Is Your B2B Sales Follow-Up Just All About The Benjamins?

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

Digital content marketing delivers an abundance of actionable data on buyers, both prospects and current customers.

This body of data is built on a common foundation of information that boils down to a person who has engaged with a piece of marketing content. If you’ve invested in the right technology or work with media partners who have, you know this person’s name, where they work, their title, geographic location, the content they accessed, and their contact information.

And therein lies the problem. Sales teams, and marketers too, fixate on the contact information like a heat-seeking missile.

This spurs us to operate on the flawed assumption that the faster we reach out to a contact with our pitch, the better the chances are to make a sale. This kind of speed often kills the sale.

The real value of the body of data that is generated from digital content marketing is gained when we see and analyze it all.

Here is a simple five-step model that will improve prospect follow-ups and increase buyer interest and engagement. 

1. Organize the data. Segment your engagement data so that it makes sense to you. For example, organize all the contacts by company, titles, content engagement history.  
2. Search for significance. For example, look for multiple engagements from different people in the same company or the same people engaging with multiple pieces of content.
3. More deeply analyze the significance you found. Look at this smaller group to determine location, titles, dates & times they accessed the content, and the content they accessed.
4. Interpret what it means. Sometimes this is referred to as intent data and we falsely believe that algorithms or AI fueled technology can make this decision for us. It can help but it cannot do the job alone. This takes a human being to ask “so what” questions of the engagement: who, what, where, when, and then draw conclusions about the why.  
5. Follow up appropriately. Personalize your follow-up outreach to align with “why” you think your content was accessed. For example, if a group of folks from the same company all read an article on how to qualify a new pharmaceutical fill-finish line, send them a part two article on the same topic followed by a case study. Then contact those who read more than one article in the sequence and offer help.