Editor’s Note: This series, “The Three Alignments,” examines three common misalignments that erode the productivity of B2B revenue teams — and how to fix them.
Below is Part 2, which examines a common disconnect that keeps revenue teams from recognizing the most valuable sales opportunities. Part 1 focuses on ways to better align your marketing and sales teams so they operate as one cohesive unit. Part 3 looks at KPIs and how the wrong metrics can hold back and even undermine ABM efforts.
In the first entry in this series, we showed that in order to spot legitimate selling opportunities, B2B marketers must identify the research activities of active buying groups — not individual buyers.
Marketing Qualified Leads, which are tied to the activities of individuals, have many shortcomings … and as a result, have a nearly-100% failure rate. However, tracking buying-team activities offers far clearer indicators of an account’s interest.
In this post, we’ll focus on how to detect these crucial buying group activities.
An Analogy for Understanding ‘Buying Group Vision’
To get a good sense of what we’ll be discussing, let’s examine a fascinating analogy from nature. It involves lions, which — mighty predators that they are — have rather imperfect eyesight.
Lion vision is optimized for seeing at night, when they do most of their hunting. But this optimization comes at a cost that impacts the way they see during the day. Therein lies an important lesson for B2B sellers.
While humans can look at a herd of zebras on a sunny day and easily see individual animals within the herd, a lion can’t — not always. By day, their blurry vision makes the herd resemble a black, white, and gray undulating blob. Only the most desperate of lions would risk being trampled under hooves by attacking a herd during the day.
Lions need to be able to pick out individual zebras, but as long as zebras stay together, they’re safe.
B2B organizations have just the opposite problem. They need a clear view of buying groups … but all of their buyer-detection senses are optimized for spotting individuals.
How To Tune Your Buying Group Vision
To be successful, B2B revenue teams must have high-definition buying group vision, able to see not just individual buyers, but also the groups they belong to.
The research is clear: Multiple members of buying teams fill out web forms during an account’s buying journey — from three form-fills on the low end to more than 15 for larger deals, and dozens of others who appear anonymously. On top of that, buying groups are having hundreds of interactions with third-party content.
So, while some buying groups are leaving dozens — sometimes even hundreds — of intent signals right on our B2B websites, we miss this coordinated activity. Instead, we treat everyone who fills out a form as if they were a unique selling opportunity. We send BDRs and salespeople off to chase each of them, because we can’t tell which individuals are members of the same buying team and which are visiting out of their own curiosity. And we ignore anonymous activity altogether.
This means our B2B “senses” miss the most important signals we could receive.
Even when BDRs and sales teams happen to notice that they’ve received multiple leads from the same organization, they still tend to misunderstand what they are seeing. Instead of seeing second, third or fourth leads as massive, mutually-confirming signals that an account is in-market, they look at the second and later inquiries as “duplicate leads.”
The presence of buying signals from multiple individuals should cause sales teams to double-down on an account, but it often has no impact at all on how sales treats that organization. (See this report for more.)
The adoption of account-based marketing has exacerbated this mismatch between B2B sensory systems and the buying groups they need to detect. When organizations adopt ABM, they focus more marketing investment into a smaller, more targeted set of accounts. This is a best practice.
However, by focusing more of their demand generation spend on a highly targeted set of accounts, marketers increase the likelihood that more than one lead will come from accounts that the sales team wants to sell to. Marketing is purposely generating more signals per account, but sales is discarding or ignoring nearly all of them.
Why?
If organizations can’t detect when the buying teams from their target accounts show up en masse, they may fail to notice. This lack of recognition can even suppress the evidence that their ABM has been successful.
Know When Not to Call
There’s another benefit from aligning marketing systems to how buyers buy: better buying experiences. Or, more often, better research experiences.
Not everyone who visits your site is in a buying process. By recognizing who among your visitors is and is not nearing a purchase decision, you gain the ability to leave the others alone to enjoy your content in peace.
Many of these people will someday find themselves part of an active buying team, and having benefited from consuming your content free of countless emails and phone calls. You may have generated new advocates at no cost.
How AI Can Help You Spot the Best Sales Opportunities
The failure to detect B2B buying groups is not the fault of B2B revenue teams themselves. Most tools and processes — the sensory systems themselves — were not designed to detect B2B buying teams. They were designed for B2C (individual person) buyers.
The task of collecting and collating all the signals available to B2B revenue teams has simply been too complex for them. But advances in AI now allow B2B revenue teams to align their sensory systems to buying groups. AI-powered ABM platforms can use IP addresses and advertising IDs to tie both anonymous and known individuals to the prospect accounts that are demonstrating interest.
And crucially, the pattern-matching capabilities of AI parse all that signal use it to predict buying stage and likely deal value. That’s the intelligence that revenue teams need to achieve next-level productivity.
See For Yourself: Steps You Can Take Today
If you’re looking for evidence of the above, examine your leads data. What you’ll find is that for each account that appears in your leads data, there are multiple personas who form buying groups.
Likewise, examine your anonymous traffic. (6sense can quickly help you see what that looks like.) When there are multiple leads from an account, there will have been many other anonymous visitors. Commonly, for each lead there will be eight to 10 anonymous visitors from the same company.
Together, these signals can transform your productivity by focusing your attention on the absolute best accounts that are preparing to buy.
