If you own a B2B business, you know how critical it is to have a robust and effective B2B database analytics. It is no surprise that most B2B marketers collect data from at least 12 different sources.
B2B data analytics is an absolute necessity for effective marketing. Marketers should clearly understand the data stored in their business database.
So, what exactly is B2B data analytics? Why is it essential to your sales and marketing strategy? And how can you ensure that you’re making the best use of it?
What is B2B Data?
B2B data is information gathered about other businesses and the people that work for them.
Contact information, business updates, previous transactions with your company, and other information are examples of B2B data.
B2B sales and marketing teams utilize this data to develop better strategies and improve their customer journey. You can gather B2B data from various public and private sources, such as articles, websites, social media profiles and pages, B2B data suppliers, etc.
The benefits associated with B2B data make it incredibly valuable in today’s marketing industry, from quicker target audience identification, improving leads, focused targeting to enhanced personalization.
The Five Types of B2B Data
Demographic, firm, technographic, chronographic, and intent data are the five major B2B data types. Let’s dive right in to discover more about them.
- B2B Demographic Data Analytics
Also called B2B contact data, these are data that helps get your foot through the door by giving you more information to understand your audience. Examples of this data include:
- Names
- Phone numbers
- Email addresses
- Work or residential address
- Social media accounts
- Income
- Job titles
- Updated employment records
- Socio-political profiles
- An inventory of skills, qualifications, and education
This is an essential data item to pay attention to if your sales team mainly focuses on prospecting, making cold calls, and sending out cold emails.
You can utilize demographic data to create highly effective buyer personas. With 56 percent of businesses emphasizing the necessity of this step, this data type becomes even more critical.
It can also help you match new leads to your ideal customer profile, especially if you’re selling to a specific role inside a company.
The best platforms for contact data:
- B2B Intent Data Analytics
How do you know whether the leads coming into your sales pipeline are serious about purchasing your product? How do you know when it’s the right time to reach out?
B2B intent data shows you when a person does actions that indicate they’re in the market to buy. This might include:
- Downloading a resource
- Repeated visits to the website’s pricing page
- Requesting a demo
- Starting a free trial
It also focuses on a company’s purchase and buying activity.
Intent data has several advantages, such as allowing you to discover leads before your competitors, helping you in prioritizing them and offering you the luxury of segmentation.
Intent data fields may contain the following information:
- A log of the website visit and the time spent
- An inventory of the services the company subscribes to
- Data on the products visitors look at
- Purchase-related search history
Some tools use machine learning algorithms to find trends and patterns and help identify more likely prospects to purchase.
The best platforms for B2B intent data:
- B2B Firmographic Data Analytics
Suppose your company offers niche services that are specially customized to the demands of another industry. You’ll need access to reliable firmographic data in this situation.
Firmographic data, also known as company data, includes the key points used to determine whether a company meets your ideal customer profile. Data points in this category may include:
- Company name
- Company size
- Company revenue
- Company location
- Number of employees in a specific department or team
- Business type and industry
- Buying process
- Website traffic
- Target market
- Org chart or account map to identify key decision-makers
For example, you sell marketing software to a B2B ecommerce digital marketing agency. To match new leads to your target demographic, you’d need to know whether the lead is a marketing agency, what kind of clients they serve, and how many people on their team will be utilizing your software. Quality business data is essential for an efficient sales strategy.
Account data is also crucial for creating a successful Target Account Sales (TAS) or Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy.
According to a 2018 survey, more than 55% of marketers felt they didn’t have enough data to create a strong marketing campaign. This problem could’ve been easily solved using firmographic data.
The best data engines for firmographic data:
- Chronographic Data Analytics
Your leads are going through dozens of events and changes that could impact where they are in the buying process.
When you keep on top of the event and the changing data, you can jump into the conversation when it matters the most. These are called chronographic data, and some real-life B2B examples include:
- When a new department is formed or grows
- When a new product or function is introduced.
- When a new role that fits your ICP is hired
- When a person is promoted inside the firm.
- When the business grows its employee count.
- When the company raises a new round of funding
- When the company rebrands or shifts its target market
Chronographic data is especially important for B2B sales and marketing teams because it highlights events that could lead to a sales or marketing opportunity. It allows B2B salespeople or marketers to predict when a prospect is most likely to purchase a product or service.
The best platforms for chronographic data:
- Technographic Data Analytics
Technographic data is mainly concerned with the tools and technologies used by businesses in their daily operations.
Basically, this is the tech stack that your target market is using.
Your sales team might use technographic data to match a lead to your ideal customer profile or your marketing team to better target marketing campaigns.
For example, if you’re selling a sales tool that integrates with a CRM, and your software only connects with Close, Hubspot, or Salesforce. You have to ensure that all new leads are already using one of these three CRMs.
Otherwise, you’d be wasting your time trying to sell them a product that won’t work with their existing stack.
The best platforms for technographic data:
How High-Performing Sales and Marketing Teams Use B2B data Analytics
With the five major types of B2B data in mind, let’s look at how sales representatives and marketers use this sort of data in their day-to-day strategies and tactics and how this can benefit your team.
Generate Leads
Account data matched to the ideal customer profile will help marketers target the right businesses, and demographic data will assist marketers in targeting the right individuals in social campaigns.
They can make their approach ultra-personalized with technographic data, for example, by targeting consumers of a competing product.
Sales development teams will leverage B2B contact data to ensure they are targeting the right person at a company and account and tech data to customize cold emails.
Market Analysis
Data from B2B transactions can also be industry-wide.
This can tell you about industry trends, shifts in the market your clients sell to, or emerging news or technology that could benefit you, which are valuable information to have when marketing to B2B companies.
Improve Inbound Lead Scoring and Routing
When you know which accounts and customers add the most value to your business, all you have to do is replicate those customers.
B2B data is critical for successfully scoring leads and routing them to your sales team.
For example, if you primarily target enterprise-size businesses and a small firm enters your funnel, you immediately see that this is not an ideal customer. Based on B2B data, inbound lead scoring tells you which leads you should prioritize to get the best outcome. Lead enrichment tools can help you convert something as simple as an email address into a detailed profile to find high-quality sales leads.
Account-based Marketing
If you’re creating or refining your ABM strategy, you know how necessary it is to have clean, accurate data.
To effectively target accounts and the people within those accounts, you should have key data about the company, such as its size, market share, employees, business processes, and organizational structure.
Data should be collected and structured in a place where both the marketing and sales teams have access since both teams are working on it simultaneously.
Identify Key Moments for Sales Outreach
Sales teams can identify the best time to contact a lead or prospect using changes and event data.
For example, let’s say you had a chat with a prospect interested in your product but were blocked by a decision-maker. Then you see that your initial contact has been promoted. You can try reaching out again now that they have the clout to close the deal.
Final Thoughts
Data is critical for sales success as long as you know how to use it correctly. Part of this is ensuring you have the right team! Jarvis are the leaders in eCommerce recruitment, and regularly fill such positions regularly.