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How To Drive Sales Performance with a State-Of-The-Art Data & Tech Orchestration Strategy

If you feel overwhelmed (or underwhelmed!) by marketing tech, have non-actionable data slowing down your go-to-market efforts, or are trying to figure out how to meaningfully impact revenue as a marketer, then this session is for you.

Paul Green, Director of Marketing Technology at Extreme Networks, will detail how to get you unstuck and share Extreme Networks’ journey of creating a global, cross-functional initiative called “Project Orion” to orchestrate marketing and sales systems into a unified go-to-market engine.

Using state-of-the-art tools like Marketo to drive demand, enrich data, identify intent signals and more, the company built a customer data platform capable of driving true organizational alignment, boosting conversion rates and accelerating pipeline and revenue.

 

Here’s what we’re unpacking today:

  • How to strategically use data and technology to help your marketing and sales teams focus and prioritize. 
  • The best account information to track in order to increase website engagement.
  • Learning to identify the right accounts at the right time.

This post is based on a talk by Paul Green from Extreme Networks at the 2019 B2B Sales and Marketing Exchange. If you’d like to listen to the full episode, you can check it out below.

 

Account intelligence is about narrowing your focus. 

Paul: I got really great advice once. They told me, “Stop talking about technology. Your marketing folks don’t care about technology, they don’t care about tools, and sales certainly doesn’t care about it. Brand your project. Talk about the project that’s going to benefit them. Yes, technology and data are important, but they don’t really care.”

I’ll never forget that. 

Account intelligence starts with taking account information from Salesforce data, then layering on predictive models, intent, website traffic, etc. Afterward, we package that back together and put it back into Salesforce. But, we’re also taking a look outside of Salesforce. We’re looking at companies that don’t exist, we’re monitoring companies that are coming to our website that don’t exist and we’re scoring those, prioritizing those and giving sales and marketing the account intelligence they need. 

 

Why should you care?

Paul: The point of doing all of this is to help your sales team find the best customers and prospects by prioritizing their accounts. And of course, this leads revenue growth at scale. 

Today we have hundreds of thousands of accounts in our Salesforce and we’re using that data to shepherd the process we’ve built to help the sales team narrow in. We have massive models that are showing the probability of the account to buy. And like anything in life, usually 20% of the customers deliver 80% of the revenue. 

We still have programs and demand generation–that’s all really important. But what sales really cares about is getting insights. They care about the story and the data that can help them prioritize. 

We actually so much data coming in that we had to come up with a framework to process it. It’s one thing to have data, models and processes but it’s another thing to think about how to activate that and bring it into the market so that the sales team and marketing team can use it.

 

Using smart data to improve website engagement.

Paul: The majority of the traffic hitting our site is anonymous. What does that mean? We don’t know who they are. We’re a marketo shop, so if someone clicks on an email we’re tracking their cookies. So what we’re doing is tracking IPs and doing reverse lookups on these IPs, which gives us the account data we need. For me, the account name and the domain is gold because that’s how all of this stuff works. 

So now every week, we’re piping website intelligence reports into our system based off the IP. You get a lot of great firmographic information, and we’re able to see what they’re doing, how many people are doing it, and look at new accounts (people not in Salesforce). Another great thing about this is that you can track this data and populate Google analytics. So you can take these generic Google analytics reports and start putting real data to it: industry, company name, size of the industry, etc. We rescore every account every week.

 

Paul’s summary:

  • We’ve taken a lot of data and process and built this toolset that has use cases in sales, marketing, channel and even IT. There are uses for this product that aren’t always apparent. 
  • This is a three-step process: Data input, orchestration and then activation.
  • Take the data layers to help marketing and sales speak the same language and come up with strategies together. 
  • We’re early in this journey, but we have hundreds of opportunities already in the pipeline.