready for prospects. Every customer wants to know you’re putting their needs at the center of your company.
Think beyond current limitations. People are exposed to a lot of content and events. Make yours stand out by breaking the mould. Sit down with your team and create an atmosphere of risk taking. Keep pushing the outlandish ideas, you’ll surprise yourself.
Get your teams excited. Kick the door open and invite team members from every team, position, and role. Get the janitor in on it. Ask them their ideas on format, topics, sourcing, potential speakers, promotional tactics. The more creativity in the room, the more innovation. The more widespread ownership, the stronger the event.
LinkedIn Events. Create the event and pull your account representatives and SDRs into the promotion. They simply go to the invite, click “invite connections”, and go through their prospects and everyone they’re already talking to. Let the power of social persuasion take over as people register.
Rely on the power of your guests. Who is making waves? Who is defining the industry or challenging popular notions of your topics? Who has a large following and is active? Do quick interviews to integrate into your ads. Give them the tools to promote the session.
For virtual, put more effort into the post-event nurturing. Your audiences are inundated with content and event invites. Sometimes they’re multi-tasking with cameras off. Show them you see them and value their engagement by nurturing the lead after the event. Expect to see your pipeline drawn out.
Our interviewees showed us the data! These key strategies have been proven to drive revenue. Test out some of them and let us know what works!
To hear more data-driven insights around all things marketing and sales, check out the Show Me the Data podcast.
