We are entering an era of marketing where effectiveness will depend on creating highly personalized experiences at every touch point. To do this, marketers must have both the processes and tools needed to operationalize coherent views of prospects and customers. The tools are becoming better every day but marketers are lagging in utilizing those capabilities.
I recently discussed this challenge with executives from three companies who are trying to help marketers solve the customer and prospect data problem from three different perspectives: John Manion (@joshmanion), founder of Ensighten, Chris Golec (@cgolec), CEO of Demandbase and Derek Slayton (@derekslayton), CMO of NetProspex.
Ellett: The biggest challenge I'm seeing right now that inhibits marketers from taking advantage of the potential of highly personalized one-to-one communications across each touch point is their organizational challenges. It's less technological issues, though they may not have the technology in place, and more that the customer experiences are managed through various internal silos. It's difficult to think about architecting experiences across touch point when the marketing organization is focused around optimizing within their own silos. Your thoughts on that hypothesis?
Manion: I agree with that hypothesis. To really achieve the holy grail of one-to-one marketing interactions that are personalized for every line of business across every touch point, there are real organizational issues. As this next wave of technology emerges and these things become a reality, you will see organizations reorganize themselves to be much more nimble in their ability to pursue these things.
Golec: I agree with that especially as you get to the enterprise where the media team is not talking to the web operations team who is not talking to the sales operations or VP of sales. And so if you look at it from a CMO perspective, if you can do it right they’re connecting all their different worlds of their media and agency teams together with their website team, together with the VP of sales. If they can pull all that data together, now they’ll have something really interesting.
Slayton: I think the technology isn't the problem. The technology can do just about whatever you need it to do. It's a matter of do you have the expertise in house to do it? Do you have the time to do it? And is it the highest priority for you to work on?
Ellett: Which marketers do you believe are doing the best job of using data to create more personalized experiences?
Manion: I think United Airlines is definitely very forward in their thinking about how they're approaching the customer from multichannel, multi touch point perspectives. I think
Golec: Docusign has done a wonderful job. They use Demandbase but they also use a number of other technologies as well. They’ve done a really nice job of connecting their advertising programs to the website experiences and they are doing it for consumer audiences, small business, large business, different industries because if you think about Docusign, they’re selling to real estate agents, they’re selling to companies, they are selling to consumers, they have premium models, so they have a very complex set of business audiences and different cohorts to manage. They are just best in class when it comes reducing abandonment rate and increasing conversion rates.
Ellett: Where does your firm fit into this marketing technology/customer data ecosystem?
Slayton: NetProspex is trying to help people tie these things together across channels. The core of any B2B marketing organization is their marketing automation platform and the customer prospecting. Everything that we do in B2B marketing is accelerating people that are somewhere in our process through that purchase decision and going and getting people in my target market to enter the funnel where I'm known to them and they're known to me.
We've built a business on the contact side of that equation for six or seven years. Marketers in early days were very focused on more data, more contacts. It was a numbers game. If I send out an email with 10,000 people and get a 2% response rate I know I can put 200 leads in the funnel. Over time we've recognized that B2B marketers are now less focused on having more contact data and more focused on having the right contact data for the people that fit their target markets.
Excellent B2B marketers are ones that are constantly narrowing the guardrails of the prospects that they're pursuing because they know those have the highest likelihood of being successful customers. Our solution has evolved to fit into that. What we do now is help our customers continuously cleanse and enrich and weed out the bad data so that they can focus on the good data from the company contact and intelligence perspective.
Golec: At Demandbase, we’ve built a proprietary data asset using network IP addresses that map the businesses around the globe that is more robust and deeper than Internet registries. The foundation of what we created around business identification, we extended into innovations for websites. We extended it into marketing automation, we extended into chat and AB testing. And we recognized one of the problems that B2B marketers have is that most of the people coming to their website are not potential customers - companies that will never buy from them. So we built our own advertising DSP and are now helping customers bring the right companies to their website, help them personalize and engage those companies and then connect it with sales activity.
Manion: Ensighten allows the enterprise to collect and own that data across every digital touch point. We’re taking the information that the enterprise already knows about their customer and leveraging that to more powerfully find, reach and communicate with customers in any medium. - whether it's a mobile application, a Web site, an emerging device like an IP-enabled TV or game console or an in-store kiosk or an ATM machine. We help manage one unified view of their customers that they can use to enrich the quality of all of those third party applications that they're leveraging across all of those different touch points.
