Shelfware has become so common in software and IT agreements that we’ve come to accept it and even expect it. This is a sad state of affairs that deals a devastating blow to our wallets (and to society’s moral compass). The cost of shelfware can even act as a barrier to entry for smaller companies and startups. We believe it shouldn’t be that way. We want tools that are easy to implement, adopt and use.

Of course, not all shelfware is collected this way. Other major causes of shelfware include:

1. Companies agree to buy each other’s products but don’t end up using them.
2. Things get put on the shelf after a change in leadership or direction of a project.
3. Implementations that failed or were not as productive as expected (i.e. for whatever reason the solution can’t work within your architecture).

Regardless of how you accumulated your shelfware, it’s still a problem that you’ll want to minimize going forward, especially when it comes to buying a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Tools with easy adoption in the B2B context can bring several benefits, particularly in terms of reducing shelfware. These problems and solutions to shelfware are compounded when choosing a CDP because of the incredibly high business value that a CDP provides. 

Remember, the best CDPs will (1) offer real-time data unification and identity resolution, (2) support buying groups and have buying group expanded capabilities on the roadmap, and (3) use AI for insights, journey mapping, and next best action. CDPs provide much more than all that, but the point is that these three capabilities alone are incredibly valuable and would be critical to helping you find, create and prioritize closeable business for revenue automation. Now, just imagine how devastating it would be if all of those capabilities ended up collecting dust on your digital shelf. How do you make sure that doesn’t happen to you? By choosing a CDP with easy implementation and adoption!

In Forrester’s The B2B Customer Data Platform Landscape, Q3 2023 report, Forrester analysts indicate that B2B CDPs have evolved into an established market that, “push successful vendors to focus on UI improvements and adoption,” explaining that, “Leading B2B CDP vendors understand that a successful sales and marketing tool is one that sellers and marketers can use. Although a B2B CDP deals with complex functions like data management, identification resolution, and journey orchestration, requiring an advanced technical or data science skill set to perform foundational functions creates adoption friction points and limits the tool’s overall efficiency gains, lowering its perceived value.”

What are the advantages of having a CDP that’s easy to adopt?

Increased User Engagement

• More likely to be adopted by users within an organization.
• Higher user engagement leads to increased utilization of the software, reducing the chances of it becoming shelfware.

Faster Onboarding

• Simplified and intuitive tools facilitate quicker onboarding of new users.
• Users are more likely to start using the tool immediately, reducing the likelihood of delayed or incomplete adoption.

Minimized Training Costs

• Require less training for users, saving time and resources.
• Reduced costs make it more feasible for businesses to encourage widespread adoption.

Rapid Time-to-Value

• Allow users to quickly realize the benefits and value of the software.
• Faster time-to-value encourages continued usage and decreases the chances of the tool sitting unused on the shelf.

User Satisfaction

• Tools that are easy to adopt and use contribute to higher user satisfaction.
• Satisfied users are more likely to actively engage with the software, avoiding the scenario where the tool becomes shelfware.

Flexible and Scalable

• Easy adoption tools often have flexible and scalable features, making them more adaptable to different user needs and evolving business requirements.
• Adaptability reduces the likelihood of the tool becoming obsolete and abandoned.

Data-Driven Insights

• Tools with easy adoption often come with built-in analytics and reporting features.
• Organizations can use these insights to track user activity, identify potential roadblocks to adoption, and make informed decisions to enhance usage.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Encourages collaboration across different departments and teams within an organization.
• Increased collaboration leads to a higher likelihood of sustained usage.

Simply put, easily adopted tools in B2B not only help to reduce shelfware but also contribute to improved user engagement, faster onboarding, cost savings, and overall satisfaction. This results in a more successful implementation and utilization of the software within the organization.

Unlike most CDPs available, Leadspace is actually ready to use out of the box and doesn’t require any other purchases to use – no extra partners or implementations. Your salespeople and marketers can immediately access the user-friendly interface to explore your Total Addressable Market (TAM), discover leads/contacts, find lookalike companies, create and activate segments, and leverage our 30+ embedded sources to enrich buyer profiles across hierarchies. With Leadspace, no downloads, coding, or training are necessary to gain significant business insights. To unlock the full potential of our Revenue Radar, of course, you will need to discover your ICP and build models off of your first-party data – luckily, our team is here to walk you through that part of the process.

