• Better technology for sales professionals
• The rise of inside sales and demise of the travelling sales pro
• Information becoming more readily available to buyers
• Social media opening new channels of communication
• More sophisticated buyers who can see through hacks and tricks
• The rise of account based decisions and account based marketing

The best data-driven marketers recognize this change and have already begun to adapt. One of the most important and effective ways to succeed in a world where the buying cycle has changed forever is to embrace data and embrace the idea of account based tracking.

By tracking how companies are engaging with you (across the actions of many associated website visitors, leads, prospects & trial users) you can identify which accounts to target and reach out to as they progress through the modern buying journey. This is important because the buying cycle for many B2B SaaS companies today look a lot like this:

The interactions that happen at each of these steps can have a significant impact on the likelihood of a lead closing but a lot of these interactions are loss in our data or are not found in one central location. The best data-driven marketers leverage all the context they have (from joining the dots in their data) to every interaction with a customer feel personal.

We know our prospects are visiting our sites.
We know our prospects are visiting our G2Crowd or Capterra page.
We know our prospects are downloading assets.
We know that our prospects are interacting with live chat.

And we know that without a great way of syncing all this data it can be very challenging to deliver an experience that feels personalized and authentic. But it is possible.

Step One: Get Your Data In Order

The first step in creating a data driven funnel that accelerates your prospects buying cycle is ensuring that you have your data house together. What I mean by that is that you need to ensure that you have set up all the properties and services you need to make this work.

• Is your Hubspot account and Salesforce account using the same fields?
• Is your G2Crowd account synced with your Google analytics?
• Have you correctly installed Clearbit to enrich your data?

All of this needs to be done before you can create a truly personalized buying cycle.

Step Two: Sharing Data Across Your Entire Stack

Once you have set up the appropriate tools, it’s important that you create a central brain that will ensure there are no gaps when leads are going through the buying cycle. Data enrichment services make your entire marketing stack more powerful by giving you insights on accounts and prospects without actually asking them for tons of info.

This means you can shorten your lead forms, focusing your questions on contact details and asking the one simple question your sales team needs to qualify, segment, or start a conversation with.

Here’s an example of how it could be set up:

What you’re looking at here is a screenshot from Hull, a tool that helps data-driven marketers make better decisions and more engaging experiences. In this example, data from Clearbit and Datanyze is being used to enrich the contact info for anyone who submits their information through Hubspot, Intercom, Typeform or is uploaded to Salesforce.

This makes sure that all your services are talking to each other and all the data is correct. It also makes it easier to ensure that your interactions feel more personalized when the time comes.

Step Three: Sync Your Data To The Right Tools

Once the data services are set up correctly, it’s time to sync and connect all the dots together. You want to ensure that your CRM, marketing automation tool and product database are all synced together to give back valuable insight around who is doing what…

Services like Hull can use Clearbit to take data from these services and create a complete profile for relevant accounts visiting your G2Crowd page, interacting with Intercom (see graphic above) or simply a prospect who decided to download an ebook. Syncing all of this information with services like “Live Chat” are great because they’ll give you insight into exactly who is on the other side of a chat box.

• Who are they?
• Are they a good fit lead?
• Are they an existing customer (looking for support, not sales?)
• … or a partner? Competitor? Existing opportunity?

Step Four: Create Engaging & Personalized Interactions

The most powerful word you can say to someone is their first name.

The second most powerful word depends on the amount of information you know about them and how you can demonstrate a deep personal connection. A strategy for improving your success rates when implementing lead generation efforts is engaging & powerful personalization.

Personalization is about controlling:

• WHO you talk to (segmentation)
• WHAT you say (templating)
• WHEN you say it (workflows)

The best practice is to combine all the context they have on their customers to send only hyper-personalized messages to their customers.

One of the best email services that we’ve seen data driven marketers use for personalization is Customer.io. They offer liquid templating giving you the power to replace entire words, sentences, phrases, paragraphs, images — anything! This is where you have the ability to implement some powerful personalization and build relationships at scale.

Let’s say you’re selling to people who use CRM services like Salesforce. You can take a generic approach and create a personalized email like:

• Since you use {{ customer.technology_crm }}, I’m sure data transformation is a pain-in-the-ass.

Which becomes:

• Since you use Salesforce, I’m sure data transformation is a pain-in-the-ass.

Or you can use create IF statements that will change the entire message depending on the data found about a prospect.

• Does this prospect have other people in their company in the funnel? You can use that to create a more engaging message.
• Does this person currently use a service that has a different set of issues than Salesforce? You can use that to speak to their pain.
• Has this person been visiting your G2Crowd page recently? You can use that as an insight into the fact that they may need to see some additional credibility pieces like case studies.

