The world’s leader in enterprise cloud data management saw significant and sustained improvement in new customer acquisition by gradually deepening the integration of intent data with its Sales and Marketing.
Informatica, the world’s leader in enterprise cloud data management, wanted to infuse its account-based marketing strategy with buyer intent data. Rather than spending months of prep time to reconfigure sales and marketing around the new data source, the company started simple and jumped right in – and saw immediate results. Over the following months, Informatica increased its investment and further integrated the data into its holistic strategy.
Phase 1: Sales Works Off Weekly Reports
Informatica partnered with Bombora, a B2B data company that tracks the content consumption of almost 4,000+ product and service topics happening within 2.8 million businesses. Spikes in content consumption on certain topics signal that key influencers and buyers in a company are researching prior to buying and, thus, are more likely to be receptive to sales and marketing outreach.
Informatica started simply with a weekly spreadsheet. The company identified key topics and competitors’ names that, when researched, signal a prospect is interested in Informatica’s products and services. On a weekly basis, Bombora identified companies consuming more information around these topics and passed that list to the Informatica sales team. Those companies were prioritized for sales outreach. During its pilot program with Bombora data, Informatica used intent data to create opportunities among previously uncontacted companies that added more than $500,000 to its pipeline.
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Phase 2: Prospects Categorized by Customer Journey
Encouraged by these early results, Informatica went further. The company identified four types of customers with distinct interests in Informatica products, and it worked with Bombora to transform its single weekly reports into four more-detailed reports that identified prospects according to their customer journey. The sales team used this added level of granularity to further tailor outreach to prospects.
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Phase 3: Intent Data Integrated with Partner Insights
For the next step on its ABM journey, Informatica integrated Bombora’s intent data with insights from Lattice Engines, a partner that provides Informatica with lists of high-fit prospects that are lookalikes of its best customers. Bombora began using these lists to inform its four weekly reports. With this integration, Bombora’s reports segment in-market prospects not only by customer journey but also by their level of fit for Informatica’s products and services.
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Phase 4: Website Traffic Informs Intent Reports
Following the integration with Lattice Engines’ insights, Informatica further informed its ABM strategy with traffic data from its own website. The company placed a tag on its site that allows Bombora to identify the companies that are visiting Informatica’s website – an ultimate signal of intent.
The result: Every week, Informatica receives prospect lists from Bombora that feature:
- Companies actively researching Informatica’s key topics
- The customer journey stage that applies to each prospect
- Prioritization of the prospects that represent the best fit for Informatica’s products and services
- Further prioritization of the high-fit prospects that are visiting Informatica’s site to learn about its offerings
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Phase 5: Sales and Marketing Align Around Intent
Now that Informatica has integrated and aligned sales around intent data, it is taking the next logical step: extending intent insights to its Marketing. The company is implementing an integrated Sales and Marketing approach in which messaging to active prospects (as identified above) is tailored according to their demonstrated interests. This custom messaging happens not only through paid programs on LinkedIn and Facebook but also through personalization on Informatica’s own site. Beyond sales lift, the company is now seeing greater cost efficiency in its customer acquisition. On LinkedIn alone, Informatica’s cost per quality lead has been reduced by 54 percent.
Informatica’s gradual approach to intent data integration has driven improvements in customer acquisition with each new phase of implementation. As Informatica’s journey demonstrates, companies need not reconfigure their entire sales process up front to realize value from intent data. An iterative approach can lead to wins every step of the way.
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