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THE SECRET HANDBOOK OF PURCHASE INTENT THE SECRET HANDBOOK OF PURCHASE INTENT As businesses adjust their thinking from the sales cycle model to the buyer’s journey, other trends in sales and marketing are coming to the forefront as well. Big Data is being used in ways never before considered, including building customer personas in the B2B world as well as predicting purchase intent—yet another new frontier to conquer. Understanding where a potential customer lands in the buyer’s journey can help marketers and sales teams nurture prospects through the process, all the way to closing the deal. The ability to predict and pinpoint purchase intent is no longer a crystal ball—the data is there, as long as you know what to look for and how to use it. This handbook will discuss some “insider secrets” you can use when you consider collecting purchase intent data. The Secret Handbook of Purchase Intent 02 Why Identifying Purchase Intent is More Relevant Than Ever Rudimentary segmentation is a low-level way to identify purchase intent, and is an essential building block in understanding your buyer. You can develop a basic customer profile by industry, company size, geographic location, IT spend, etc. But these data points don’t tell you whether they are a good fit for your company: with this simple information, you don’t know whether your product is compatible, whether they have already chosen another vendor, or if they are ready to begin researching solutions. Many companies go a step or two further, with activities like tracking the kind of marketing content that is being consumed, targeting lookalike audiences, and researching additional verticals to pursue. But even that amount of data are still pieces of the big picture and don’t necessarily result in converting intent into engagement. Marketing and data analytics users average a 62.1% higher Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).1 The Data on Data-Driven Marketing: Where Data & Analytics Make a Difference, Aberdeen Group, December, 2015 The Secret Handbook of Purchase Intent It’s important to not only look at a wide variety of data, but also develop the ability to interpret it as purchase intent, and dig even deeper into identifying additional prospects that are likely to be interested in your products and services. These patterns can be uncovered by wisely mining available data and then leveraging those insights directly into actionable sales and marketing responses. After all, failing to reach out to a customer who is displaying purchase intent signals can equate directly to revenue loss. The Five Most Likely Attributes to Identify a Buying Signal As an individual consumer, you probably often exhibit purchase intent: in fact, companies like Amazon depend on their recommendation engines to upsell and cross-sell. But in the B2C world, the cycle is typically very short: your dishwasher breaks, you research currently available models and options, and perhaps visit a store for the handson experience. By performing online research and visiting the store, you are exhibiting purchase intent. You probably want a replacement dishwasher as soon as possible, so the research phase is probably no more than a day or two; then, you make the purchase and wait for installation. 03 TIP › Some questions to ask when planning to target accounts include: What does their tech environment look like?Are there any differences in what or how much a company buys based on technology? Or firmographic information? • How can we find more companies that have XXX technology or equipment? • Will these companies see the value in our products and services? Can we make assumptions about the companies who do? • How can we identify the types of companies we want to see more of? • The Secret Handbook of Purchase Intent But sales cycles for businesses can take much longer: problems must be identified, management must be convinced, budgets must be approved, research must take place, compatibility must be assured, and so forth—and, most of these steps happen by committee. To identify purchase intent in a B2B setting, you must be able to observe the signals in each of these steps, by each of the people involved in the decision-making process AND be able to tie all of these indicators together to one company. FIRMOGRAPHIC DATA To make a basic comparison, firmographic data is to businesses, government entities, and non-profit organizations what demographics are to people. Firmographics tell us much of the information used in high-level segmenting, such as company size, industry type, and core competencies. In other words, firmographic data gives us the description of an organization in a nutshell. This data can validate or eliminate large swaths of organizational purchase intent. For example, a software company with a focus on educational software is highly unlikely to exhibit purchase intent for wholesale tires; however, an automotive repair chain might. A company who buys enterprise-class Cisco products, for example, exhibits different attributes than one who buys a startup option. A few instances where firmographic data can yield purchase intent data include: • Status and structure: whether a firm is a public or private company, a subsidiary, a franchisee, a corporation, limited liability partnership, and so on. This type of information can help determine whether an authorized buyer might be present. • Location: in some cases, proximity to the customer is a big factor for purchase intent. For example, a construction company in Ohio will likely source building materials as locally as possible to minimize shipping and logistics costs. • Performance: this type of firmographic data describes how a business executes over time. A company in a growth period might need more servers, computers, or office furniture, while a company in decline would have very different business needs. • Culture: a company’s culture can also provide clues into purchase intent; for example, some companies are technological innovators while others are known to be laggards—some take risks, and others are more conservative. 