INTERVIEW WITH
Moira Van den Akker
Director of Enterprise Marketing
B2B Customer Acquisition: The role of human engagement in a world of digital-first enterprise marketing
By creating human connection early on in the buying journey, businesses improve their chance of converting prospects into customers.
How has marketing changed in recent years?
The last ten to fifteen years in marketing have been dominated by the notion that marketers should capture a lead and nurture it through an automated process. But more recently, marketers have evolved beyond this and are seeking to build more authentic connections with their prospects. When you juxtapose this with the fact that buyers now conduct most of their purchasing research independently and avoid talking with vendors until the very last stages, it's not surprising that marketers are scrambling for ways to engage and build trust with them.
The brands that have already had success with these new methods are ripping up the old B2B playbooks. When looking to build trust with a new account, their adverts no longer send a prospect to a page where they can download an ebook or other gated content. Instead, they seek to engage on an emotional level with their audience – focusing on marketing that elicits a feeling like advertisements that make people laugh or cry. By creating human connection early on in the buying journey, businesses improve their chance of converting prospects into customers.
Businesses have to do their homework in advance of any physical meeting, both on a professional and personal level
What can businesses do to maximize face-to-face opportunities?
Face-to-face time with prospects and clients is invaluable for winning and retaining business. But it is harder now to secure this face time than ever before. With this in mind, businesses have to make sure that every face-to-face interaction they secure is used to its full potential. Whether it’s for new prospects or existing clients, businesses have to do their homework in advance of any physical meeting, both on a professional and personal level. The personal level helps build the relationship through common interests, whilst the professional level is what can really set your business apart from the competition. First- and third-party signals from where the prospect or client has engaged with your website and content across the internet will help you to see what matters most to them and the challenges that they might be facing. Bringing this insight to the table shows that you are informed and serious about helping the prospect or client solve their problems. Businesses that don’t take the research seriously enough risk wasting the time of their prospect or client and damaging the relationship.
Marketers need to be smarter with how they track buyer intent.
MOIRA VAN DEN AKKER
Director of Enterprise Marketing
DEMANDBASE
How can marketing teams better support their sales colleagues?
Marketing teams can help to support their sales colleagues by providing insights on prospect activity that occurs outside of sales interactions. This insight can come from first-party interactions, where the prospect engages with your website or content, and third-party interactions, to understand what actions the prospect takes outside of your domains — what we refer to as intent signals. Because prospects choose to stay anonymous for longer throughout the buyer journey now, avoiding filling out forms where possible, marketers need to be smarter with how they track buyer intent. External intent providers can help marketers to understand the keywords and topics that a prospect is researching outside of their own websites, helping to fill in the blanks from anonymous visits by prospects. Even more importantly, trending intent can help sellers identify the right moments to reach out to a prospect to build that sought-after trust and avoid bombarding prospects with irrelevant messages at the wrong time.
Gathering insight is just one half of the job though. Marketers should also package and present the insight in a way that allows sales teams to quickly digest it, and then utilize it to have meaningful conversations with their prospects. Typically this means bringing the insight into the CRM platform that sales teams manage their workloads through, helping the sales team to digest the right information at the right time.
Demandbase helps B2B companies hit their revenue goals using fewer resources. How? By aligning your sales and marketing teams around a combination of your data, our data, and artificial intelligence — what we call Account Intelligence — so you can identify, engage, and focus your time and money on the accounts most likely to buy. That’s Smarter GTM™
Get in touch
Share this page
+44 (0)1273 102811
info@techpros.io
Get in touch
Share this page
+44 (0)1273 256495
info@techpros.io
