Using Artificial Intelligence in B2B Lead Generation

I’ve been in the data analysis field with a specific focus on sales and marketing for 30 plus years. I’ve seen quite a lot of change in the tools available, but what is happening now is different. The scale is different. The power is different. And, the importance to you is different.

This is something you must master and use. Your competitors are. By using these tools to acquire new customers, to keep customers longer and grow lifetime client value, you will gain a huge competitive advantage. You want that competitive advantage. You don’t want your competitors to use that competitive advantage against you.

Anyway, you are at the right place at the right time, so let’s get started.

B2B marketing and sales professionals have been a little slow to embrace artificial intelligence.

Possibly because of the nature of relationship selling or because of limited access to the kinds of behavioral data that drives machine learning.

For whatever reason, change is coming. It’s coming now, and it is coming fast.

One of my mentors, Gil Cargill, consults to sales leaders across the country using his sales acceleration formula to give you measure of future revenue. Or as he like to say, what did you sell next quarter.

As you see, the formula starts with leads (# First Meetings) and the ability to close high dollar deals quickly will be dramatically impacted by the quality of those leads.

It is by bringing together the data generated by the internet of things, with identity resolution, that machine learning can identify who are the best prospects. Who is ready to buy from you now, based on their observable behaviors?

There are two starting assumption I want you to consider

First, that all buyers will do research before buying and second, that all buyers visit your website before buying from you.

Now let’s use that information to look at the 3 steps to generating more leads, better leads, through machine learning and identity resolution?

• First, we need to find the profitable 10%
• Then we gain leverage through the application of machine learning
• Finally, we implement tools that will work for you to find the profitable 10%

Finding the profitable 10%

The 80/20 rule tells us that a small number of any group delivers most of the results. So, if we look at our universe of leads, or our ideal client profile, then there is a small number of those, say 20%, that will generate most of our sales and profits. And today, where we have more of a winner take all mentality, I would say we should think more about a 90/10 relationship. Whether using A.I. tools or traditional marketing strategies, the intent is to find the profitable 10% and put our limited resources to work where they have the greatest chance of success.

 

 

Problems and results. Your prospects don’t care about you or what you sell, other than to the extent you can solve a problem for them or give them the result they want but don’t have. To get them to pay attention to your message, you must focus on the problem you solve and the results you deliver.

Buyers Journey. All buyers travel a path to purchase. For B2B sales where buying decisions are usually more complex and the sales cycle longer, that path to purchase is focused on understanding the problem they want to solve, how big it is, what options they have for solving it, what is the result from solving it, who can help them solve it, what will it cost to solve, how long it takes, etc.

As we said in the beginning, today much of that research is done online. By responding to ads that poke at a top of mind problem, by doing keyword searches, by reading content on authority websites.

Conversion Equation. If the buyers journey requires the prospect to conduct research, consume educational content, then it means they must make a series of conclusions along the way. Or, a series of micro-conversions.

For each step of the buyers’ journey, there is a conversion equation that must be applied. Interrupt, engage, educate and offer. And, to get your prospect to move to the next step in the buyers’ journey, you must offer more value than the cost they will pay otherwise they stop, give up and look elsewhere.

Gain leverage through the application of Artificial Intelligence

Now, let’s generate leverage to this by applying Artificial intelligence so we can identify that profitable 10% before your competition does.

Big data + identity resolution + machine learning = AI.

What A.I. now allows us to do is to quickly and efficiently evaluate tons of behavioral data to identify your clients and prospects observable path to purchase and then to identify the profitable 10% who are heading down that path to purchase right now. Why? So, you can focus your limited resources on these most profitable prospects.

The internet of things is real. In 2018 there were 7 billion connected devises. By 2020 there will be more than 20 billion connected devises. Everything from your laptop, to your phone, to your car to your refrigerator is a node on the internet of things.

The 4 V’s of big data:

Volume – to accurately predict an event you must analyze lots of individual data points.
Velocity – the data must come in regularly and ours is generated in real time, and
Variety – we must look at a wide variety of data. Not just all the data from one source, but all the data from a wide variety of sources.