You can use that too!

All of this is possible with good data and a flexible email provider.

Wrapping This Up

The best data driven marketers recognize that each of these steps are important for helping both sales and marketing teams reach their full potential. The data opportunities that can help a data-driven marketer succeed in todays world are often times mindblowing and for some…

They can be overwhelming.

Which is why we’ve put together an entire series of blog posts that break down ways you can become a better data-driven marketer in 2019. Check out the Spotted Series and if you ever have questions — Don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re also on Twitter + Linkedin! I’m always up for chatting about B2B marketing and how SaaS companies can use data to create better funnels.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +434,678 people.

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How Data Driven Marketers Should Think About B2B Buying Cycle In 2019 was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That’s the strategy that most SaaS companies embrace when it comes to nurturing their leads.

But your leads can quickly burn out if you hammer them with emails, and the only metrics that tends to increase substantially when you do this is your unsubscribes. That’s not good for anyone.

In this post, I’m going to share with you three simple techniques that can be leveraged to increase the likelihood that your leads are nurtured appropriately and effectively. There’s nothing worst than watching leads slip through your funnel because you didn’t embrace the right efforts.

Here are three simple strategies that can be embraced and don’t lead to failure:

Engaging & Powerful Personalization

The most powerful word you can say to someone is their first name. The second most powerful word depends on the amount of information you know about them and how you can demonstrate a deep personal connection. A strategy for improving your success rates when implementing lead generation efforts is engaging & powerful personalization.

Personalization is about:

• Controlling WHO you talk to (segmentation)
• WHAT you say (templating)
• And WHEN you say it (workflows).

The best practice is to combine all the context they have on their customers to send only hyper-personalized messages to their customers.

More Strategic Engagement Triggers

Once a lead is going through the buying cycle it’s important to give them opportunities to get closer to a sale through multiple avenues. Whether it’s offering them a spot on a webinar that is coming up or offering them a free guide — all of these efforts provide them with the ability to increase their engagement level and for you to trigger a new sequence of activity & engagement.

Let’s say you’re running an educational event for key customers & prospects. You send an email to your lead list hoping that some of them demonstrate interest and order a ticket to attend. Most companies will simply press send on the email and hope that on the other end they are met with sign ups. The best companies use triggers to influence the way in which they engage with different prospects.

For example — You can leverage CRM data to make sure that the messages that go to people at companies with more than 20 people get message that talks about “bringing their team” and people who are solopreneurs are met with messages that are focused around them as individuals. Or… You can trigger a follow up email that differs depending on whether someone clicked the link in the email or if they almost went through the check out for event tickets.

All of these elements can result in better engagement. Better responses. And an overall better lead nurturing program.

Omni-Channel Marketing

Once you have leads engaging with your content it’s time to get creative.

Rather than giving your leads fatigue by delivering emails over and over and over again– mix it up. Supplement your emails by leveraging channels like:

• Live chat (Intercom, Drift)
• In-app personalization (RightMessage, Intellimize)
• Offline gifts (Sendoso, Printfection)
• Social media (Phantombuster)
• Retargeting ads (Rollworks, Influ2)
• Targeted sales outreach (Salesforce, SalesLoft, Outreach)

Diversifying the ways you reach your customer reduces the likelihood of fatigue and increases familiarity with your brand. All of this combines to make it more likely that your leads will become qualified opportunities and move from opportunities into customers.

One of the best ways to set this up is leveraging a tool like Hull to connect user data from website traffic to Hubspot and to Facebook ads manager. Once all of these platforms are talking you can ensure that you have a complete profile of what’s going on with your visitors and ensure that your ads are being served to the right people and emails are being sent at the right time with the right message.

Want more lead generation efforts?

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. There are PLENTY of other strategies you can leverage.

But combining all three of these strategies is a sure-fire way to make your lead nurturing efforts more effective at turning leads into opportunities and opportunities into customers. If you have any questions about these techniques and strategies don’t hesitate to reach out on Twitter @Hull! or connect on LinkedIn.

I’m always up for chatting with data driven marketers about how they can leverage their data to create more effective lead generation efforts.

Want more content like this?

Here’s a collection of great lead generation techniques that some of the best data-driven marketers (at companies like Appcues, Mention & Gorgias) are using to generate relevant and qualified leads:

Five Data-Driven Lead Generation Strategies | Hull

📝 Read this story later in Journal.

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Sales reps (they’re just doing their job) pleading for back-to-back coffee meetings from hundreds of prospected attendees. (Thought experiment: what if everyone said yes? Zinggg!)

