Account-based buying signals
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Website engagement can predict buying intent, as engagement is the single biggest predictor of intent. Tracking website behaviors of named accounts through tools like Demandbase allows predicting which accounts are most likely to buy by monitoring engagement levels over time. Following a process of identifying unknown website visitors, tracking named accounts, monitoring engagement levels, setting sales alerts, and customizing the website experience can help optimize predicting and closing sales.
Account-based buying signals
- 1. Account-Based Buying Signals How to tell which companies are most likely to buy based on website activity Adapted from a presentation from Adam Greco, Senior Partner at Web Analytics Demystified and Shari Johnston, Director of Demand Generation Demandbase
- 2. Account-Based Buying Signals How to tell which companies are most likely to buy based on website activity Adapted from a presentation from Adam Greco, Senior Partner at Web Analytics Demystified and Shari Johnston, Director of Demand Generation Demandbase Executive Summary Takeaways include: The B2B buyer’s journey has shifted radically over the years, and smart digital marketers use this to their advantage. • Focusing on the power B2B companies can use web analytics to predict who will of identity and learning to buy by learning to read the “digital body language” of web read your target accounts’ digital body language when visitors, and by pinpointing exactly who those visitors are. they are browsing Website engagement is the single biggest predictor of buying intent, making it possible to predict a company’s odds of purchasing • Using website engagement well before they reach out to your sales team. With the proper as the single biggest predictor of buying intent. tools, predicting which customers are most likely to buy is simply Tracking named accounts a matter of honing in on their website behaviors. We say “simply,” through customizable but of course there is an iterative nature to the process, as well data that specifically benefits your sales team, as a tactical strategy you must first adopt and then customize and by setting alerts when to your company’s specific needs. Boiled down to its simplest active sales opportunities elements, honing in on visitor behavior looks something like this: are happening 1. Start tracking who is looking at your website now. • The Demandbase Cheat 2. Wait a month or two (and keep tracking). Sheet for getting started 3. See who turns into a buyer. 4. Assess which elements of your website had the biggest impact and which sources and keywords drove the most buyers. With this information and over-time analysis, you’ll gain necessary insights and progressively structure your website to attract and retain paying customers. 2
- 3. Introduction In today’s B2B marketing world, there is an overwhelming amount of content available to prospective buyers from websites, social media, blogs, forums and so forth. Accordingly, buyers are more educated and sophisticated than ever before. They know how to quickly and easily navigate the Web to find the information they need, and their journey starts well before they consider engaging with a sales rep. By the time a prospect contacts you directly, even through a form, he is deep inside the pipeline of decision-making. But if you In a complex sale, don’t have the tools to help you analyze these potential customers, the buyer’s journey they might not even make it to your sales shortlist. is 70% complete by A 2011 Demandbase survey showed that company websites the time he’s ready were the number one online source of new leads, and research to engage with a live from International Data Corporation (IDC), a global provider of sales person. market intelligence, indicated that customers spend 50% of the buying cycle looking for or engaging with content. With half of their Source: SiriusDecisions time spent this way, it’s vital that you are feeding prospects exactly what they are looking for. We can’t emphasize the importance of this enough: targeted content delivery to potential buyers needs to be a focused marketing strategy for your company. Given that not a single B2B sale happens without a visit to your website somewhere along the buying process, it’s crucial to invest in content, because it’s a main source of future revenue. You need to reach prospects in a proactive way, rather than passively waiting for them to reach out to you. But how do you do this when 95% of your web site visitors are anonymous? In the traditional model of meeting customers in person, facial expressions and body language helped us figure out what interested prospective customers. But in the global digital era, you get that information from prospects’ digital body language—what they search for, the pages they visit, the links they click on. If you’re listening in the technological sense, you can hear what your leads are saying with every click. “Out” the Silent Majority for Better Marketing and Higher Revenue Most visitors to your B2B website—in fact, about 95%—are anonymous because they haven’t yet identified themselves through a form submit. One of our customers, a large enterprise network storage organization, calls these invisible visitors “the silent majority.” Before using Demandbase, this company had no way of identifying the large number of people browsing their 3
