Have you ever felt like it should be easier to produce more sales opportunities? Have you struggled with attribution and the ever-dreaded “Return On Investment?” Do you know you have great value to offer and you just want to get a chance to talk to your ideal future customers?
We’re here to help you fix all of that.
Terminus has the tools and tactics that will help you identify your relevant audience, reach them where they are, and engage with them in their buying process to drive more pipeline. It’s covered in-depth in our newest ebook, but in this series, we want to cover the three pillars of the methodology. It’s all about How To Identify, Reach, and Engage Your Buyers.
In this post, we’ll cover the steps we walk our customers through to help them identify their ideal customer. So let’s get to it.
Today’s digital buyer is a voracious researcher. Talk to your friends in sales; buyers typically make it deep into the sales cycle before they ever speak to a salesperson. That means your go-to-market strategy does some serious heavy lifting! When your ideal prospect is doing their research, are you showing up early in the process? Do you think it’s impossible to market to your buyers with that level of precision?
It’s possible, but to do it you have to be able to identify prospects who meet your ideal customer profile (ICP). Here’s how you can do it with Terminus.
How to Identify Companies That Fit Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- Evaluate your CRM – Who are your best, most profitable customers? Would your business boom if you could replicate your 10 best customers? Hopefully you’ve been keeping your CRM data clean. If you have, you can use the firmographic, environmental, and even behavioral attributes of your best customers to find more who share the same traits.
- Identify Data Gaps – If you’ve been less than diligent about keeping CRM records accurate and up-to-date, we have some work to do. A mere 12% of B2B marketers are confident in their data. New Terminus customers start their journey with a data audit–we’ll show you where your dataset is lacking.
- Enhance Account Data – Cleansing and enriching your data doesn’t have to be a tedious, manual process. Terminus works with your CRM to keep target account data accurate and relevant with real-time enrichment.
How Do I Enhance My Account Data?
There are two primary types of data you’ll want to use to fill the gaps in your prospect data.
Fit Data forms the baseline of your account-based marketing strategy. This includes firmographics, like industry and company size, but you may be squaring off against competitors who are using more advanced fit data. Common advanced data attributes include technology used, recent funding, and number of employees in a specific department.
Intent Data tells you which target accounts are ready to have a conversation or make a purchase. It refers to the behavioral signals that indicate increased interest from your target accounts. There are two categories of intent data:
- First-party intent data is the info you capture about your targets through your website, personal interactions, or online properties
- Third-party intent data is info you capture about your targets on websites other than your own. To enhance the Terminus intent engine, Terminus partners with Bombora and G2 to identify these in-market accounts, so our customers can use it to show up early in a prospect’s buying journey.
More On Intent Data
If you know the profile of your ideal customer, you can begin to imagine how intent data could be used to find them. Armed with your ICP, you can use these types of intent data to build target your target lists:
Psychographic Intent – Just like Spotify suggests artists and songs based on the artists and songs you select yourself, your next ideal customer is putting out clear signals about the products they offer, the customers they target, and more. Reading those signals can put you in a prime position to show up right when a prospect starts looking for someone like you.
Technographic Intent – You can often predict the technology a company is likely to adopt based on the technologies they have already adopted. Your ideal customer may have a tendency to turn to a technology like yours at a predictable point.
Hiring Intent – Recent hires and job postings speak volumes! They can identify pain points and problems that a prospect is trying to solve.
Research Intent – When a cohort of employees inside a single org are researching the same topics, this spike can indicate a readiness to learn about and eventually purchase a solution.
Building a bigger, stronger pipeline starts with identifying better prospects earlier in their buying process. There are more types of intent data, and MUCH more on this topic to cover. Hopefully this appetizer gives you a little taste of how you can use data — including the data already accessible in your CRM -– to identify your ideal prospects in the marketplace early and often. The full three-course meal is available in our ebook. We’ll be back with two more chapters in this story, but feel free to read ahead.
