The science of sales development: how Everstring uses intent data to build pipeline

The importance of being relevant

The overwhelming trend in prospecting over the last few years has been to personalize one’s outreach as much as possible. No one wants to be sent an automated, canned response, right? Right?

Well, almost.

Personalization is good, says Veronin. But relevance is better.

“A couple years ago we would send marketers cute emails about their dogs. Or, if they were into sports, we’d email about their favourite football team. That’s personalization, but hat does that have to do with helping them at their jobs? Relevance and timing have become much more important.,” says Veronin.

“Personalization, in fact, is in a solid third place for me. And that’s the approach we take here.”

Relevance at EverString begins with intent data, information gleaned from a prospect’s or an account’s search history. Think about searching for a new pair of shoes you want to buy: one trip to Nike’s website will result in a stream of ads for Nike products (and Nike’s competitors) being served to you.

The intent data that EverString uses to understand the interests of their prospects is the same, just now being used in the B2B world.

“Account selection is super important. You don’t want to waste your time on companies that can’t use your services. And, we rely on data to figure out that fit for us,” says Veronin.

“The internet is slow — reading investor relations documents is slow, reading product descriptions is slow. But, we have sooo much data at our fingertips. And that data is now available for sales development teams, you can do similar retargeting as you experience in a B2C environment.”

Intent data…in the trenches

So…what does that intent data look like on the ground for EverString’s SDRs? How do they actually execute their prospecting using this information?

The process is remarkably simple: EverString collects intent data (sent to the via Bombora, the service they use that collects the information) in Salesforce. What their SDRs see is a simple dashboard containing:

• SDR owner
• Account name
• Website
• Everstring fit score
• Intent topics (Bombora data)
• Last activity

The “intent topics” from the above list could a collection of keywords an account is searching, or a list of websites they are visiting in their search for a new software vendor (or both). And the EverString fit score, like traditional lead scoring, is number derived from the data they receive from Bombora (relevant search terms, relevant vertical etc.).

“Intent data and keyword data all flown into your CRM, all in one crisp, clean, tidy report and you have your target accounts for the week. You walk in a monday morning — you see accounts, what they do, and what they are actively searching for,” says Veronin.

“So our reps are able to look at the fit right there, and reach out to them.”

(We had Veronin’s boss, Matt Amundson, on the podcast a while back to discuss the importance of being “human” while prospecting. You can read about our chat here, or listen the in-depth full interview here)

Originally published at predictablerevenue.com on February 28, 2019.