But also, what if no one says yes? Conferences are expensive (time out, money spent, expense bill). How can this definitely drive a return if you don’t do the outreach beforehand?

So going to SaaStock in Dublin this year, I wanted to figure out a smarter way of booking meetings. And to make sure we were confident in getting a return, we said we’d aim to get at least three meetings with engaged, best-fit accounts before we’d book travel and tickets.

Last year, I was speaking. It makes a little outreach easier (come along to one’s helpful talk), but it still feels a little cold.

Can we do better than crappy LinkedIn spam….?

Here’s a quick-and-dirty post explaining how we setup our meetings before we booked out SaaStock tickets, flight & hotel.

Finding companies attending SaaStock, that were already engaged with us, but not yet a sales opportunity

Inbound/Outbound is a naive way to think of selling in B2B. Usually, multiple people are involved in buying vs. just one lead. There are multiple paths to purchase, not just one.

This is why account-level thinking and “account-based marketing” is important.

So I wanted to figure out which accounts were highly engaged (viewing pricing, docs, blog posts, case studies, subscribed almost requesting demos) AND were recently engaged.

For most accounts, this isn’t in your leads database. Who takes delight in subscribing to email offers? Often <10% of your website visitors.

So what of the rest?

At Hull, we use Hull for all our tracking and integration. We capture every page view and interaction, and roll those into unified customer profiles — for each person and each company. We have this tracked historically too.

A website visitor appears as an “anonymous visitor”. We have an analytics id but not a name, email or anything else.

But we’re in B2B :)

Using Clearbit Reveal, we can turn our website visitors IP address into a company name. We don’t know who they are at a person-level, but can know who they are at a company level. And this is good enough.

Now I know G2 Crowd, MongoDB, ProfitWell, Algolia, and a ton of other great-fit accounts are all over Hull.io right now

Better still, I can see what they’re interested in. The specific integration pages, the blog posts, the docs..

Finding companies going to SaaStock

It’s hard for conferences to strike the balance between selling their attendee list to attract more sponsors and ticket sales vs. maintaining the attendee experience.

What I like about SaaStock is they give the attendees the choice. If you want to be featured, you can be (and it’s listed on their website). Together with speaker and sponsor lists, we can grab this and look it up.

To speed this up, I used =IMPORTXML in Google Sheets to scrape their listing pages (quick bit of xPath). Then ran a vLookup against our web traffic (with Clearbit Reveal data) to find the companies going who are on your website.

(Post-purchase, I see there’s an app there too. Now to join the dots between accounts attending and accounts engaged their too)

Finding the right accounts to talk to.

Lots of companies attend. Who are engaged AND the right fit?

You should have a clear ideal customer profile that defines your data model. This is what you can use to filter out the right sort of companies.

If you’re a bit more advanced, you can use MadKudu’s scoring & signals to point out the good / very good fit companies. Pair that with our engagement data earlier. Voila!

Now we have a reason to reach out -

Crafting the message

I hate sales reps that don’t put in the effort to personalise. As soon as it’s more than a few, most cut corners.

(In my last role, I personalised 1:1 emails at scale — 250,000+ outreach emails. It’s totally possible if you’re aware of and tackle the caveats).

I didn’t want to do that here. A personalised email, assembled from different snippets, tailored to what I know about them. Add a soft automated follow up email in a sequence.

Here’s what I sent…

(Your sales reps might have plenty to critique and improve here, but you get the gist)

I used a similar technique on LinkedIn too.

Did it work?

Ticket ordered, flight booked!

Conversation then continued…

Turns out contextual outreach like this works really well. Is it scalable? Nope. But what’s the goal? ARR booked, from a sales opportunity, from a meeting, set from targeted outreach.

Some people started asking how we were joining the dots.

… good guess, but not quite ;)

I’m no fan of the fully-automatic sales techniques. A human intervention is the chance to surprise, delight, and join the dots yourself. Let the data bring the context, but the “final assembly” and review should be the person who knows the person and account.

See the Hull Crew at SaaStock }}

Personalization. Attribution. Lead qualification. GDPR compliance. Reporting. Team alignment.

ALL of these are data integration problems.

If you’re at SaaStock, in a scaling SaaS company, and are trying to work out how to tackle all of this headaches together (but you haven’t seen Hull yet? Start with our platform tour + The Complete Guide to Customer Data, I’d love to meet.

Message me on LinkedIn, in the SaaStock app, or on Twitter @edfryed.

Ask our customers too. Teams on Hull that are attending, sponsoring, or speaking at SaaStock include Drift, Appcues, Mention, Spendesk, and more — look out for their team (Appcues has a booth).