Don’t believe it’s that easy? Check out Forrester’s scoreboard, The Forrester Wave: B2B Customer Data Platforms, Q4 2023, where Leadspace is the only platform to score a solid 5 out of 5 in Adoption. When you invest in a powerful CDP solution, make sure it doesn’t turn into shelfware. When we say Leadspace is ready to use and that you will use it, we mean it.

The post Easily Adopted CDPs: The Difference Between Success and Shelfware appeared first on Leadspace.

In their CDP Landscape report, Forrester’s analysts explained that, “Although still a fairly new addition to the revenue technology stack, B2B CDPs have made significant strides to set and stabilize their place as the customer data solution. B2B CDPs have evolved into an established market that… pushes successful vendors to focus on UI improvements and adoption. Leading B2B CDP vendors understand that a successful sales and marketing tool is one that sellers and marketers can use. Although a B2B CDP deals with complex functions like data management, identification resolution, and journey orchestration, requiring an advanced technical or data science skill set to perform foundational functions creates adoption friction points and limits the tool’s overall efficiency gains, lowering its perceived value.”

Unlike most CDPs available, Leadspace is actually ready to use out of the box. Your salespeople and marketers can immediately access our user-friendly interface to explore your Total Addressable Market (TAM), discover leads/contacts, find lookalike companies, create and activate segments, and leverage our 30+ embedded sources to enrich buyer profiles across hierarchies. With Leadspace, no downloads, coding, or training are necessary to gain significant business insights. To unlock the full potential of our Revenue Radar, of course, you will need to discover your ICP and build models off of your first-party data – luckily, our team is here to walk you through that part of the process.

Don’t believe it’s that easy? Just ask Forrester! Check out their new wave, The Forrester Wave: B2B Customer Data Platforms, Q4 2023, where Leadspace is one of only two platforms to score a solid 5 out of 5 in Implementation and Professional Services. When we say Leadspace is ready to use, we mean it. 

What are the hallmarks of a best-in-class execution and implementation of a CDP?

• Using the full range of offerings: Data Management, Recommendations (Models/Scoring), and Activations (Salesforce, Marketo, etc.)
• Having very clear process in place already (or in progress)
• Having a team that is able to manage, analyze, are savvy, and can make adjustments based on tests and experience
• Have very clear initiative and goals that a CDP can help with vs. please just fix my messed up data (until it gets messed up again)

Don’t forget to read through Forrester’s entire report to see how Leadspace measures up against leading CDP vendors in every category (pay special attention to Identity Resolution & Profiles). Customer Data Platforms are here to help and we’re here to stay. Hop on the fastest road to revenue—with clicks, not code—today! Talk to us.

The post Leadspace: The CDP That’s Actually Ready to Use appeared first on Leadspace.

What is Identity Resolution?

Identity resolution is quite plainly the ability to resolve from a ton of data signals the identity of a buyer – who they are, who they work for.  It’s the science of connecting the growing volume of person identifiers to a single individual as he or she interacts across channels and devices. In other words, Identity Resolution is the process of accurately associating data (or buying signals) with the specific people who interact with your business. With Identity resolution you can build a 360-degree view of your prospects, customers, and partners. It is the foundation to automating your lead-to-account matching process correctly.

What do Identity Resolution platforms (or CDPs) do?

In B2B sales and marketing it’s important to track buyer behavior and attach those buyers to a company and ultimately a company buying team. Millions of marketing leads lie dormant in marketing systems because they cannot be associated with a company. They can’t be scored on anything other than behavior. They can’t be routed to the right salesperson. Identity resolution platforms aggregate data from numerous buyer touchpoints, enrich that data with great third party information and then unify it with the company’s first party data. All of this data is organized into a unified buyer profile based on a system of rules, helping sales & marketing teams associate buyers to companies and ultimately to access accurate, up-to-date buyer information. This drives accurate segmentation and targeting. Once audiences (buyer segments) are created, sales & marketing teams can activate them in ABM outreach, connect them with various media platforms and evaluate how these groups are responding to their campaigns across multiple touchpoints.

Why is Identity Resolution so important today?

Time kills all deals. Time kills all leads. In today’s economic environment, speed is of the essence.  Leading companies today with strong identity resolution platforms are able to take even the most limited of information in simple web forms, enrich them with great data, match them to a CRM account and route them to the right system or person in minutes. Identity resolution makes your underlying data (and profiles) more trustworthy, improves customer service, enhances operational efficiencies and increases data analytics reliability.

