Historically, targeting the right prospect for your next marketing or sales outreach has been a game of guesswork:
- You have a target list that might be out-of-date (it probably is)
- The list is based on criteria not influenced by real-time data (so it’s probably stale)
- You get bummed when you engage those prospects and nothing happens (except for those prospects sending your cold calls to voicemail and marking your emails as spam)
We’ve been playing this game of whack-a-mole for far too long. We’ve learned to settle for low click-through rates, unanswered cold calls, and lists based on form fills.
But thanks to technological innovations, now we can fully deliver buyers the personalized experience they expect and deserve — and the business results we’ve strived so hard to achieve.
60% percent of buyers want to connect with sales during the Consideration stage. Before that, they’re happy to conduct research on their own terms. They have a good understanding of the market for the solution they’re interested in.
That means the onus is on a seller to properly target these sellers and engage them — not pester them — at precisely the right time in their journey. It’s a challenging tightrope to walk.
But there’s good news: Armed with the right tools, you can start targeting the right accounts with uncanny accuracy… and provide buyers with thought leadership and guidance when they need it most.
Let’s take a closer look at these tools, and how they can transform your business.
Audience Creation
Your audience is the entire foundation of your GTM function. Without this solid foundation, your revenue-driving activities won’t be as effective as they could.
When it comes to audience creation, one of the biggest and most important changes your organization can make is shifting from static lists to dynamic audience segments. A dynamic audience list is one that automatically filters your prospects by criteria you define.
Here are some of the different audiences you can target with dynamic segments:
- Accounts that are in-market for a solution
- Accounts that have reached a qualification status
- Accounts researching a specific set of keywords
- Accounts that have engaged with a particular piece of content
There are hundreds (maybe even thousands) of more ways to slice-and-dice your audience to find the exact right target for your next outreach.
The best part of creating dynamic audience segments? You don’t have to do anything when a new prospect moves into your target segment. Thanks to technological integrations, you’ll be notified in your system of choice and focus on that hot lead immediately.
Personalized Engagement and Laser-Accurate GTM Activities
The beauty in building a dynamic target audience is what you can do with that information. Instead of relying on the same old GTM efforts — webinars, mass emails, generic prospecting emails — you can use your newfound knowledge to create efficient and effective campaigns.
When you’re capturing crucial data about your buyers and using that information to build dynamic lists, you can target your marketing and sales efforts with pinpoint accuracy.
Consider the following scenario that can easily happen when you leverage the right technology to enable your processes:
- Your GTM teams receive a notification that a top target account has been conducting online research specific to one of your products
- Personas from the account’s buying team have visited the page on your site relating to that product numerous times
- Your ABX platform has just activated it as being considered in-market
Here’s where the fun begins…
Activating Marketing Actions
Your marketing team starts cooking up personalized content that speaks directly to that specific buyer in the form of webpages and advertising campaigns, ensuring your product is always top-of-mind.
Activating Sales Actions
Your salespeople can now start their conversations from a position of power because they know exactly who your buyer is, what actions they’ve been taking, what they’re interested in, and the messaging that resonates with them.
Operating as a Unified Revenue Team
Not only are your GTM activities more effective because your teams are working in concert and have the right targets, they’re more effective because your recipients are more receptive.
Remember, buyers only want to be contacted when they’re ready. Engage them too early and there’s no fit … and you’ve bothered the prospect for no reason. Engage too late and you’ve missed the opportunity. They’ve signed with the competition.
But you start closing deals when you reach out at the exact moment they’re ready to hear from you, with a message custom-made for their exact needs.
Conclusion
After you’ve begun capturing all of the data and signals your buyers are giving off, the next logical step is to use that information to target the right buyers at the right time.
When you use the right technology your whole GTM operations become lean and efficient. You can build dynamic audiences that update in real-time and send notifications about changes, and your teams can craft highly personalized and effective campaigns tailored to the buyers you know are in-market.
