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Predictive Analytics
Guides

The Guide to Account Identification

In this guide, we’ll explain how identifying accounts effectively can provide actionable customer insights, reduce sales and marketing waste, and activate more personalized engagement.

—
The 6sense Team
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Four revenue team members gather at one of their desks to examine prospect accounts

Home / Platform / Account Identification / The Guide to Account Identification

Chapters

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

The Challenge: Your Buyers are Anonymous

Chapter 3

How Account Identification Works

Chapter 4

What to Know About Match Rates

Chapter 5

Unlocking the Power of ABM

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

How do you identify your target customers? Do you use data, or rely on generalized personas and guesswork? (Spoiler alert: Data gets better results.)

In this guide, we’ll explain how identifying accounts effectively can provide actionable customer insights, reduce sales and marketing waste, and activate more personalized engagement. 

It’s hard to take an account-based approach when you’re unable to identify accounts in your pipeline. Much of buyers’ activities online remain anonymous — meaning, you’re missing important indicators from potential customers that are ready to buy.

Account identification is the process by which revenue teams match anonymous digital intent signals to buyers and accounts. It enables marketing and sales teams to segment their audiences more precisely and engage them with the most relevant communication.

With the ability to not only determine who your highest-priority buyers are, but also the topics they are researching online, you can prioritize who you engage when. This eliminates resource waste and increases revenue.

Chapter 2

The Challenge: Your Buyers are Anonymous

Many buyers in your ideal customer profile (ICP) never visit your website. That means when you can’t detect ICP buyer-intent data beyond a buyer’s personal engagement with your own website and content, you can lose deals that you never had a chance to compete for.

How is this possible? Well, B2B buying teams aren’t big fans of marketers and sellers:

  • Less than 3% intentionally engage revenue teams early in the buying journey
  • They conduct nearly 70% of their research anonymously on third-party websites, far from the curious eyes of B2B marketers and sales reps
  • In fact, many already come to a buying decision before they ever explicitly engage with a company’s sales team

But there’s a twist: Buyers create digital “breadcrumb trails” of buying signals as they research. This crucial, unseen data hides in what we call the Dark Funnel™. Traditional martech systems can’t interpret it, but leading platforms (like 6sense) are purpose-built to detect, analyze, and create actionable insights from this information.

This is particularly helpful since website form-fills — a longtime mainstay of website marketing — aren’t efficient or effective methods to generate quality leads. Website visitors rarely fill out forms. They browse pages to gather as much information as possible before providing their contact information.

And as many salespeople will tell you, even if someone does fill out a form on your site, they’re typically not a great lead. Often, it’s an individual contributor (not a key decision maker) doing preliminary research.

A much more valuable cue that an account is ripe for outreach is to identify multiple buying team members doing anonymous research. But to do so, you need an effective solution for matching activity to individual contacts and accounts.

Chapter 3

How Account Identification Works

You need access to the right data to identify accounts and buyer behavior. That means implementing tools that deanonymize those digital signals and collect intent data to determine which accounts present an opportunity for your solution right now.

Intent data uncovers third-party buying signals across the internet, effectively finding which accounts are actively researching topics related to your solution.

Account identification methods then match this data to accounts in your pipeline, empowering you to prioritize accounts and personalize outreach to them.

Legal Concerns Surrounding Account Identification

At first glance, privacy laws may seem like a barrier to gathering and using this account data. However, as long as you and the account-identification vendor you select follow the rules, you will be 100% compliant.

First and foremost, handle personally identifiable information (PII) with care. Next, ensure your vendor has the appropriate safeguards in place to process PII and source third-party data in compliance with federal regulations.

Chapter 4

What to Know About Match Rates

Match rates measure an account-identification vendor’s ability to connect anonymous buyer activities to pipeline accounts. When your account match rate is high, you can uncover more target accounts, optimize spend, and improve personalization.

How Matching Works

Account matching takes data from your own website and customer database, as well as third-party sites, and matches them to contacts or accounts. Historically, this was done using corporate IP addresses — but the rise in remote work forced vendors to rely on other methods.

In addition to IP addresses, accounts can be matched using device IDs and cookies. And incorporating other data signals such as channels, product categories, and location can further uncover account data and intent.  

Matching accounts to activity indicates who to pursue more assertively. That’s why it’s probably no surprise that a low match rate can be detrimental to your revenue strategy. If an account is misidentified, you’re personalizing messages based on false information, which creates a poor experience for the buyer. It wastes resources, too

Failing to match an account altogether means you’re missing out on hundreds of potential customers and thousands — or much more — in revenue.

How to Evaluate Vendor Match Rates

Before selecting a vendor to help you identify accounts, put their match rates to the test. There are a couple of ways to do so.

The first is to provide vendors a list of known IP addresses and ask them to come back with corresponding accounts. The caveat with this method is that in order to get an accurate indication of match rates, you’ll need a list of at least several thousand addresses — not the most feasible approach.

An easier test is to put JavaScript tags on your website for a week and ask vendors to report back on match rates and accounts that visited the site. This also shows you whether vendors use other data points to match accounts beyond IPs.

It’s important to note: Whatever method you choose, use the same dataset for every vendor to get the most definitive comparison.

(6sense is proven to have the highest match rate in the industry, collecting millions of interactions and connecting intent across devices, channels, people, and more. Our method has helped us to achieve up to an 85% match accuracy.) 

Chapter 5

Unlocking the Power of ABM

Insight into who buyers are and what they’re interested in — and where they are in the buying process — enables sellers to know when accounts are hot and to get into deals sooner for maximum influence.

By using both customer and intent data to tailor your approach for personalizing marketing and direct outreach, you win prospects’ trust, engage them with the features of your product they care about, and ultimately speed up deal cycles.

And in the end, by nailing the who, what, when, where, and why of accounts, you aren’t wasting time on prospects that aren’t looking for a solution. You can make a bigger impact on pipeline without investing more budget, time, and resources.

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Account identification allows for more meaningful buyer interactions and creates a better, more personalized experience for prospects.

Effective account identification, paired with intent data, will:

  • Match anonymous activity with accounts in your pipeline for a clearer picture of potential customers
  • Pinpoint where accounts are in the buying process so you can prioritize those ready to buy now
  • Uncover what buying team members are researching so sales and marketing can provide relevant outreach
  • Leave no gray area for which accounts to engage when, better aligning sales and marketing teams
  • Eliminate waste on accounts in the early stages of the buying process (or not in it at all)

Stop guessing and start knowing. Move forward with confidence that you are reaching the right accounts that will lead to positive business outcomes.

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The 6sense Team

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The 6sense Team
6sense helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth by putting the power of AI, big data, and machine learning behind every member of the revenue team.