A lot of data goes into building the buyer profiles needed to personalize outreach and prioritize closeable business effectively. Accurately connecting firmographics, demographics, technographics, intent, fit, persona and engagement to a single buyer profile is critical to building the buyer profile we need to target buyers effectively. Identity Resolution and Profiles are the backbone of revenue targeting, and revenue targeting is the backbone of sales and marketing effectiveness.

What are the risks of adopting a solution with a bad Identity Resolution framework?

Worst case scenario, you’ll end up actively creating bad customer/prospect experiences as a result of incomplete and inaccurate personalization based off of bad buyer profiles. The right data attributed to the wrong buyer is ultimately wrong, and bad personalized outreach will make for a worse experience than no personalization at all.

Other common challenges along the way will include:

• Long lead to response times
• Incomplete or duplicate profiles
• Violation of consumer privacy regulations
• Data quality issues
• Fragmented view of customer journey
• Difficulty activating customer data across channels

How do I get THE BEST Identity Resolution framework?

With Leadspace, you can expect the best identity resolution available – just ask Forrester! In their 29-criterion evaluation of B2B customer data platform (CDP) providers, they researched, analyzed and scored the most significant current solutions available. Check out their report, The Forrester Wave: B2B Customer Data Platforms, Q4 2023, where we were the only platform to score a solid 5 out of 5 in Identity Resolution & Profiles.

In this recent wave, Forrester came to find that, “B2B CDPs are using AI to improve audience creation and personalization.” They concluded that B2B CDP customers should seek a solution based on 3 major capabilities:

• Offer real-time data unification and identity resolution.
• Support buying groups and have buying group expanded capabilities on the roadmap. 
• Use AI for insights, journey mapping, and next best action.
  

Leadspace’s perfect Identity Resolution score is extremely significant and at the heart of every B2B GTM platform. While other categories matter, it all starts with Identity Resolution and unified, active profiles. Without a good framework for that, the rest of the capabilities a CDP offers will lean towards being obsolete, as they’re not operating from complete, accurate and active buyer profiles to begin with. So, we’re quite excited with our evaluation. 

Long story short, if you want the absolute best identity resolution and profiles available (hint: you do) contact us today and we’ll show you what makes our buyer profiles better than anyone else’s!

The post Identity Resolution: The Cornerstone of Your B2B Data Strategy appeared first on Leadspace.

Sales & Marketing teams know that targeting customers with incomplete and siloed data is a complex process. Having a single, comprehensive view of your customer data in one place makes it significantly easier to effectively target the right people at the right time with personalized campaigns. Unfortunately, creating active, unified and accurate buyers profiles by hand is extremely cumbersome and error-prone. To overcome these difficulties, companies are beginning to automate the process by implementing Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), which empower sales & marketing teams to seamlessly blend all of their siloed customer data into a single source of truth – developing buyer profiles for people, companies (and even divisions with hierarchies) and accounts. Even better, with certain CDP solutions, those unified profiles are automatically updated in real-time as source data changes and new data is ingested.

A lot of buying signals (data) go into building the buyer profiles that sales & marketing need to successfully target their best customers.

Identity resolution is the backbone of active profiles, and active profiles are the backbone of sales & marketing.

What is Identity Resolution?

Identity resolution is the process of accurately associating data (or buying signals) with each of the specific people who interact with your business. Identity resolution is required to build a 360-degree view of your prospects/buyers, partners, suppliers and more. It is entirely critical to automating and implementing your lead-to-account matching process correctly. In today’s world, profiling is the backbone of any data-driven organization – the stronger your data is, the better your next-best-step decision making process is.

To be successful, companies must be able to accurately identify potential buyers, partners and suppliers throughout their data environments. Consider large on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud and cloud-based data ecosystems. With such a vast amount of complex data volume and variety, how can you be sure that your buyers, partners and suppliers are accurately identified in your systems?

With the right identity resolution and profiling software, you can leverage a centralized system to resolve buyer identities across all of your data and applications to ensure you’re generating the best possible buyer profiles at every hierarchy. Identity resolution makes your underlying data (and profiles) more trustworthy, improves customer service, enhances operational efficiencies and increases data analytics reliability. It can help you detect fraud, identify your best customers, and improve customer contact methods.

