Executive Summary
- ABM platforms like 6Sense and Demandbase are great for defining and segmenting potential markets for B2B companies.
- However, ABM tools don't focus on the real-time activity of individual buyers within target accounts.
- To maximize revenue and optimize sales and marketing resources, companies need to focus on their website and identify individual buyer behavior in real-time.
- Combining ABM account data and segmentation with website behavioral buyer intent creates a narrow, precise pool of highly-qualified accounts ready to convert.
- This “bullseye” target of website visitors converts with 5x faster sales velocity than relying solely on the ABM data and account score.
- This approach benefits both sales and marketing teams and is especially important for resource optimization in challenging economic conditions.
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If your company sells to businesses, and you are clear on the types of companies you serve, using an ABM platform (e.g. 6Sense, Demandbase) to define and segment your potential market puts you on the right track.
However, you’re missing a critical piece of the puzzle.
That’s because ABM tools are great at giving you directional insights on what your market looks like in the form of company accounts that match your ICP, and what stage of the buyer journey those accounts might be in based on their in-market activity, but they don’t focus on the real-time activity of individual buyers within those accounts.
To find that, you’d need to add a more precise tool - something that can find buyers by looking at their behavioral signals of intent right now, while they are on your website, rather than just looking at the broader in-market account activity over time.
Your ABM platform will look at all of the activities of your targeted accounts and segment them by their combined activities as represented here:
But to maximize your revenue and deploy your sales and marketing resources most effectively you need to shift the traditional paradigm of thinking and focus more attention and effort on your website, where the buyers are right now:
By looking closer at the behavior of visitors on your website, where you have the highest amount of first-party data to calculate their buyer intent accurately in real-time, you can effectively prioritize your sales and marketing resources and optimize your ABM platform performance.
The “bullseye” of buyers
Lift AI calls these “website buyer intent” signals, and with those in hand you can focus and align all of your resources on the overlap between in-market ABM insights and the surfaced buyers on your website, creating a bullseye of buyers ready to convert.
In fact, this is exactly how Lift AI customers identify their bullseye to skyrocket their conversion rate - by combining individual website visitor behavior with ABM Account Based Scoring and Segmentation to create a narrow pool of red-hot, ready-to-buy accounts that convert 5x more than any other segment (more on this later).
This is not only a salesperson’s dream, but a marketer’s one too - especially in 2023 where economic conditions are tight and resource optimization is imperative.
In order to fully grasp the opportunity of the ABM + behavioral buyer intent bullseye, we need to look at:
- What is the best way to use your ABM tools?
- What are your ABM tools currently missing?
- How website behavioral buyer intent fills the gap
- Solutions you can deploy right now to find the bullseye
- The results you can expect from finding the bullseye
What is the best way to use your ABM tools??
The modern ABM tool has three primary functions:
- Identifying your potential market from databases of accounts
At the beating heart of an ABM tool is its database of accounts and contacts.
This is an enormous list of information that contains company names, email addresses, IP addresses, company sizes, and much more.
By combining firmographic, demographic, and contact data, these databases allow you to define what your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like, so it can provide a list of accounts that match your criteria.
Suddenly, you have a potential market of accounts that you can begin to track in the marketplace.
- Segmenting your potential market based on their buying journey activity
Now that you have a list of potential accounts, you can start looking at where those accounts might be in their buying journey.
To do this, ABM tools track a handful of activities across the internet such as what kind of articles those accounts are reading (and if they’re relevant to you), what kind of keywords they are searching on Google, and more.
The ABM tool then makes a best estimate about how close that account is to making a purchase decision based on this activity by assigning a hypothesized score to each action.
- Identifying accounts on your website and notifying your sales team
If one of these accounts happens to land on your website, the ABM tool can log that information and notify your sales team.
The ABM tool can cross-reference this with what you have identified as your ICP, and if the fit is strong, will score the account higher in your system.
From there, your sales team can follow up with the account via email, phone, or any other means of communication based on the available data.
So, your ABM tool provides good directional data on what your addressable market could look like, what basic activity they have in the market, and if they’ve been to your website. This is all helpful, useful data to marketing and sales teams - but it's not without challenges.
What your ABM are currently missing
It comes down to this - ABM tools provide good direction, but don’t surface individual buyers in real-time. That’s because of several challenges:
1. They rely on databases which can be inaccurate and outdated
The ABM tool’s beating heart is the database, but these databases are subject to a few weaknesses which impact how useful their data is:
- The data might be outdated
- The data can be inaccurate (e.g. incorrect guess of company size)
- The data is not updated in real time
2. Their scoring systems are broad and simplistic
As mentioned, ABM tools mostly look at in-market activity to gather insights, meaning they look at events across their sources of information, which stretch broadly over the internet. This includes recurring research themes, keywords searched, and form fills to update their databases. Each of these activities are assigned scores, then weighed in the system to determine what stage they are at in their buying journey.