And if you want to do all your shopping for the customer data stack of choice, some of our choice partners like Clearbit and MadKudu are attending as well.

How we booked meetings at SaaStock before buying our tickets was originally published in Ship’d by The Hull Crew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a guest post by Intercom Platform Partner Hull.

Hull’s Intercom integration comes after many of our own customers and leads have asked for an Intercom connector. The idea is to share data from Intercom to other tools, and use data elsewhere to upgrade Intercom profiles and segments.

In short, we take the data that sales, marketing and customer-facing people need, and put it in the tools they use. Natively. Quickly. No code required.

The Perfect Partner for Intercom ♥

Intercom is one of those few MarTech products that can totally unite teams around the same set of data. With the various products like Acquire and Engage, it puts marketing, support and sometimes sales on the same page within the same software.

Chances are, if you use multiple Intercom products, you’ve had the “ah ha!” moment using a common profile between different teams — not having multiple different tools, with different data, siloed away somewhere. The same sort of “ah ha!” you might have had internally with something like Dropbox.

But, Intercom isn’t all things to all people - Des Traynor (Intercom’s Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder) writes extensively about how this is a deliberate product strategy at Intercom. Even ‘perfect’ companies who diligently use all of Intercom’s products across their whole organisation need other tools. Whether it’s sending messages through other channels like email, ads or a website, or informing other teams in Salesforce or your analytics tools, your customer data is needed elsewhere too.

Our data shows this — modern businesses depend on multiple services to manage their sales, marketing and customer success. But the data within those tools often remains locked away and unconnected.

Hull combines and then shares a single customer profile across all your tools

Hull starts by connecting your many sources of user actions and profile data and combining them into one profile. For most of these tools, this takes just a few clicks to login and plug them in.

Using all those data points from different services, you can then create advanced segments to sync to all your other tools in real time — including Intercom and Mailchimp lists, Optimizely and Facebook Custom Audiences, and even Slack channels.

You can create segments from properties, events and event properties (like “how long after signup did this happen?” and “where did this action take place?”). That means you can create segments like this:

• Created 2 or more documents
• … between 2 and 5 days after signup
• AND Who have >1 day of their free trial remaining
• AND Who have not ever visited help.yourdomain.com
• AND are subscribed to emails in Intercom, Mailchimp and HubSpot
• AND have not been contacted by sales (as noted in Salesforce)

You can create this segment in Hull (in a similar point-and-click way you do with Intercom) and share every contact profile in that segment (including every property and event on that profile) across to Intercom and all your other tools. Hull will keep this segment and each profile up-to-date in Intercom every time any of the segment’s contacts is updated.

Building the Hull-Intercom Integration

We keep the same focus on flexibility on the technical level — all of our integrations are implemented as microservices. The sales, marketing and customer success teams using customer data need visibility into how that data gets processed — and since every business is different, the ability to extend and change how that process works is important.

To make that possible, all our integrations are available as open source projects on our Hull Github organization. If you need to know in detail how your data is processed, then you can go straight into the code to find out. If there’s a missing feature in our Intercom (or any other) integration, you can fork the repository, deploy it in one click on Heroku or host it anywhere. Alternatively, you can submit a pull request — we will be happy to consider merging it upstream.

The code of our Hull-Intercom integration shows how we work with the Intercom API. Some Hull clients have hundreds of thousands of users, and so our integrations need to be able to push and pull large volumes of customer data quickly and efficiently. Using a combination of single API calls and the Intercom Bulk API calls allows us to do it beautifully — just like Intercom itself 😀

We found the details of the Intercom API presented in a helpful way in their reference documentation. In case we had any questions or doubts, their super friendly support staff were always willing to help and meet our needs.

Connect Intercom to Hull

Your team doesn’t need a developer to setup Hull — no code, no engineering required. You can install the Intercom integration in a few clicks, and start seeing your data into Hull as fast as Intercom’s API will send it.

If you’re interested in this integration, take a look at our Intercom ‘recipes’ here and request a demo so we can walk you through the platform.

If you’d be interested in extending our Hull-Intercom integration, you can fork it on GitHub. Let us know if you have any questions, ideas or feedback. We’d love to support your work with Intercom.

Thanks to the team at Hull! If you want to know more about integrations with Intercom, visit our integrations page or find out more about the Platform Partner program.

Nobel Prize winning Economist Paul Krugman published The Austerity Delusion in The Guardian last week, with similar commentaries “going viral” .

In this two minute takedown, here’s the counterargument — the policies they’re not discussing.