A high-quality identity resolution framework will help you at every stage of your data modernization journey, and enables you gain a competitive advantage to enhance business results in challenging areas including:

• Strategic targeting / prioritized outreach
• ICP analytics / TAM analytics / territory planning
• Data-driven decision making
• Revenue Automation
• Effective application of predictive models
• Account-based marketing (ABM)
• Creating account/contact hierarchies
• Lead-to-account matching and lead routing
• CRM clean up and ongoing enrichment
• Customer experience programs
• Data Health Reports
• Financial reporting and forecasting
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Governance and compliance

What are the advantages of having a high-quality identity resolution framework?

✓ Master your conversations and inbound leads in real-time with conversational AI.

Conversational AI is at best a robotic conversation without understanding the person and context.  With identity resolution, you can match, enrich and route leads with the least amount of friction in your funnel – leaner questions, leaner forms. This lets you handle the most formidable tasks such as matching a lead to an account with only a personal email or routing high-value leads to the right sales team or nurture program.

✓ Improve your decision-making capabilities. 

Base your business decisions on complete, accurate, consistent and current identity data. Identify, eliminate and prevent the spread of errors, duplicates or inconsistencies in your customer identity data hub. This ensures accurate buyer intelligence reporting/analysis and empowers you to make better decisions faster with complete, accurate and active customer data.

✓ Improve your risk management and compliance processes. 

Identity resolution supplies your business with reliable, high-quality identity data that you can use to enhance compliance reporting and risk assessment.

✓ Enhance your customer experience.

With a single, more comprehensive and accurate view of your buyers, you can identify prospects in online inquiries and for omni-channel commerce. Identify your best customers. Improve contact methods. Additionally, you can reduce customer turnover and improve customer contact to effectively manage customers through their own unique buyer journeys, ultimately providing them with a more satisfactory experience.

✓ Maximize the value of your technology investments.

Identity resolution facilitates the anticipated value of your most strategic business initiatives. A powerful data-matching engine enables you to cross-reference siloed data sets and create unique identities across multiple records. So you can trust that your business applications and systems contain high-quality identity data at every step.

✓ Handle your most challenging use cases in real-time.

With identity resolution, you can search, match and manage identity data records from multiple countries across multiple hierarchies. Enable your salespeople to immediately see up-to-date buying signals (including intent) associated with each new lead as they come in for quicker outreach. This lets you handle the most formidable tasks –  even using different alphabets and handling complex, multi-language identity data.

Having the best identity resolution framework means you can achieve all of these advantages faster and better than your competitors can. So, how do you find the best identity resolution and unified profiles framework? Back in 2021, Forrester’s evaluation of 14 leading B2B CDP companies, considering several factors to compare each CDPs’ Identity Resolution and unified profiles framework. Forrester started by looking at each CDPs’ identity resolution and profiling services and if the process was user-configurable. They wanted to know if (and how) the solutions create unified profiles at the account, buying group, and contact level. Finally, Forrester looked at each solution’s ability to create a persistent store of unified profiles and if they offer B2B Revenue Waterfall enablement. 

In that 2021 report, Forrester differentiated Leadspace as a leader in Identity Resolution & Unified Profiles. But, Forrester evaluated leading CDPs again this year… This time around, they scored Leadspace to be THE leader in Identity Resolution and Profiles! Leadspace was the only CDP evaluated in The Forrester Wave: B2B Customer Data Platforms, Q4 2023 to score a perfect 5 out of 5 in this category.

Seeing as the effectiveness of data-driven decisions depend on the quality of the underlying data (unified buyer profiles), Leadspace’s perfect score in this category is extremely significant. While other categories matter, it all starts with Identity Resolution and unified, active profiles. Without a good framework for that, the rest of the capabilities a CDP offers will lean towards being obsolete, as they’re not operating from complete, accurate and active buyer profiles to begin with. So, we’re quite excited with our evaluation. Let’s dive deeper into Leadspace’s Identity Resolution & Unified Profiles framework.

Our identity resolution framework is based on deterministic/probabilistic identifiers (IDs). Unique/non-unique company and person IDs are used in clustering algorithms to unify profiles and validate/dedupe data. Unification logic is customer-configurable for business needs. For scalability, we use probabilistic IDs, PII and anonymous, to complement unique IDs for matching. Probabilistic clustering leverages decision trees (XGBoost) and other algorithms. 

