Track Buyer Engagement Throughout the Deal Lifecycle

What you’ll learn

This playbook is your guide to mastering buyer engagement using Demandbase’s powerful tools and insights. You’ll learn how to:

• Identify top buying group members and personas based on key data points.
• Leverage connections and engagement signals to prioritize outreach.
• Use activity timelines to uncover account interest.
• Monitor deal engagement throughout the sales lifecycle.
• Pinpoint opportunities for multi-threading and identify key warning signs.
• Enhance decision-making using analytics and metrics-driven insights.

By following this playbook, you’ll gain the skills to tailor your sales approach, optimize multi-threading, and build engagement across key personas in your accounts, ensuring no opportunity is left behind.

Why is this important?

Buyers expect personalized, relevant interactions based on real insights—not generic outreach. This playbook addresses these challenges head-on by providing a structured, data-driven approach to buyer engagement.

• Buyers Are More Complex: Modern buying groups can include multiple stakeholders with unique goals. This strategy ensures every persona’s needs are met, reducing barriers to decision-making.
• It Drives Deal Success: Engaging the right people at the right time keeps deals moving forward. By multi-threading and tracking activity, you reduce risks associated with relying on a single point of contact and increase win rates and average sales prices by having more buyers interested in more of your products and/or services.
• Competitive Advantage: Leveraging tools like heatmaps, Slack alerts, and engagement dashboards lets you act faster and engage smarter than your competitors.
• Greater ROI on Efforts: The insights and processes outlined here ensure your time and resources are spent on strategies that yield the highest impact, from pipeline efficiency to increased TCV.
• Alignment Across Teams: Sales and marketing alignment has never been more critical. This playbook fosters collaboration, ensuring everyone works toward the same goal of closing high-value deals.

By implementing these strategies, you equip yourself to not only meet buyers where they are but also anticipate their needs and deliver value at every interaction. These steps are essential for building trust, shortening sales cycles, and ultimately driving revenue growth.

What You Need to Get Started

Before you begin, ensure you have access to the following tools and resources in Demandbase and your CRM system:

• Demandbase Buyer Engagement Reports: For persona insights, historical activity, and engagement tracking.
• LinkedIn Connections CSV: To map relationships and identify potential advocates within accounts.
• Slack Alerts: Set up real-time notifications for account activities.
• Engagement Metrics and Heatmaps: For visualizing persona activity and page interactions.
• SFDC Custom Dashboards (if applicable): Sales Touches, High-Value Page Visits, and Heatmaps should be configured.
• Pipeline Review Dashboards: To understand engagement for upcoming opportunities.

Step-by-step playbook

Part 1: Identifying and engaging key personas

Step 1: Identify the top people in buying groups

Demandbase identifies potential buying group members based on Title, Seniority, Historical Engagement, and Intent. Follow these steps to leverage this feature effectively:

1. Access Buying Group Insights: Navigate to your active accounts in Demandbase. Use the “Top People” section to review recommended members of the buying group.
2. Group by Interests: Organize buyers by the product or service they’re likely interested in (e.g., ABX solutions vs. Advertising tools). Focus on senior personas or decision-makers, as they’re more likely to influence purchases.
3. Fill in Gaps: Identify missing personas that are pivotal to the buying decision, such as Sales Operations or Marketing Executives. Add these gaps to your outreach backlog for immediate action.

Step 2: Leverage LinkedIn connections for warm introductions

Demandbase integrates with LinkedIn to help you connect with buying group members.

• Import Connections: Sync your Demandbase with LinkedIn to map connections and uncover new relationship opportunities.
• Identify Warm Leads: Pinpoint colleagues, customers, or connections who can introduce you to potential buying group members. Segment recommended connections by level of influence and relevance to the buying decision.
• Request Introductions: Prioritize connections who can introduce you to key decision-makers. Use executives for senior-level introductions as needed.

Step 3: Track engaged personas via campaigns, outreach & website activity

Buyer engagement is a strong indicator of interest. Demandbase helps you track who’s interacting with marketing, outreach, and website content.

• Monitor Engaged Personas: Use the activity dashboards to track individuals engaging with emails, campaigns, and the website. Pay attention to trends, such as which personas are repeatedly engaging and what themes they’re exploring.
• Prioritize Frequent and Recent Activity: Track frequent visitors or those with recent spikes in activity. These are hot targets for outreach. Highlight personas who have engaged with multiple pieces of content across different channels.

Part 2: Analyzing and optimizing ongagement

Step 1: Analyze account activity timelines

The timeline is a powerful tool for understanding engagement at the account level. Use it to paint a complete picture of interest.

