Modern B2B sales cycle has more moving parts than a Formula 1 racing car.
Modern B2B sales cycle has more moving parts than a Formula 1 racing car. With multiple channels, conversations, customer segments, and marketing tools involved, enterprises often lose their best customers in a hurricane of data and numbers. Sales is a very intricate process that requires contextual understanding of buyers’ preferences, value systems, interests, and intent behind every transaction. Without a clear understanding of different buying signals, B2B demand generation teams will lose out on in-market opportunities emptying out their coffers for no significant revenue gains.
B2B buyers have come to expect the same personalized, immediate experiences they get as consumers. Where once generic information was acceptable, buyers now demand content and solutions curated specifically to their interests. B2B sales and marketing teams must:
• Know their audience: Where do they spend time online? What are their pain points?
• Be proactive: Don't just respond to inquiries; anticipate what buyers need before they ask.
• Make it easy: Offer clear paths for buyers to find information and take the next step in their journey.
The ideal state for leveraging buying signals is to deliver hyper-personalized experiences choreographed on the fly through signal-activated predictive buyer intent.
What are B2B Buying Signals?
For many B2B demand generation marketers thinking what exactly are buying signals: Buying signals are behavioural patterns and actions that highlight a prospect’s intent, or lack of it, to purchase your products/solutions. These can also be perceived as the data trail that your potential customers leave behind. These signals enable marketing and sales teams to minimize customer acquisition costs and shoot up the bottom-line revenue. By identifying and interpreting B2B buying signals, you generate more predictive intelligence for both sales and marketing. Let’s look at the different types of B2B buying signals for both sales and marketing:
Marketing buying signals
-
1
Behavioural data
Behavioural data is information about the customers’ pain points, challenges, and buying requirements. Buyers with different pain points search for solution-based content, leaving a digital footprint encompassing:
• Website visits: Visiting the blog, homepage, comparison page, product/service page, or the pricing page, indicating various levels of intent from low to high.
• Email interaction: Activities like opening an email. Click through rates, and replying to an email with specific questions can be an indication of prospect’s intent. -
2
Engagement data
Engagement data highlights the degree of interest a prospect has in your products/services. An engaged audience will not only open the email or visit your homepage, rather will explore content, sign up for email updates, explore case studies, compare with other vendors, and might fill up a form to engage with your sales rep.
• Engagement intent: Engagement depth can be measured from high to low based on activities such as following a company on social media, registering for a webinar, or scheduling a meeting with the sales rep.
• Content engagement: Signing up for email updates, liking a particular social media post, downloading a case study or product brochure, or signing up for a free demo. -
3
Contextual data
Contextual data provides insights into website visitors and their interaction with different we pages, their pain points, and what solutions they are looking for. Understanding these cues provides marketers the right contextual awareness about which stage the buyer is in, what their pain points are, and what kind of solutions they are looking for. By mapping contextual data with the buying stages, B2B demand generation teams can streamline and build repeatable process.
-
4
Intent data
Intent-based buying signals focus more on buying actions and activities that aid to buying decisions during the buyer’s journey. Intent data focuses on prospects that are actively searching for a product or service like yours or have an identifiable need for a product or service like yours. Various types of intent data could be:
• Sales and marketing initiatives
• Technology initiatives
• Growth initiatives- funding, new expansion plans, mergers & acquisitions
• Ad engagement
• Keyword searches
• Upcoming projects/RFPs
• Existing partnerships with a vendor coming to end
• Conversational intelligence
• Changes in buying committee members, promotions or change in hierarchies
Sales buying signals
-
1
Fit data
Fit data constitutes holistic blend of firmographic, technographic, and demographic information of your target accounts/prospects. These data points determine the ideal characteristics of your best-fit buying profiles and TAM. Fit data pinpoints B2B sales teams towards customers who are potential match for their products/services. Combining behavioural, contextual, and intent data with fit data, you can derive a predictive intent scoring that can help you tailor your outreach cadence for faster deal closures.
-
2
Account, Industry, and Buyer intelligence
These are actionable B2B sales data intelligence offered by Denave- built through in-house AI-powered research and a B2B data profiling team. Powered by our GenAI bank, we are able to profile advanced account intelligence vis-à-vis new digital initiatives, changes in tech stacks, partnership ecosystems of target accounts, IT adoption trends, business investments, hiring, and outsourcing.
On the other hand, our industry intelligence provides visibility into technology demand and maturity, emerging trends and key drivers across target industries, and updated insights on key partnerships, contract renewals, M&As, and more. Furthermore, persona or buyer signals include insights into the authority, seniority, and buying influence of different personas. Clues extracted from social media profiles, firmographic details, psychographic data, and more can help enterprises to personalize based on persona intelligence for better response rates across email marketing, B2B telesales services, and other channels.
These triggering data points enable B2B demand generation teams to build hyper-personalized outreach cadences, helping them capture intent of their prospects faster than the competition.
Conclusion
Not all buying signals are created equal and the relevance of each sales signal may vary based on the B2B demand generation and sales process, the type of product/services, and the type of target market you work in. As enterprises weave all the sales signals across their channels, communications, and funnel stages, they can position themselves to deliver highly targeted, personalized customer outreach at the right time with the right messaging. Moving ahead, signal-based selling will be a key differentiator to drive higher engagements, better response rates, and more leads to deal closure.
Read Responses
No Comments
Leave a Reply
Your email address will not be published.
