Whether you’re prepared or not, B2B sales digital transformation is sweeping the industry.
Leading B2B companies have already figured out how to capitalize on data in digital transformation for creating personalized experiences.
Without getting too technical (there are enough articles for that), let’s look at the basics of B2B data-driven marketing.
Why Care About High-Level Personalization?
In short, you should care about high-level personalization because your buyers do – whether they consciously realize it or not.
A Seismic study found that 85% of buyers are more likely to write-off a potential company or seller if they don’t receive personalized content during the first interaction.
Furthermore, 75% of buyers expect businesses to anticipate their needs and offer relevant suggestions.
Like Justin Shriber writes for Harvard Business Review:
“These ‘have it your way’ consumer experiences have changed the way the business world thinks about sales. B2B buyers have slowly been conditioned to expect the same personalized treatment that they get while shopping on Amazon. They want to be approached with relevant offers at the right moments, not when it’s convenient for a sales rep.”
While most B2Bs employ some entry-level personalization tactics, most still struggle with high-level personalized features like real-time behavioral tracking and retargeting.
The Importance of Data in Digital Transformation
Your B2B sales digital transformation personalization needs data. It’s a promising strategy to segment your audience into multiple categories.
First, you want to organize your audience based on firmographics.
- Industry
- Company size and profits
- Stage of the buying process
- Job role
- Buying power and role in the process
Next, segment your audience based on the type of content they prefer so you can use this information to direct your content marketing efforts.
- Blog posts
- Whitepapers
- Case studies
- eBooks
- Video
- Podcasts
- Tutorials
See why collecting high-quality data matters?
Why Clean Data Matters
Your personalization strategy is only as good as the data you feed it. Sadly, most businesses aren’t working with the best information on their leads.
- 62% of businesses work with data that’s up to 40% incorrect.
- 40% of goals fail due to inaccurate data.
- A quarter of all databases contain critical mistakes.
- B2B data can decay up to 70% every year while 2.1% of contact info goes bad each month in general.
74% of B2B organizations struggle to scale personalization efforts as part of their B2B sales digital transformation. Poor data is a major reason. Data collection and cleaning is an ongoing process to make sure you’re sending the most effective content retargeting campaigns.
How to Keep Your Data Accurate for Effective B2B Data-Driven Marketing
In your B2B sales digital transformation, accurate data is critical for strategizing, retargeting, and reaching your goals. The best way to keep your data correct is to start with a clean database. Here are two ways to accomplish that.
Comprehensive Lead Verification for B2B Sales Digital Transformation
Is your databased filled with personal emails or even fake contact information? How can you even be sure?
When a lead gives you their email address, don’t ask them for a ton of information. Require them to provide a business email and a country location.
From there, you can use human lead verification to cross-reference their credentials with what’s publicly available on LinkedIn. Not only does this help you weed out fake leads (like Bezos@Amazon.com), but it also helps you develop comprehensive lead profiles based on information like:
- First and last name
- Job title
- Job role
- Department
- Location
- Company name
- Company firmographics
- Industry
Since the information comes from LinkedIn, it’s verified and updated in real-time – no more worrying about job role switches.
Removing Forms for Accurate Data in Digital Transformation
Is all your best content blockaded behind a form? It’s holding you back.
80% of new leads will never convert into sales. Does your figure sound much higher?
When you collect email addresses from everyone who visits your website, you’re left with more leads than you can handle – or should. Of course at least 80% of those leads aren’t converting. In fact, they never had any intention of buying and most of them probably aren’t even in your verticals or industry.
Instead, set your content free.
Give your leads a substantial sample of your content and then ask them to provide their email address to download the whole thing. Visitors who aren’t in your field will simply consume your content and move along while genuine leads will want to stay in touch.
Removing forms comes with a few other benefits too:
1. You’ll create a seamless mobile experience for the 70% of B2Bs researching on their smartphone.
2. You can collect high-quality behavioral data on known and anonymous visitors to use for future personalization tactics.
Intent Data: The Missing Link in B2B Data-Driven Marketing
Research suggests that buyers complete anywhere from 57% to 90% of the buying process before they ever reach out to your company.
Your website and retargeting efforts need to do most of the legwork to engage leads during that up to 90% of the process.
Understanding why a visitor is consuming your content is critical to taking your B2B sales digital transformation strategy from so-so to success. That missing link is called intent data. Based on information from your own collection and third-party sources, you can learn exactly why someone is visiting your website and how close they are to closing a sale.
By doing that, you can nail down other personalization strategies and even develop a solid account-based marketing strategy aka. hybrid personalization.
It’s really not as complicated as it sounds. Plus, focusing on intent data can save you money because you’ll only put funds towards retargeting and nurturing the best leads.
Start Your B2B Sales Digital Transformation
Most businesses struggle to scale personalization efforts because they aren’t creating buyer-first personalization strategies.
By removing forms and letting your leads consume content at their own pace, they can self-nurture. By the time they contact you, they’ll be further along in the buying process and ready to discuss real numbers.
Let your content breathe and skyrocket lead conversions by 51%! See Hushly in action now.