04 BUYER PROFILE Although purchase decisions are often made by committee, at the end of the day those decisions are still made by people. And as we all know, people are subject to bias. Looking into the characteristics of the buyers and other decision makers can signal purchase intent when taken in the right context and is fundamental to building out a buyer profile. Some of the demographic information uncovered in the profile you build for your buyer(s) can signal purchase intent is similar to the firmographic data discussed in the last section, such as location: a buyer might prefer to purchase as locally as possible for certain supplies. And culture can also be a factor: companies with certain cultures tend to attract people with similar values; a fiscally conservative buyer would likely be a good match for the same type of company. 71% of B2B buyers who see a personal value will buy a product. How Emotions Influence B2B Buyers, Executive Board The custodian of a company’s money wants to make the best possible decisions: quality, value, compatibility, etc. Classifying the details of who does the buying can help you craft messaging and other activities that appeal to them personally. Consider, as one example, the generation gap: a millennial might be more interested in your product or service if it can streamline their workflow or improve work/life balance, while a baby boomer might prefer a solution that offers long-term stability. Profile data can also help lead you to unexpected sources of purchase intent signals. You may find that people of a certain age or location might be more likely to reach out to their peers on LinkedIn or a blog for product evaluations or recommendations. It’s reasonable to assume that if someone is looking for advice, they may be considering a purchase. BUSINESS CONDITIONS The state of a business can also provide several clues into purchase intent and include more than just learning whether a company is in a growth or recession period. However, that information can also be a clue: growing companies tend to purchase a variety of products to get new employees up and running. General economic conditions can also directly affect a company’s decision to purchase or abstain, so it can be helpful to understand the state of the economy—not only where they are headquartered, but also in areas where they do business. The Secret Handbook of Purchase Intent 05 Another business condition to note is a company’s tech environment. Many technological products and services are interdependent; when you learn about a company rolling out a new technology, that would signal a good time to reach out with details about your compatible product or service. TIP › Consider these questions when mining temporal data: Does a company purchase more just before the end of a fiscal year, or at the beginning of a new one? When does this company's fiscal year begin? Are there seasonal patterns to their purchasing habits? Is there something black or white about the business?Did it change from black to white, or vice versa? The Secret Handbook of Purchase Intent Other behaviors can be evidence of purchase intent as well; examples include an increase in service calls or an uptick in visits to a particular product landing page. Those first-party data points that are either actively being captured or interpreted as changes in customer behavior may indicate that an existing customer could be considering a new purchase, or possibly switching to a competitor’s offering. By astutely mining this data, you can ensure that you are meeting your customers’ needs and addressing any concerns before it’s too late. TEMPORAL DATA In an ever-changing business landscape, noticing which types of changes are occurring can provide actionable insights. The most obvious of these is the ability to predict companies’ purchasing patterns over time. There are other, more obscure data points to discover, such as job postings and vacancies. Job postings can provide a sneak peek into a company; for example, if a company is looking for an Oracle developer, clearly the company uses Oracle and may be expanding in some way. If your product or service is compatible, this kind of job posting can be a good signal to interact. Additionally, if job listings at a particular company are trending upward, that’s a good sign of growth. Job vacancies can also be clues. If an executive leaves a company, for example, you’ll want to learn why they left. If the reason is related to company performance as a whole, rather than the person moving on to a similar role within a different organization, that could indicate a downturn in purchasing. Consider researching press releases and other corporate communications to learn whether the role will be backfilled, as well as information about the person hired to that role. You may be able to uncover demographic information that could affect the company’s culture or purchasing habits. 