The basic question in this is what type of expansionary fiscal policy to go for (both cost the taxpayer, now or later) — more government spending or lower taxation. Krugman’s article argues for more, not less austere public spending.

The Tories chose tax cuts — the opposite. Cutting top rates for wealthy (read: wealth creators, investors, job creators) and raising tax-free thresholds for people on lower incomes. The big thing this changed was how worthwhile it has been to work (coupled with a cap on welfare benefits) — the quiet retort to the anti-austerity brigade.

There’s evidence, certainly at levels of lower unemployment (like the UK now — we’re around the pre-crises unemployment rate) that lowering taxes does more for growth than government spending. The “multiplier” talked about in this article (my £1 spent is another person’s income. They then spend it… and so on) gets smaller with falling unemployment rates.

I’d say its too late to adopt the alternative (keep taxes higher, spend more) and inappropriate since we’re out of crises and into a recovery. That said, I would strongly support heavy Government investing (borrowing) in supply-side infrastructure like housing construction, roads, rail (HS3 linking up the northern cities, Crossrail) and broadband because that strongly impacts long run growth. These give helpful “£X out for every £1 in” equations.

Krugman mentions taxes 8 times in a 5000 word essay. Economists argue and regularly produce conflicting evidence — I’d love to hear his thoughts on the ‘other end’ of fiscal policy.

You can bamboozle each other about the currency, ‘monetary union without fiscal union’ and pulling numbers out how things can’t or can be afforded. “Scotland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world” isn’t a useful argument — rather, will Scottish people be wealthier or poorer?

Studying Economics at University, I feel it’s worth a crack trying to outline some of the key issues behind the Scottish economy and what matters.

What’s needed (I think) is perhaps a simple framework of questions to ask when hearing about the economy and a place to ask questions. On Medium.com, you can hover over each paragraph with the + and add a comment.

So, here goes…

1. Where is Scottish wealth?

Wealth. Not money, but “stuff people want”. Scotland has plenty of this. For instance;

1. Oil
2. Financial Services
3. Research & Education
4. Exports (whisky and such)

I’m sure you can think of a plenty of others…

2. How much is Scottish wealth worth?

As much as people will pay.

This is where money has its place. The accumulation of money isn’t the point. Accumulating wealth is. Money is just a means of transferring wealth. It means we’re not swapping my garden carrots for your garden beetroots.

The value of money determines how much wealth you can acquire with what you want. The currency determines the value of your money.

3. Where is Scotland’s income?

Your income is someone else’s spending. Your income comes others paying money to acquire wealth — “stuff other people want”.

So, Scotland’s income — what Scots take home, what can get taxed by the Scottish Government and what helps Scots gain wealth themselves — is dependent on other people.

• Scotland’s oil income is dependent on the price of oil at any time, and the supply of oil each month.
• Income from financial services is dependent on that industry staying around.
• Income from Research and Education is dependent on research funding.
• Income from exports is dependent on foreign demand for things you’re wealthy.

4. Will Scottish wealth last?

Oil will run out. But if the oil revenues aren’t spent on servicing the Scottish people — education, health services etc. — but are invested instead, then the wealth will stay on.

But, there will always be demand for financial services, research & education, and Scotland’s exports — so long as Scots are competitive.

The other side of wealth is the debt that’s owed by the United Kingdom and would be owed by Scotland.

5. What might change with independence?

Much of this is speculative — but that uncertainty of money and “how much things are worth” could end up changing the Scottish wealth and “stuff Scots want”.

The financial industry is dependent on stability — people don’t like uncertainty over their savings and pensions. If banks in Scotland can’t offer their clients and customers stability, they’ll have to move their operations elsewhere to stay in business.

The UK’s research funding is currently divided across the UK, but under independence those funds might not given to Scottish Universities.

Exports might suffer from not being worth as much. If the £ weakens with a break up, Scottish businesses earn less for the same price being sold abroad.

Again, much of this is speculative.

But, what would be certain is Scotland would have to deal with its economy on its own, instead balancing against the whole United Kingdom.

The question worth asking is how much better or worse Scotland can weather the inevitable ups-and-downs of its economy, particularly with a large financial sector.

6. What matters about Scotland’s currency?

The currency determines how much things are worth in Scotland.

Under the £, or the €, Scotland wouldn’t have control over the value of their currency. Scotland wouldn’t be able to adjust their interest rates — “the cost of money”.

This means the cost of borrowing money — for businesses, housing etc. — might be wrong. It could be too high in a recession, making housing too expensive for instance, or too low in an economic boom and cause prices to rise too quickly.

7. (Bonus) Are there many, many contradictory views and statistics in the referendum debates.

Yes. Many.