We are collecting more than 50 billion real time behaviors every day from hundreds of million sources.

Identity Resolution.

To identify the profitable 10% of any audience, we need to resolve the identity of the person generating all that data. Think of identity resolution as the key to turning this data into information you can use to grow your business.

Individually, we all use multiple devises, browsers, email addresses and we want to be able to know who each piece of information belongs to, regardless of the devise or email they used online. To do that we’ve had to build an identity graph. Currently it can identify 260M US consumers.

This allows us to resolve the identity of 80% of your website visitors and practically 100% of your B2B prospects.

Path to purchase.

The last step is to use the data we collect and identity resolution to build a path to purchase for anything we want. Here is an over simplified look at how that is done.

We see someone who has purchased and look back at their path to purchase. All the websites, searches, and content they consumed.

Then we do that for multiple people and look for the patterns in URLs and keyword searches.

This gives us a behavior pattern for a conversion.

Then we run our algorithm against the new data entering our system every day to identify who is exhibiting those behaviors right now.

Remember I said there are 4 V’s of AI.

The final V. Veracity. Meaning to accurately identify the pattern of behavior that indicates a conversion is likely.  In English, identifying the “profitable 10%”

Fundamentally, A.I. will allow you to find the profitable 10% faster and less expensively. Machines can process the huge amount of data being generated by the internet of things much quicker than any person. In the time it takes you to read this page, our algorithms can identify which of your prospects is engaged in researching the problem you solve right now and pass it back to your sales and marketing teams for follow-up. Then do it again tomorrow when it processes another 50 billion pieces of new information.

Our Process

How do we bring this technology to life for you?

We begin with our proprietary Identity Graph. We know the emails, devise IDs, names, addresses and much more on 260M Americans and can deterministically resolve their identity.

We collect massive amounts of data. Over 50b unique behaviors every day. That data is then matched to a user in our identity graph

We run our algorithm against your path to purchase to see who is exhibiting the observable behaviors of someone in the market for your product or service. This is what we call InMarket Leads.

We have our Smart Pixel running on your website and that allows us to tell you who is visiting your website and what content they consumed. This is what we call our Site Visitor Match or InFunnel Leads and it is offered with unlimited segmentation.

For practically any B2B company, we can apply our A.I. process to your business in just five steps.

1. Map your prospects to the identity graph. Map your CRM or other databases to our identity graph so we can identify when any of them is in the market for what you sell.
2. Map the path to purchase. Starting with a training sample, we map the path to purchase and then optimize the algorithm over time with new conversions.
3. Collect the data. Chances are we already capture the data we need to make the algorithm accurate. But, if we need to acquire supplemental sources, we will do that.
4. Produce InMarket data lists. When the algorithm runs, which it does constantly, as prospects exhibit the behaviors that indicate they are researching a problem you solve, that data is passed back to you in real time.
5. Identify InFunnel prospects. When a prospect visits your website, you will know that along with the specific content they consumed

Results

While all this technology is cool, I know what you are interested in is results. How does this help you generate more and better leads for your business?

You get real-time (or daily or weekly, depending on requirements) lists of who is in the market for your services right now.
You get daily or weekly lists of who is InFunnel – who has been to your website and consumed your content.

With that information, you can call them, send direct mail, send email, advertise to them on any platform, we can even use that information to run 1 to 1 radio and TV advertisements.

This is your data. You own and control. It never expires. It is platform agnostic so you can use it anywhere online or offline.

By focusing your marketing and sales efforts on the profitable 10%, you will close more transactions, for more value, with a shorter sales cycle. Providing you with a measurable competitive advantage.

Summary

What we do for B2B lead generation is customized for the needs of each client. This is artificial intelligence after all. Not cookie cutter leads being sold to multiple buyers.

I’d like to invite you to learn more about how this would work for your organization. Schedule a 1 on 1 discovery call with me and we will discuss your specific business to determine how our technology might apply to you.