They also look at a few website engagement metrics on your own website, which adds to their scoring system. This may include pricing page views, ebook downloads, webinar registrations, time on site, and mouse clicks.
Similar to the broad in-market metrics, ABM on-site scores are subject to several weaknesses which are explained in great detail in this article:
- The lead scoring and in-market intent signals are based on human hypotheses, which means they are best guesses subject to bias and inaccuracy
- The signals are too few in number to accurately determine intent (in reality, they need exponentially more signals)
- Their intelligence is not provided when it matters most (real-time)
- Some of the website engagement metrics are too simplistic and isolated, such as if website visitors attend a webinar, viewed a pricing page, filled out a form, etc. In reality, each visitor’s unique journey should weigh and score those individual actions differently, while being cross-referenced with each other - a pricing page view isn’t enough.
Additionally, when it comes to tracking your website, ABM tools use a process called “ID reveal” to match visitor IP addresses against their database of information to identify them. However, this process only works for 30% of your website visitors on average, leaving the remaining 70% completely anonymous alongside a tremendous opportunity for revenue capture.
Why behavioral website buyer intent fills the gap
So, if ABM tools provide good direction in terms of market size, market fit, and rough ideas of where target accounts are at in their journey, how do you surface the individual buyers within those accounts, right now?
There is only so much data ABM tools can glean from broad website activity.
To learn more, you have to look at the data you have full control and insight over, on your own properties. In other words, you need to look at your website.
Specifically, you need a way to tell which individuals on your website right now are likely to buy, and the only way to do this is to analyze their behavioral buyer intent signals in real-time.
That said, it’s not a simple matter of reviewing website engagement signals. To do this properly, you need an artificial intelligence model that overcomes the inherent weaknesses of traditional buyer intent signals.
That way, it doesn’t matter who the visitor is or what ABM sales stage they’re in, the AI model will simply find the buyers on your website right now, in real-time - and the only tool that can do that is Lift AI.
The only website behavioral buyer intent solution - Lift AI
Lift AI is the only website buyer intent solution that scores the behavior of each and every website visitor as they navigate your website, segmenting them into buyer intent segments in real-time.
The AI model is pre-trained on billions of data points based on typical buyer behavior profiles, resulting in over 85% accuracy per visitor scored.
Here’s how it helps fill the ABM gaps:
- It creates the bullseye of your most promising accounts
When Lift AI high intent visitors are combined with your ABM Account Scoring and Segmentation, you can isolate the individual buyers within accounts and get much more distinct, accurate and actionable predictions to enable prioritizing of sales and marketing efforts.
- It works in real-time to surface buyers right now
Unlike ABM tools which often surface after visitors have left your website, Lift AI enables you to see when visitors are displaying high buyer intent right now while they're on your website, increasing your chance of converting them by aligning the conversion experience to their intent level in the moment.
- Bonus: It works with the 70% of completely anonymous visitors too
As discussed, ABM tools provide insights on up to 30% of website visitors on average. However, Lift AI assigns buyer intent scores to everyone - including the 70% of visitors who were completely anonymous before. This allows you to find and convert net new opportunities, creating more pipeline and revenue.
The bullseye effect - 10x smaller segments with 5x higher conversions
In one case study, a client using an ABM tool found that 289,163 of their website visitors were identified accounts and marked as being in the “Purchase” stage of their buyer journey based on the aggregate information captured in the ABM platform.
This visitor segment was too large to effectively prioritize resources against, and at 2.38% it was only converting fractionally higher than the 1.8% conversion rate of accounts marked in the “Decision” stage, so the marketing and sales team couldn’t optimize its approach or resources in a meaningful way.
However, after Lift AI’s real-time behavioral data was layered on top to find high intent website visitors based on their behavior, the audience was narrowed down to a bullseye of 26,157 visitors (10x smaller than before) who converted at 11.38% (5x higher than before).
This gave the client a clear vision on the slice of website visitors who were strong-fit accounts from their ABM tools and high real-time buyer intent from Lift AI, allowing them to focus in on that segment with all of their available resources.
Not only did this provide more revenue, but it increased the productivity of their sales team as they were only spending time engaging the bullseye visitors, while using automated sales tools to engage the non-bullseye prospects.
“One Lift AI high intent playbook quickly became the second biggest pipeline producer ( 1st was contact sales), and even more impressive, it did so with 5x the sales velocity.”
Put simply: Lift AI scores the buying behavior of individual website visitors using pre-trained AI, and when combined with your ABM Account Scoring and Segmentation, you get much more distinct, accurate and actionable predictions to enable prioritizing of sales and marketing efforts.
We call this the bullseye, which offers a narrow, meaningful segment of website buyers amongst all the noise of traffic which converts with 5x the sales velocity.
If you want to see how Lift AI can find the bullseye alongside your ABM tools, get started with us Today.
