Leveraging Account Intelligence to Drive Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Outcomes

When we hear marketing and sales jargon like “account intelligence,” our first thought is often “technology.” And sure, technology plays a major role, but what is it in service of? Reaching our customers. Or more specifically, the person behind the customer. As the practice of gathering and analyzing data to provide actionable insights, account intelligence makes reaching these customers possible—leading to a deeper understanding of their needs and preferences to guide key decisions and improve selling outcomes. Hence my topic for the day—leveraging account intelligence to drive marketing, sales, and customer success outcomes.

The Differences in the Data

As I already mentioned, technology provides opportunities to collect tons of insightful information about the folks that engage with our brands. In some cases, it even allows us to better understand the folks that aren’t engaging with us. Here are the categories that make up account intelligence data:

1. Demographic Data: This includes basic information about the accounts, such as their industry, company size, location, and more. It can also include firmographic data, such as the company’s revenue, number of employees, and other organizational characteristics. By understanding this data, you can tailor your messaging and campaigns to speak directly to the unique preferences, challenges, and pain points of each account.

2. Behavioral Data: This category of data provides insights into how customers interact with your brand. This includes information on what they’re buying, how often they’re buying, and even how they interact with your website. By analyzing this data, you can identify patterns and trends in customer behavior, which can help you create targeted campaigns to increase their level of interaction and likelihood of making additional purchases.

3. Psychographic Data: Insights into your customers’ values, interests, and beliefs. By understanding this data, you can tailor your messaging and campaigns to resonate with their values and interests, which can help establish stronger relationships between the company and the account.

4. Geographic Data: Provides intel about the location of your accounts—including its physical address, region, country, and proximity to other key locations. By understanding the geographic distribution of your accounts, you can tailor your messaging and campaigns to speak directly to the unique preferences and challenges of each location.

5. Firmographic Data: Detailed information about the organizational characteristics of your accounts—such as its industry, size, revenue, and number of employees. By analyzing this data, you can gain a better understanding of the composition, structure, and capabilities of each account, which can help you plan your own strategy accordingly.

6. Technographic Data: Information about the installed-base, competitor, and third-party software, hardware, and cloud services used by your accounts. By understanding this data, you can identify potential upsell opportunities and determine which products or services the account, or other accounts like it, frequently purchase together. You can also identify potential weaknesses in your customers’ IT infrastructure, which can help you exploit vulnerabilities to gain a competitive advantage.

Putting The ‘Action’ in Actionable Data

So yeah, there’s a ton of data out there. But it’s only as valuable as the strategy we tie to it—enhancing our marketing, sales, and customer success efforts to achieve our mission goals. Let’s break down some of the ways account intelligence supports all three.

Account Intelligence Empowers Marketing With:

1. Personalized and Align Messaging: Tailor messaging and campaigns to speak directly to the unique preferences, challenges, and pain points of each account—while keeping messaging consistent and targeting the channels that are most effective for accounts.

2. Customer Engagement Campaigns: Understand your customers’ engagement levels with your brand and create targeted campaigns to increase their level of interaction and likelihood of making additional purchases.

3. Account-based Events: Create personalized event experiences through preferred event arenas that resonate with the attendees and help establish stronger relationships between the company and the account.

Account Intelligence Empowers Sales To:

1. Prioritize Your Efforts: Identify hot-lead accounts based on intelligence outputs—such as propensity-to-buy models—and focus your time and resources on high-potential targets most likely to close.

2. Hone Value Proposition: Differentiate yourself from your competitors by allowing account intelligence to drive the tailoring of your pitch and add instant value to the conversation.

3. Improve Bundling: Determine which products or services the account, or other accounts like it, frequently purchase together and offer a bundle deal to increase the value of the sale—increasing the lifetime value of the customer.

Account Intelligence Will Empower Customer Success With:

1. Proactive Outreach + Retention: Identify potential issues or opportunities before they arise. For example, if you notice a customer has been using a particular feature of your product less frequently, you can proactively reach out to offer additional training or support.

2. Identifying At-Risk Accounts: All proactive actions aside, there will always be at-risk activity. Account intelligence can help your teams identify and flag accounts that may be at risk of churning by analyzing data—such as usage patterns, support tickets, and feedback.

3. Upsell Opportunities: Strike at the right time with upsell conversations by leveraging automated product usage alerts and history reports to identify the need for upgraded features with increased adoption.

It’s All About Reaching People

All of the data, technology, and jargon aside—account intelligence is about the person behind the customer.

By gathering intel on your customers and using advanced technology and tools to analyze that data, you can create targeted messaging and campaigns that are more likely to achieve your objectives. We’re all consumers, and thus understand how uncertain our behavioral patterns can be. Account intelligence gives us a chance to get in front of (some of) the uncertainty. And at MODintelechy, we pride ourselves on connecting the dots between relevant account intelligence and the unique strategies that cash in on their value. Reach out today, and we’d be happy to help!