Katie Bullard
Chief Growth Officer, DiscoverOrg

In 2017, better data drives marketing and sales ROI. However, when your B2B data decays at 70% year-on-year, how should CMOs justify investing in data management platforms (DMPs) and expect their CRMs to run accurately each quarter? Apart from data collection and management, it is equally important to cleanse data regularly. DiscoverOrg’s Marketo Connector puts your data cleansing and enrichment on auto-pilot , enabling Marketo users to build and leverage the world’s most integrated data platform.
We spoke to Katie Bullard, Chief Growth Officer, DiscoverOrg to understand how the marketing and sales intelligence platform delivers accurate insights based on automated and human-based intelligence to 4,000 sales and marketing teams allows brands to create 1:1 interaction with customers..

MTS: Tell us about your role at DiscoverOrg and how you got here.

Katie Bullard: I’m the Chief Growth Officer for DiscoverOrg, which means I’m responsible for identifying, prioritizing, and capitalizing on the biggest growth oppurtunities for the business from a product, partnership, and marketing perspective. My path has definitely not been linear! I started out in finance, city government, and urban planning/real estate strategy, and ended up in technology about 8 years ago. I think those experiences have really rounded out my ability to wear an enterprise hat, no matter the role I’m in.

MTS: Help us understand the concept of “Clean Data”. How can marketers benefit from “Clean Data” provided via Marketo Connector?

Katie Bullard: Data is literally the foundation of any successful marketing program. Even if you have the best content in the world, if you don’t have the right data to identify your top prospects and engage with them with the right message at the right time, you will never be able to contribute effectively to the company’s revenue goals. B2B data decays at a rate of up to 70% per year, so if you have a marketing database with 100,000 prospects, only 30,000 of those contacts will have the correct title, email, company, etc…within 12 months if you don’t have a process for keeping that data clean and accurate. Not only that, but dirty data leads to incredible challenges for the entire organization. When bad data ruins a company’s reputation and lands a domain on blacklists, marketers put growth for the entire company in jeopardy.

MTS: How can Marketo users improve the performance of their ABM campaigns with the new application?

Katie Bullard: The enhanced Connector supports effective ABM in 3 primary ways:

Step 1: The first step for marketers building a strong ABM program is to identify their ideal customer profile (ICP.)  Most companies are missing a lot of the data they need to do this effectively, and the DiscoverOrg-Marketo connector allows them to quickly append new and accurate data points from DiscoverOrg that they may not have already in their Marketo database–meaning their ICP analysis is more accurate and they can more quickly find lookalike prospects. Our team of researchers is gathering more than 70 data points on every company in our database at any given point in time–from standard firmographic info to technographics to department budget details and buying intent data.

Step 2: Additionally, no company stays the same –if they do, they probably aren’t a great prospect for you! When companies grow, when buying signals change, when technologies change, etc…you should have a process to stay on top of that and monitor and re-prioritize accounts appropriately and the Connector makes that process easier as data is automatically cleansed, enriched, and appended.

Step 3: Finally, ABM might be all about accounts, but at the end of the day, we are still engaging with and connecting with individual people at those target accounts. Most B2B sales include 3-6 decision-makers and influencers, so marketers need to identify the key buyer personas and contacts that are most important in your buying process. With the Connector, you can not only pull in the right contacts based on your unique criteria, but you can keep the data up-to-date automatically.

MTS: In 2017, B2B marketing and sales technologies are closing the gap on Data science and Customer Experience. How is DiscoverOrg poised to make this happen?

Katie Bullard: Successful marketing and sales teams have always figured out how to balance art and science. It’s not just about the number of conversations or demos, and it’s also not just about telling a beautiful story. It’s both. When it comes to sales and marketing technologies, the same is true, and DiscoverOrg has the right model to blend the human element and the science element. How? For DiscoverOrg, that means we will leverage advances in data science to scale and grow our database and buying signals exponentially faster than we’ve ever done before. The efficiencies that process delivers allows our research team to spend more time gathering the kind of buying insights that can’t be scraped off the web and validating the data we are gathering—guaranteeing a level of accuracy that no other data providers can promise. But just delivering great data isn’t enough for a great customer experience. Our customers want to know how, when, and where to use the data without having to jump between a million different systems. Our product roadmap is focused on building intelligent tools around the data that surface the right buyer at the right account at the right time and with the right message—all pushed directly into whatever CRM, marketing automation, or sales acceleration tool our customer is using.

MTS: Would the RainKing acquisition herald the trend of “singular automation” platforms for ABM and sales?

Katie Bullard: The continued convergence of data, predictive intelligence, and sales enablement technologies will continue to advance. This acquisition heralds the trend that has always been core to DiscoverOrg: that sales and marketing teams prefer quality over quantity and in the era of ABM, when it is so important to deeply understand the buying centers and characteristics of your target accounts, it’s no longer enough to just buy “lists” for your database. You need in-depth data like org charts, buying signals, technographics—and all of that verified by our in-house research team.

MTS: How do you see sales intelligence platforms evolving with the coming of age of data science and analytics?

Katie Bullard: It’s not enough to just provide data!

We have to make it easy for sales and marketing teams to consume that data in very meaningful ways that make them that much better at prospecting. I think we will see significant advances within sales intelligence systems as continuous feedback loops between multiple systems make it easy to proactively surface data that is both cleaner and more relevant.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Katie.
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