06 BEHAVIORAL DATA In some ways, customer behaviors can be simpler to collect than some of the other more esoteric indicators we’ve covered. For example, learning the number of times a white paper has been downloaded is a fairly straightforward process. Tracking how people are interacting with your marketing content like white papers, webinars, and videos can yield beneficial data that can hint at which of your products and services are being researched. However, evidence of research isn’t always an indicator of purchase intent— unless you have the ability to see where the traffic is coming from. A particularly intriguing behavior that can be a strong signal of purchase intent was touched on in the Buyer Profile section: social media and forums. Buyers researching solutions may ask for recommendations, references, or use cases using LinkedIn, product forums, and in other media channels. They may want to know how other similar companies use your products (or your competitor’s products) to solve their business needs, whether it performs as advertised, or even the name of someone they can contact for more detail. DID YOU KNOW Lead gen content users produce 3. 1 X the revenue from their content marketing efforts Content Marketing for Lead Generation: Success in Simplicity, Aberdeen Group, October 2015 The Secret Handbook of Purchase Intent Additional behavior to consider is the shift toward mobile. As mobile devices become increasingly ubiquitous, so does research being conducted using them—so be sure your website and other marketing materials are optimized for mobile displays. More purchasing is taking place using mobile devices as well, so you might even consider an online storefront or a standalone app—and don’t forget to include mobile payment options. Pitfalls to Avoid To make purchase intent assumptions based on a single data point is to do a disservice to your company. With the amount of data that’s currently available, intuition and faith won’t cut it. For example, you absolutely don’t want to make your marketing decisions based on just web visitation data alone. Some may erroneously interpret content downloads or webinar attendance as intent data, but research doesn’t always equate purchase intent. The most valuable models are those that leverage the largest amounts of data; the more data you have, the more accurate your models will be, because you can segment at a very granular level. 07 About Aberdeen Group Aberdeen Group is the leader in bringing big data and content marketing services together for sales and marketing professionals. Our solutions provide proprietary intelligence on who their ideal target audiences are, what they are interested in now, how to connect with them and what content to share with them. The Aberdeen integrated marketing solution provides our customers with a unique ability to reach the best opportunities. Learn more at aberdeenservices.com. But all the analytics in the world won’t help if they can’t be properly interpreted. Beware of assigning a narrative to a data set—don’t assume. Just because the data appears to show a pattern doesn’t necessarily mean that there is one. Be sure you have as many facts as you can get, and ask for a second or third opinion. Inspect the sample size: exactly how many does a 3% increase in impressions over last quarter mean? Don’t expect perfection, and be willing to experiment. Predictive analytics can help you find likely candidates with high purchase intent indicators, but even those who don’t hit every benchmark can become good, loyal customers. Consider connecting with perhaps the top two tiers of suspects rather than just the cream of the crop. Future Trends in Purchase Intent Prediction In the B2C world, data is often shared across various platforms. Perhaps you’ve looked at, say, cookware, on a few websites to learn more about available options and then seen matching products displayed in your Facebook feed. Quite a bit of B2B data is proprietary and not used in this way, but it’s possible in the future. At this point in time, whether B2C or B2B, we’re still only looking at textual data. Technologies that can interpret images—still or video— would revolutionize how we look at data. For example, the ability to identify a person who took a picture at a trade show near a company logo could provide tremendous new opportunities in predicting purchase intent. IMPROVED PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS You could fill a book with lists of various types of analytics available today, and each type seems to harvest different types of data. Individually, analytics can suggest purchase intent indicators, but it’s the aggregations and applied data science that determine which discrete sets of data in combination with others derive the better sense of purchase intent. And, while basic analytics can identify patterns and trends, they might not be able to help predict the future. You probably noticed that the attributes discussed in this brief—business conditions along with firmographic, buyer profile, temporal, and behavioral data— are all highly interconnected. Future advancements in connecting, aggregating, and analyzing this data to provide a single picture will be extremely valuable in predicting purchase intent. The Secret Handbook of Purchase Intent 08