- 4. site. You can’t market to the unknown, so they decided to partner with Demandbase to “out” the silent majority and identify them by industry, company name and size, and more. They then built a demand-generation engine to create compelling experiences for the 95% in order to drive more conversions and, ultimately, more revenue. By microtargeting visitors with personalized landing pages for key industries, our client saw the following astonishing results:Most visitors to your B2B website—in fact, about 95%—are anonymous because they haven’t yet identified themselves through a form submit. One of our customers, a large enterprise network storage organization, calls these invisible visitors “the silent majority.” Before using Demandbase, this company had no way of identifying the large number of people browsing their site. You can’t market to the unknown, so they decided to partner with Demandbase to “out” the silent majority and identify them by industry, company name and size, and more. They then built a demand-generation engine to create compelling experiences for the 95% in order to drive more conversions and, ultimately, more revenue. By microtargeting visitors with personalized landing pages for key industries, our client saw the following astonishing results: • 30% lift in product demo play • 39% lift in downloads • 83% lift in navigation to their deeper product pages Website Engagement Is the Single Biggest Predictor of Buying Intent Using this sort of This white paper is predicated on the idea that website engagement predictive analytics is crucial to predicting the buying intent of prospective accounts approach, you too can who are browsing on your site. Let’s dig a little deeper into the predict your company’s stats around this: future revenue based CI Insights Inc. (formerly Experient), has over 13 years in the on website viewer business of customer intelligence consulting, conducted a study behavior in the on engagement scoring with sales predictions, analyzing 400,000 present. accounts over a 24-month period on how customers engaged with website pages, email data and attendance at offline events. Out of this study came one important finding: website engagement with high-value content increased the likeliness to buy. For example, a prospect that took the time to watch a product demo video turned out to be four times more likely to buy than one who didn’t. 4
- 5. At Demandbase, we tested this theory by taking a sample of closed accounts from Q3 2012 to see if website activity really did predict future revenue. We pulled data for a 6-month period prior to the close date, and in every single case we saw a spike in Web traffic shortly before a purchase was made. The Power of Identity and Reading Digital Body Language Before the days of Web marketing, trade shows were often the best way to meet leads. All lead gathering took place in person. If someone walked up to your booth at a trade show and expressed interest in your products, you asked them a number of vital questions right off the bat: 1. What’s your name? 2. What company do you work for, and how big is it? 3. What industry are you in? 4. Are you familiar with our products? 5. What problem can we help you solve? 5
- 6. STEP 1: Identify the Unknown Using Demandbase and standard analytics tools, you can identify the silent majority browsing your website by company size, industry, name and more. Below is a visual example of how you can identify one potential customer. Reading the data, you know that this person works in the high-tech industry for a company (Symantec) that has over 10,000 employees. Using Demandbase and analytics tools to pinpoint who is on your website and how they are behaving makes the website—traditionally a marketing tool—much more exciting for your sales organization because it has real selling potential. Your sales team will learn exactly who is visiting the site and how often, and receive customizable reports that can be tweaked to their needs: Armed with this data, you can open up a productive line of communication between sales and marketing that is often missing in B2B. You can zero in on exactly which companies are looking at your products, and then act on the information in a proactive way. 6
- 7. STEP 2: Track Named Accounts Named accounts, often called key accounts, are the accounts your company is most interested in targeting. Imagine being able to see which named accounts view your key conversion pages or your most valuable content. Earlier, we talked about defining the analytics to describe which accounts are looking at the various pages on your website. Demandbase uses IP Now, let’s take this a step further and talk about tracking identification to name visitors who view specific information, especially pricing information. Tracking in this way provides crucial insight, accounts. We can because if a prospect gets as far as your pricing page, classify your traffic by he is deep inside the funnel, serious about your audience type and provide product, and possibly ready to reach out to you. enterprise information on that subset of your Using Demandbase, you can hone in on your named accounts, analyze specific pages they are spending traffic. Once you have this time on, track which pages lead to success, and make information, it’s easy to decisions about which landing pages to send people pass it along to your web to during campaigns. Plus, you can view pathing reports analytics tool. of how visitors from a particular company (or industry) navigate your website. All of this data not only helps inform the sales team, but also helps the marketing team refine and restructure the website in an effort to make it a more strategic tool. 7
- 8. STEP 3: Track Visitor Engagement Even more powerful than analyzing which of your pages a particular company looks at is Demandbase’s ability to assign visitor engagement points. By tracking an account’s engagement score, and combining that score with the company’s overall analytics, you can begin to gauge which companies are exhibiting high interest in your products. Engagement points work this way: • If an account views a product page, you assign 2 points (for example) • If they view the pricing page, 25 points • If they watch a demo video, 50 points The first step is to name as many website visitors as possible to get that silent majority down to a minority. Once you’ve identified as many accounts as you can, the second step is to get them to visit your pricing pages. The third and final step in this process is to look for relationships between named account activity and sales success. By analyzing this activity, you can indicate spikes in named account visits or pricing views, and then better predict future buying behavior. This analysis can also help guide future salesperson hiring strategy and website flow. 8