Clients that deploy the B2B Revenue Waterfall leverage us to support execution on the model. In order to optimize for accuracy, we use deterministic IDs for following types of unique Person and Company data. Our Person Unique Identifiers include Workmail, Webmail, Social Profile, Phone, and Cookie/Device ID, and our Company Unique Identifiers include Domain, ID/DUNS, Social Profile, Phone, and IP.

We provide identifiers at different levels of the company hierarchy so you have the ability to unify and create single records/groupings at the global HQ level, Country HQ level, Business HQ level and/or at specific regional/site locations. Account unification solutions are built to support the operational structure of organizations to identify buying centers and teams for customers’ offerings as well as the legal structure. For example, our operational hierarchies can be mapped to D&B DUNs legal based hierarchies to provide this interoperable framework across functions and teams. These hierarchies link profiles together and persist across systems. Events and behaviors then update and inform those profiles. 

With Leadspace, you can expect the best identity resolution available – just ask Forrester. Check out The Forrester Wave: B2B Customer Data Platforms, Q4 2023, where we were the only platform to score a solid 5 out of 5 in identity resolution and unified profiles. To learn more about how you can achieve best-in-class B2B profiles that you can trust, backed by the best identity resolution available (all while cutting your data spend in half), schedule your meeting today. Seamlessly create complete, accurate B2B buyer profiles that are pre-blended and active with unrivaled, embedded third-party data for people, companies and accounts. Eliminate your buyer data silos and accelerate the success of your sales & marketing campaigns with Leadspace’s CDP for best-in-class B2B buyer profiles you can bet your business on!

The post Do You Really Need the Best Identity Resolution & Active Profiles Available? appeared first on Leadspace.

Forrester Research evaluated 14 B2B Customer Data Platforms, considering 10 key capabilities, and published their findings in The Forrester New Wave: B2B Standalone CDPs, Q4, 2021. Leadspace was among those evaluated, and ranked as a leader in nearly every category!

• Data Integration & Unification
• Data Sources & Types
• Identity Resolution & Unified Profiles
• Activation & Alerts
• Application Integrations
• Decisioning
• Reporting
• Execution Roadmap
• Market Approach
• Product Vision

We assure you that we are still providing the best-in-class buyer profiles and predictive AI models for the fastest TAM-to-opportunity pipeline available. For more on how we performed check out our respective blog on each capability. We look forward to proving ourselves by cutting your data spend in half, eliminating your data silos, and driving your sales & marketing teams to closeable business faster than any of our competitors can. Contact us today!

The post Leadspace and Forrester New Wave™ appeared first on Leadspace.

It takes a village of data to populate all the fields that our sales & marketing teams need to effectively understand our buyers. Painting the whole picture requires Firmographics, Demographics, Technographics, First-Party Data, Third-Party Data and Revenue Signals (Fit, Intent, Persona Models). Getting all of these can cost an arm and a leg when bought separately, and then blending them all together is a whole new monster.

Legacy approaches to building B2B buyer profiles are riddled with obstacles. Buying data from multiple vendors gives you siloed data from the start. Then you need to manually unify, dedupe and update the data as it comes in. You’ll encounter blank cells and outdated information – so expect stagnant profiles down the line. Data blending and account matching is incredibly cumbersome and error-prone, and you’ll have to guess which source to trust when there’s a discrepancy between data sources. You’d make different databases for Sales & Marketing based on their respective needs because it’s quicker, but now they’re operating from different data which becomes a pain to update consistently as it changes over time. It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to support all opportunities within an account at scale. There’s also the issue of operational skills and training across vendors/sources. Finally you’ll encounter Intent & Technographic signals that are not integrated into CRM systems, which will be a mess to do yourself… 

Simply put, the traditional approach to building accurate, complete, active B2B buyer profiles is a much messier process than it sounds. If you’ve built B2B buyer profiles with account hierarchies at scale, you know what I’m talking about. So, what’s the solution? How can we automate or streamline this cumbersome process without breaking the bank? Believe it or not, we can actually address all of these issues and cut your data spend in half at the same time. To learn how, check out our webinar, How to Improve Your Prospect Database and Save 50% Annually, where Amish Sheth, VP, Solutions Engineering at Leadspace, explains how to easily achieve best-in-class B2B buyer profiles while cutting your annual data spend by 50% at the same time.