• Review Timeline Data: Examine high-value activities, such as pricing or demo page visits, related case study + solution page views, engagement across multiple marketing campaigns in the last 90 days, and how sales is reaching out to people in the buying group. Look for patterns that indicate growing interest across the account.
• Identify Buying Groups: Consider scenarios like multiple team members visiting the same product pages or demo requests from different personas within the same team. Find more people within the buying group or persona that you can add to your multi-threading strategy.

Step 2: Use heatmaps and activity tables

Demandbase provides heatmaps to help visualize engagement intensity. Use this to refine your targeting approach.

• Spot Patterns in Engagement: Review patterns of recurring visits, high-value page views, and team interactions with specific topics.



• Expand Opportunities: Look for new personas exploring your product offering. This can indicate an opportunity to introduce additional solutions or expand the scope of the deal. Engage individuals across multiple layers of the organization, even if they’re not directly involved in the original opportunity.

Step 3: Uncover opportunities for multi-threading

Going deeper into accounts often means bringing more players into the game.

Include a section in your weekly sales email that highlights the persona engagement of open opportunities. This allows reps to quickly identify which groups are engaged and which need to be brought into the deal or re-engaged.

For example, if most opportunities lack engagement with Demand Gen and Marketing executive personas, recommended plays are:

• Reach out to demand generation people to discuss who you are speaking with and what they would find valuable.
• Have an executive reach out to their marketing executive counterpart to set up a conversation.

Part 3: Driving real-time insights and sales alignment

Step 1: Set up Slack alerts for real-time insights

Timely insights drive better decisions. Use Slack alerts to stay ahead of account activity.

• Customize Alerts: Set up notifications to alert you about activity from key buying contacts.
• Example Use Case: If stakeholders from a recent buying group presentation re-engage with your product pages, you’ll know to prioritize follow-up conversations.



• Act Quickly: Respond to alerts within 24-48 hours to maintain momentum.

Step 2. Analyze engaged target personas

Not all engagements are equal—what and who matters the most?

• Opportunities with Low Exec Engagement + Touches: Evaluate opportunities where executive engagement has dropped off.



• Engaged Target Personas: Monitor key personas for not just activity levels, but also content consumption. For example, have they engaged with case studies or ROI calculators? Reignite engagement based on their content behavior.

  Insight: Personas engaging deeply with high-value material signal stronger buying intent.

Step 3. Focus on sales touches & engaged target persona activity

Bridge the gap between marketing engagement and sales interactions.

• Review MQLs and cookied contacts interacting via marketing campaigns, sales touchpoints, or your website.



• Cross-reference persona engagement with corresponding sales touchpoints.



• Verify that campaign engagement aligns with high-value persona interests—think feature pages, pricing, and use-case examples.

When multiple stakeholders from the same persona consistently align on similar interests, you’re hitting strong buying signals.

Step 4. Monitor the activities of buying personas across the funnel

Track the high-value page visits in the past months.

In the above example, as the high-value page visits are to a sales-related product, a Sales Leader would want to see recent touches on sales buying group members:

• It shows that there have been touchpoints on the SDR Leader, but no recent touches on Sales Execs or Sales Ops.
• The latter two are typically people with buying power, so there is a need for activity on those buyer personas.

Scenario: You notice engagement surges on a target persona but little outbound activity—plug the gap with a personalized touchpoint.

Part 4: Track deals using the deals dashboard

Use engagement metrics to protect and grow your pipeline.

• Pipeline Review by Engagement: Make sure that all opportunities are sufficiently engaged.



• Engaged People for Opportunities With Upcoming Close Date: Assess whether deeper persona engagement aligns with close dates.



• Forecast In/Out by Engagement: Spot warning signs early and mitigate potential risks for ‘In’ opportunities and revive ‘Out’ opportunities.



• Engaged Contacts with Low Activity: Engage target personas where they are showing engagement and have low activity.

Quick action: For deals showing signs of life but flagged as “out” in forecasts, generate renewed interest by re-engaging lost personas through tailored outreach.

The results

Implementing this playbook will transform your sales approach, delivering measurable outcomes such as:

• Stronger Buyer Insights: Understand what your accounts need by analyzing personas and engagement signals.
• Improved Multi-Threading: Engage multiple decision-makers, reducing risk and increasing deal value.
• Faster, Smarter Decisions: Use real-time data like heatmaps and alerts to act swiftly and strategically.
• Pipeline Optimization: Prevent stagnation by identifying engagement gaps and reviving promising deals.
• Higher Win Rates: Close more high-value opportunities through targeted, data-driven engagement.

By aligning sales and marketing efforts, this playbook ensures your team works smarter, builds stronger relationships, and wins more deals.