- 9. STEP 4: Set Alerts Segment Website Behavior for Sales for Named Accounts Here’s an example of how you can customize Demandbase’s visitor engagement metric allows for web analytics data to the exact specs required customization of the web analytics tool to alert sales by a sales representative. Susan, the sales rep, whenever a named account surpasses a particular can quickly view a list of her targeted named threshold—for instance, when a certain number of accounts and see which paths those accounts customer engagement points are reached. are taking and how often they are visiting the When someone expresses interest in your product, site. Sales reps appreciate this type of no- a faster reaction means a higher probability of sales nonsense, segmented information. success. In fact, Salesforce.com research showed that minutes make a huge difference. This type of proactive sales behavior showcases your company as intelligent, progressive and driven—attributes that customers find impressive and professional. 9
- 10. STEP 5: Make Your Website as Relevant and Customized as Possible to Each Visitor You can’t easily build a custom website targeted to each unique person or industry that visits you online. But by using Demandbase with other advanced online marketing and testing tools, such as Test and Target by Adobe, you can create rules around what content is displayed on your home page, depending on who is looking at it. For instance, a visitor from the high-tech industry will see a case study related to their field, while a visitor from a healthcare company will instead see a healthcare case study. In this way, you take streamlined advantage of your time with visitors. At Demandbase, we found that conversion rates were higher when we used rules to help personalize our website to each unique visitor. Before personalizing in this way, we had a high bounce rate on our homepage; after, our bounce rate decreased substantially. STEP 6: Proactively Initiate Chat Sessions with Named Accounts One of the most effective things that our customer Salesforce.com did was integrate Demandbase with proactive chat. Getting a prospect to complete a form is great, but eventually a real conversation must be had in order to close business. Most chat vendors have a rule hierarchy, so, for example, if a prospect is on “A form completion the website for over five minutes, a chat box pops up. is interesting, but not Salesforce began by opting for a chat box to pop up nearly as interesting as when a visitor hit the pricing page. Over time, based identifying the company on their analytics, they refined their model, creating that looked at 32 pages intelligent pop-up chat timing for named accounts but didn’t convert yet.” displaying particular behaviors, and have been able to greatly increase their conversion rate as a result. — Jason Stewart, B2B Marketer and Marketing Technologist at Demandbase Setting up pop-up chat rules requires a deft hand. Too much of a “push” to talk will turn off customers. The trick, as Salesforce.com learned, is to place pop-up chat opportunities at just the right time for that particular customer. 10
- 11. Web Analytics Demandbase Cheat Sheet: Demystified: B2B What A Marketer Needs to Get Started Recommendations 1. Research to understand what Looking into the future of B2B marketing through is triggering your buyers’ intents. website content, we’ve learned a few lessons: 2. Create a list of tools that will help you optimize to • Don’t give up on the silent majority: the buyer behavior. unknown 95% of your website visitors • Don’t wait until it’s too late to figure 3. Understand which types of accounts you should monitor. out which companies are interested in your products 4. Hone in and engage your target • Listen to your prospects’ digital audience, customizing your body language tactics as you collect more data. • Use all of the information at your 5. Integrate with analytics tools. disposal to help close sales 6. Create sales alerts. 7. Test and target landing pages. 8. Keep an eye on the future, “Your website is a lead-churning constantly revising and refining machine, and you want to be over time. constantly optimizing it.” While B2B marketing priorities have stayed — Adam Greco, the same, marketing tactics have changed a Web Analytics Demystified great deal. By learning to read digital body language and to “out” your silent majority of web visitors, you can better predict who will buy and proactively reach out to them, instead of waiting for them to come to you. 11
- 12. Demandbase is the first real-time targeting and personalization platform for B2B, transforming the effectiveness of marketing programs and Marketing’s ability to impact revenue. While personalization tools have long existed for B2C, until now, none were geared specifically to enable B2B marketers to make online interactions more effective, delivering the right message at the right time. Without the use of cookies, Demandbase’s Real-time Identification service bridges the gap between known and anonymous web visitors by identifying and segmenting the companies visiting a website, and providing detailed, targetable business attributes in real-time. Demandbase integrates with other sales and marketing tech ologies to deliver n unique intelligence about web visitors, and better attract, convert and retain the right customers. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Demandbase to drive better marketing performance. Founded in 2006 and used by more than 1,000 companies, Demandbase is headquartered in San Francisco, California and funded by Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE), Altos Ventures, Sigma Partners, and Sutter Hill Ventures. 12
- 13. San Francisco Headquarters Demandbase, Inc. Facebook facebook.com/DemandbaseMarketing 301 Howard Street, Suite 1800 Twitter twitter.com/demandbase San Francisco,CA 94105 YouTube youtube.com/demandbasemarketing [email protected] Blog demandblog.demandbase.com/ 415.683.2660 Demandbase Support 415.683.2660 [email protected] © 2012 Demandbase, Inc. All rights reserved.