In his webinar, Amish takes us through the underlying goals of B2B sales and marketers, the challenges with their respective databases, strategies, the role of AI, use cases, value benefits, how Leadspace can help, and a Q&A at the end. If you want to truly understand the difference between good, great, and best-in-class practices, Amish is the guy to show you.

So, stop wasting time and money buying siloed data and attempting to blend it. Learn how you can replace your current data vendors with a single source of pre-blended, up-to-date third-party data. Get pre-built B2B buyer profiles for people and companies at all account hierarchies. See how you can spend less time (and money) building your buyer profiles, and more time prioritizing and pursuing them. Your competitors are also looking to leverage AI to facilitate closeable business – so don’t miss the boat, check out the webinar.

The post Stop Spending Money on Siloed Data. Get Pre-Blended 3rd-Party Data for Half the Cost! appeared first on Leadspace.

Unfortunately, building robust buyer profiles is a complex, cumbersome process – and it usually isn’t cheap. As we all know, buying signals come in many shapes and from many sources. Which information do we trust when there’s a discrepancy between two or more sources? Buying data from multiple vendors, unifying it, updating it and manually checking its accuracy is an extensive process. At minimum, we’ll be making one-time purchases of firmographic, technographic, and intent data separately. Even once we have all the data in our hands, putting it to use is a significant challenge. Preparing and blending all that data from different sources by hand is an extensive, time-consuming process. By the time we’ve put it all together, a portion of the data will already be out of date. The process is riddled with human error, blank cells, and outdated information. Traditional demand and ABM approaches leave us with siloed data, stagnant profiles, and the inability to support all opportunities within an account at scale.

In the olden days of marketing – aka ten years ago – it used to be okay to do an annual data update because there were less acquisitions and job changes. That’s not the case today. People and companies change constantly. Companies make acquisitions, people change jobs, and intentions are dynamic. This means your buyer’s data changes every day – but does your database reflect that? Is the data you use to drive your business as accurate as the day you procured it? Data decay is an issue that every company must face at some point. Email marketing databases, for example, naturally degrade by approximately 23% every year according to Hubspot. While the degree of decay is not yet fully understood, our response to it can greatly mitigate the effects the decay will have on our organizations’ successful use of data to drive decisions. Operating from accurate, complete data is critical to making successful data-driven decisions. Yes, your data will decay over time, but how you deal with its decay will determine its value to your company’s overall success in our increasingly data-centric economy. Ultimately, legacy approaches to building B2B buyer profiles are error-prone, expensive, and time consuming.

There’s an old saying in business consultation, “fast, cheap and good – pick any two.” So, what’s the solution? Pick all three with Leadspace Profiling. With Leadspace Profiling, you can leverage unrivaled third-party account and person data, from 30+ leading B2B data sources (70 million companies, 240 million buying centers, 280 million contacts). Leadspace will automatically ingest and unify first- and third-party data for account context and prioritization. We’ll automatically generate full account profiles including hierarchies, firmographics, technographics, weekly intent, and mobile contacts. This includes weighted cross signal analysis so you can trust the data is being pulled from the most accurate source. Generally, our customers save over 50% on data costs through a combination of eliminating data purchases and better leveraging their existing data service vendors, and can automate the cumbersome, error-prone processes most data users endure today. Here’s how we recommend you do it with Leadspace Profiling.

Align your Sales & Marketing Teams with Account & Contact Profiles.

Step #1: Enrich both your CRM and Marketing Automation Platforms in hours. Use our enrichment APIs to directly connect to our award-winning B2B customer data platform.

Step #2: Unify your first- and third-party profiles with Leadspace. Our award-winning Customer Data Platform integrates, normalizes and matches profiles with existing accounts.

Step #3: Enrich your Inbound lead flow in real-time, with unrivaled third-party data coverage. Leadspace goes far beyond basic firmographic data like company size, industry and revenue, to include more granular information like installed technologies, account intent, contact/company expertise, and much more.

Step #4: Discover new Account and Contact Profiles with the Leadspace Studio to create new sales and marketing campaign segments — aligned to your TAM and territories.

Organize the right leads & contacts within those accounts.

