According to the 95-5 Rule, just 5% of buyers are in-market at any given time. Making it even more difficult to capture this 5% is the pace at which B2B software moves. Take the Marketing Technology Landscape supergraphic for example – growing 11% from 2022 to 2023, with the addition of 1,000+ new tools!

For sales and marketing professionals, keeping up with this pace of change while reaching in-market buyers can seem like a constantly moving target, especially in a down economy. With the right data and team in place though, there’s an opportunity for greater alignment to unlock revenue potential.

Identifying the 5% of in-market buyers with the right data

As a seasoned growth marketer, I know that a critical component to B2B marketing and sales success lies in knowing who your future customers are and when they want to be found. This level of intelligence derives from getting your hands on the right data.

Intent data – the signals that provide insights into prospects’ buying intentions – is most commonly used by companies that take an account-based marketing (ABM) approach to sales and marketing. While it’s helpful to have high-velocity sales outreach and a well-oiled marketing machine, intent data and ABM can be layered in with a traditional marketing qualified leads (MQL) waterfall model. Regardless of the MarTech stack in place, intent data can contribute to building a quality pipeline.

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Aligning sales & marketing teams for optimal execution

The right data is of course a key ingredient for sales and marketing effectiveness. Having the right team is another. With so many cooks in the kitchen, misalignment commonly occurs – leading to inefficiencies, delays, and even worse: missed opportunities.

When it comes to optimizing marketing and sales intelligence with intent data, there are a number of instrumental players.  Here are five crucial roles in this team effort and what they should be focused on:

• The Growth / Demand Gen Marketer is responsible for keeping the pipeline pumped with quality leads, connecting with a larger addressable market, and increasing marketing ROI. Insight into their prospects’ intent can help create meaningful content to help influence their purchase decisions. By identifying what stage of the sales funnel they’re in, growth/demand gen marketers can increase MQL to sales-qualified lead (SQL) conversion rates because they’ll be serving the right message at the right time, leading to faster sales cycles. Intent data can also help by focusing budgets on accounts that are most likely to buy.
• The Customer Marketer is responsible for reducing churn while maintaining a strong competitive advantage, and brand trust validated by customer success. Intent data helps the customer marketer better understand customers and create programs that deepen their engagement with the company’s product. With some tools, signals are received in real time, indicating that a customer is researching a competitor. These insights can be leveraged to check in on accounts, reduce churn, and increase stickiness and value from the product.
• The Revenue Operations (RevOps) Leader is responsible for gaining reliable intelligence to drive optimal strategies and playbooks, mapping sales segment targets to market need. RevOps pros can access insights for account and territory mapping, informing playbooks. They can integrate intent signals with their CRM and other sales tools to help prioritize accounts. RevOps pros can also structure a tiering system of “best bet” accounts for sales and marketing to align on.
• The Sales Development Representative (SDR) is responsible for prioritizing higher quality leads, optimizing speed to lead, and consistently hitting SLAs. SDRs can leverage intent to improve the efficacy of their outreach and their team’s ability to source pipeline with in-market accounts. In the case of a large volume of inbound interest, knowing which accounts have high intent will change focus and help SDRs set meetings with more qualified accounts.
• The Business Development Manager (BDM) is responsible for onboarding new reps quickly while continually optimizing outreach and aligning with account executives (AEs). By leveraging intent signals, BDMs can identify in-market accounts, align with AEs, and pursue outreach with a customized, more meaningful approach. This results in a reduced sales cycle, a better experience for prospects, and ultimately, more wins for the revenue organization.

Despite the desire to end “spray and pray” prospecting once and for all, it still exists as a common practice. Marketers and sellers know better, but don’t always have time to slow down – and cutting through the clutter for precise targeting is often easier said than done. But if they want to effectively reach their 5% of in-market buyers, it’s pivotal for sales and marketing teams to take a step back, review their intent data, and define clear roles and responsibilities for executing on it.

At the end of the day, B2B teams have an opportunity to grow revenue by identifying and targeting prospects when they’re ready to buy – but only if their teams have the right plan in place to ensure constant alignment.

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