By Nirosha Methananda, VP of Marketing at Influ2
The conundrum of doing more with less has followed sales and marketing for decades, and economic downturns only exacerbate the need for operational efficiency. Fast forward to today: Hybrid work has redefined the sales process and record inflation has led to significant layoffs across marketing teams. Every marketer and salesperson is looking to increase their pipeline — from leads to conversion rates to deal sizes — to maintain revenue using the same or fewer resources.
But how? Crossed wires or missed connections between sales and marketing often create friction between a brand and its target accounts. And when marketers reach out to prospects but only have broad information about an account, they’re neglecting the human touch. After all, marketers don’t speak to accounts; they speak to people.
Sales and marketing teams need outbound support before they place a call or hit send. They need detailed information about prospective buyers, including the consumer’s job functions and interest level. Moreso, marketers need tech that can increase conversion rates and drastically improve efficiency during challenging market conditions — all in the name of accomplishing more with less.
Case study: One Door’s Person-Based Advertising-backed solution
Visual merchandising platform One Door faced the challenge of “doing more with less” in 2019. Because the platform’s key targets included large organizations with thousands of employees, its upfront outreach spend was unnecessarily high. Though One Door’s vanity metrics were promising, the platform discovered its conversion rates and revenue weren’t stacking up.
To address these issues, One Door marketers needed visibility into when, if and how its key decision-making targets were engaging with ad content. That’s when its creative advertising agency, CommCreative engaged Person-Based Advertising (PBA) solution Influ2.
To provide robust outbound support, Influ2 supplied metrics like behavioral scoring and target engagement reports. One Door used these metrics to create and distribute ads for individual buying personas. These helped to satisfy One Door’s primary KPI — increased marketing pipeline.
As a result, One Door had a 70% increase in marketing-influenced pipeline and a 66% increase in branded searches. Here’s how a PBA strategy helped One Door meet and exceed its sales and marketing goals in just one year.
1. Targeting buyers using intent data
Sales and marketing teams often turn to outbound initiatives when inbound strategies fail. Yet industry research reports a concerning dichotomy: sales outreach is increasing, but the average conversion rate across all industries is just 1.7%.
One Door noticed a similar disparity in its KPIs. While vanity metrics like Click-Through Rate (CTR) soared, proven sales benchmarks like conversion lagged. The One Door sales team primarily reached B2B buyers who were only slightly interested in the product instead of decisive buyers ready to make a final decision. One Door needed a strategy to focus outreach efforts toward these highly motivated buyers. The question was how to identify those individuals and efficiently conduct outreach.
The solution? To employ Influ2 and gauge target prospect engagement and reach out to them accordingly.
Enter behavioral scoring. Influ2’s behavioral scoring model calculated an aggregate level of engagement for each target that interacted with One Door’s ads using clicks, visits and impressions. And this delivered One Door a list of engaged prospective buyers.
This process:
- Filtered out irrelevant contacts unlikely to enter the sales funnel; and
- Provided One Door with a list of engaged buyers, increasing sales outreach efficiency on multiple fronts.
Influ2 also helped bridge a crucial gap between One Door’s sales and marketing efforts.
2. Creating a cohesive sales-marketing team
“Smarketing,” or alignment between sales and marketing, is crucial to the efficiency and success of any campaign. One arm cannot work without the other, especially during tough market conditions. Case in point: it’s estimated that U.S. companies lose out on $1 trillion in revenue annually due to sales-marketing misalignment.
Influ2 provided One Door with a single source of truth about motivated buyers and significantly boosted smarketing cohesion. One Door leadership identified this alignment as a major success in its overall strategy. With Influ2 data, the company’s relatively small sales team regained precious time by following only robust leads. Meanwhile, One Door marketers used Influ2 ad engagement data to create personalized ad content directed toward those same leads.
As a consequence of smarketing cohesion, One Door’s marketing-driven sales pipeline increased by 70% YoY between 2019 and 2020. Remarkably, this revenue increase was not driven by doing more in a traditional sense (i.e., doubling down on outreach efforts or placing more follow-up calls). Instead, One Door smarketing team members accomplished more by refocusing its outbound efforts on highly motivated buyers to make a deal. In other words, Person-Based Advertising enabled One Door to meet proven KPIs, including revenue generation, more efficiently.
In 2019, this level of progress was great. In 2023, it will be imperative. As inflation rises and market conditions toughen up, now is the time for marketers and sales team members to reassess their processes and identify where data can provide quick, reliable ROI.
About the Author
Driven by a strong urge to Always Be Learning (ABL), Nirosha Methananda is a proud marketing generalist. With a career spanning close to 15-years, across many marketing disciplines and industries, she recently joined Influ2 as its VP of Marketing… and is taking on the challenge to build out what the evolution of ABM looks like.
In her most recent role, Nirosha was responsible for creating Bombora’s distinctive brand and establishing it as the leading global provider of B2B Intent data. Prior to this, Nirosha led marketing for PwC Australia’s Tech Consulting practice, dabbled in PR and journalism at Power Retail and gained an interest in digital and data at Experian Hitwise.
