Our natural instinct as sellers is to lead. I remember my first sales manager telling me, “Run the process, or it will run you.” So, I’ve done my best to always take control and run the process. But sellers and marketers trying to lead in today’s B2B space aren’t serving us well anymore.
I mean, we make prospects fill out a form to get our content, but prospects often don’t want our content badly enough to fill out that form. So now, most of the traffic on our website is anonymous. And they probably aren’t opening our emails either. But because our process calls for a nurture track, we nurture them right up until they unsubscribe -- never truly reaching them or giving them the content they really need.
We are dancing on our own in the dark. Which may sound empowering, but it’s not going to get us any business.
It’s time to recognize that B2B buyers today are in control of the information flow and pace. We have to let them lead. Fortunately, with the help of artificial intelligence and big data, we can start to understand buyer behavior previously lost in the “dark funnel.”
We can now know things like: Who’s on the buying team? What are they researching? Are they researching our competition? What content are they consuming anonymously on our website? And most importantly, where are they in their buying process? Uncovering these insights is critical if we want a chance at getting to the dance floor. But once we get to the dance floor, we want to be more Dancing with the Stars, and less Elaine from Seinfeld, awkwardly dancing alone.
This is where account-based orchestration capabilities become critical. We have to take action on those insights to keep time and follow our prospect’s lead. At 6sense, we call this concept of matching a prospect’s pace and behavioral signal with the right action SmartPlay.
Create Your ‘If, Then’ Scenarios
As a marketer, you can do this by building an “if, then” statement. For example, If an account is researching a certain competitor, you would then surround the buying team with corresponding digital display ads. Or, If an account comes to your website anonymously, then buy contacts for the entire buying team so you can reach them and engage them.
As individual statements, they’re not that interesting. But when you start to daisy-chain them together, you can respond in real time based on the prospect’s signal. It seems like a fancy type of nurture track, but you can learn to adjust based on real-time behavior from the dark funnel and orchestrate actions across tactics -- from display ads to social to direct mail to the contact cadence of your business development representative (BDR) to field marketing. The prospect leads and you follow right in time, based on their signal.
Let me lay down some example moves you can make based on your prospect’s journey.
Awareness: An account is in the awareness stage when the buyer realizes they have a problem. The buyer is doing educational research to more clearly understand, frame and identify their problem. This means they are “in market” for what you do. So, they are researching keywords you know are relevant, but they have not visited your website. What do you do? How do you engage them if they haven’t raised their hand? Here is when the dance begins. If an account is in awareness, then start relevant display ads to get them to visit your website so you can fill out the buying team contacts.
Consideration: Next, they move into the consideration stage, where the buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it. This means someone has come to your website, but of course, they have not filled out a form (or they put in “Mickey Mouse” as their name, if they did). They are trying to learn about you. Now what? If an account moves to consideration, then look at keyword research and visit history, and adjust the web experience accordingly. It doesn’t matter if you can get them to your website if your content isn’t tailored to their needs.
Decision: The pace is picking up now that they have moved into the decision stage. Here is where the buyer chooses a solution, narrowing down a list of potential vendors to evaluate. Now you have multiple personas visiting your website and indicating interest. You’ve got to move your feet in time so that the prospect wants to engage with you. If an account moves to decision, then invite them to a webinar series and send a direct mail door opener.
Purchase: Then finally, once the account is in the purchase stage, where the buyer will commit to a specific solution and justify the reasons for the purchase, it is time to two-step! The account has now become an opportunity and you want them to meet with you. If the account moves into purchase, then start the BDR cadence for all key personas, personalize for keywords researched, and alert sales and field marketing to get them to a local dinner you are hosting.
As you can see, prospecting is like a dance. Today’s buyers are leading, and it’s up to you to keep in time. But you can only do that if you are able to uncover their anonymous activity to know where the buyer is in their journey. While my dance instructor career never did take off -- probably because I could never follow and have horrible rhythm -- my marketing dance moves are on point, and it’s making prospecting fun -- just like an awesome night out on the dance floor.
