Smarter GTM™ with Account Intelligence? That’s a No Brainer

“Thirty-seven percent of marketers waste marketing spend as a result of poor marketing/media data quality. About 35 percent suffer from inaccurate targeting.”

– Forrester Consulting

That’s not Smarter GTM™.

If you’ve been in marketing for a decade or more, you may have counted yourself among that thirty-seven percent at one point or another. After all, B2B sales and marketing organizations have been at this song and dance for a while:

• Information needed to target ideal accounts is scattered across systems and processes
• With broken and incomplete data, organizations go to market with account blindness
• The result is spammed prospects, dead-end leads, and wasted time and resources

Rinse, and repeat. Until now.

We’re living in an era of unprecedented technology acceleration. So, surely, there must be something that can help make sense of this mess, right?

Yes, there is. And it’s called Account Intelligence. Let’s talk about what it is, how to get it, and how to activate it.

What is Account Intelligence?

Account Intelligence is the amalgamation of a multitude of B2B data (pulled from your first-party data combined with third-party insights) that, when deployed, enables your marketing teams to see opportunities earlier, progress deals faster, and drive growth further.

There are five types of first-party data, and nine types of third-party data that foster a Smarter GTM™. There is a lot of detail about where each type of data comes from and how you can make sense of it starting on page 5 of our Smarter Go-To-Market^TM Powered By Account Intelligence eBook.

The first-party data is already at your fingertips through your CRM, website data, advertising metrics, marketing automation platform, etc. The third-party data (technographics, company information, hierarchy and grouping data, social insights, etc.) is what many B2B marketers are missing, and needs to be sourced.

This brings us to our next point.

How do you get Account Intelligence?

Let’s get something out of the way before you head out into the world collecting data: data ethics and privacy need to be at the forefront of your Account Intelligence efforts.

So how do you make sure that your Account Intelligence is sourced ethically while following the best practices of data privacy? Check your sources (and your sources’ sources. This is a great question to ask when vetting data providers).

For instance, at Demandbase, we consider several factors for our data strategy. First, we focus on both the scale and depth of the key relevant data we collect. Second, we deploy proprietary AI (as well as machine learning text analysis) in a multi-step, compliant approach.

Our methodology matches your first and third-party data, deanonymizes all the unknown data points, runs your lead-to-account matching and connecting, and takes care of these five steps in the process:

• Validate: Run email validations on all your CRM contacts and leads.
• Match: Gather all the known and anonymous behavioral data and match it to the right account
• Cleanse: Prioritize hygiene for your data (should be done at least twice per year, or ideally, every quarter)
• Enrich: Fill in missing fields and append technographic data
• Deduplicate: Remove duplicates and append missing data

A Smarter GTM™ dream.

Most businesses don’t have this process as established and automated as they’d like (or should). And then you hear statistics like:

• 70% of your data can be incorrect after a year without intervention
• 25% of the average B2B database is inaccurate at any given time

Your data should be accurate, reliable, and rich. And if 1 in 4 contacts has a bad email address, incorrect title, wrong phone number, or no longer works at the company listed –– then the data is none of those things.

With the knowledge about what Account Intelligence is and how to get it, it’s time to learn how to inject it across your organization.

How do you activate Smarter GTM™ with Account Intelligence?

Having great insights and Account Intelligence is a great foundation to inform your go-to-market strategy, but intelligence without action is insufficient.

Let’s talk activation.

At Demandbase, we view the ultimate activation potential of Account Intelligence as a cross-functional, organization-wide effort. As such, we set Account Intelligence as the underlying layer to everything we offer:

With Demandbase One^TM, our complete solution for intelligence and action for your Smarter Go-To-Market^TM:

• Empowering your SDRs, AEs, and everyone on your sales team with the insights from the Sales Intelligence Cloud has never been easier.
• Giving your advertising campaigns a much-needed boost and enabling your marketing team to personalize the buyer journey for your prospects is made possible by the Advertising Cloud.
• Delivering the visibility your marketing and sales teams need to orchestrate cross-channel campaigns is a seamless experience with the ABX Cloud.
• Providing your analysts and data warehouse team with high fidelity data and insights from the Data Cloud will enable them to create impactful and actionable reports.

This is Account Intelligence, activated in every area of your business for a Smarter Go-To-Market^TM.

Now, all of those smart people in your teams can do really smart things –– and wipe out the competition in the process.

(You should forward them the eBook so they can get the whole story.)

Account Intelligence is, simply put, a no-brainer.