Step #1: Enrich your lead & contact data with unrivaled third-party data coverage, for a complete view of every individual person within your target accounts. Leadspace goes far beyond basic person-level data like job title, to include highly useful information like persona-based scores, specific job roles & responsibilities, what technologies they use, expertise, specialties, and much more.

Step #2: Match leads to accounts with Leadspace lead-to-account matching. (Our unrivaled data coverage means our match consistently outperforms point solutions that rely solely on questionable first-party data for matching, like email address domains only.)

Step #3: Create High Quality Buyer Profile Segments, for comprehensive coverage of the key decision-makers and influencers within each account. Use AI to create customized personas, or select from Leadspace’s vast persona library. Like our data, Leadspace custom personas aren’t based on superficial criteria like job titles— they’re built by analyzing the “DNA” of your best customers, which includes a vast range of criteria.

Profile Better: Guided Operations. (Identity Resolution, Lead-to-Account Matching)

• Utilize our B2B data unification and buying expertise to build closeable unified profiles. We’ve critically evaluated, selected and curated the industry’s best third-party company and people data sources in the world. Then we unify these profiles with your first-party data to fuel your business and your B2B Buyer Graph.
• Add the personal touch to your unified profiles. Create the best buyer profiles at the individual level by using personal demographics and buying behaviors from social signals and interests to assign personas instead of nondescript job titles.
• Route better with the industry’s best lead-to-account matching from Leadspace. Our AI-powered engine enriches and scores leads in real time with firmographic, hierarchy, intent and propensity data to intelligently fuel the most sophisticated lead management scenarios.

Leverage the Leadspace CDP to enrich, unify and deduplicate your data.

Leadspace supports the maintenance of your data quality. Leadspace can unify multiple siloed CRM and Marketing Automation instances into a single dataset, removing the guesswork that may be necessary to do this manually – effectively consolidating and tackling multiple complex processes with a simple point-and-click function. Unification allows you to verify, dedupe, enrich and cleanse CRM & Marketing Automation data with firmographics, and demographic data, and even leverage AI intent and propensity models for true data-driven insights. Additionally, you can upload those records directly into your CRM or Marketing Automation tool to ensure consistency in data across your entire MarTech landscape.

To put it bluntly, we know you’re always looking for a way to do more with less, and we’d like to offer you a way to do a lot more with a lot less. If you give us 30 minutes of your time, we’ll show you how we can replace all of your current data vendors for less than half of the price you’re spending on them all today. We are sure that we can do all of this for 50% of what you currently spend your on firmographic, technographic, and intent data alone:

• Firmographic, technographic, intent data
• 30+ embedded 3rd-party sources
• Multi-source unification & curation
• Full ICP & TAM discovery and exploration
• Profiles for people, companies & buying centers
• Cross-signal analysis with confidence scores
• Active profiles – continuously updated
• Data Health Reports and TAM analytics
• Best Lead-to-Account Matching
• Segment activation and deployment
• Full enrichment across 200+ fields
• Full CRM and MAP integrations

The breadth of our embedded third-party data is best-in-class. Our data comes pre-blended and is automatically updated. No more siloed data! Your sales, marketing and product teams can all operate in alignment off of the same data. When someone switches jobs or a company is acquired, everyone will see it be reflected in their respective buyer profiles. So, if you’re sick of spending a fortune on data and you want something much better, let’s talk. If you’d like to learn more about Leadspace Profiling, take a look at the Leadspace product sheet to see how Leadspace’s CDP solution can modernize and optimize your B2B marketing approach.

The post Getting Robbed by Data Vendors? Get Best-in-Class B2B Buyer Profiles for 50% Less! appeared first on Leadspace.

About Leadspace

Leadspace Drive^TM is a top Customer Data Platform (CDP) solution which specializes in building best-in-class dynamic B2B buyer profiles across your Total Addressable Market (TAM) at the person, company, and buying center level – all at the lowest possible cost with Leadspace Profiling. Industry leading companies buy us for our robust data graph of 30+ of the top data sources pre-embedded into our system – but they love us for our models! Our Revenue Radar^TM applies unique, multifaceted AI models for company Fit, Intent, and Persona across your dynamic buyer profiles to score them and determine which of them are the right companies, then which of them are the ready companies, and then which of their people are the right people. Add in your engagement scores to see which of those right people are the ready people, and you know who the absolute best customers are for competitive strategic investment. 

With Revenue Radar^TM our four-signal AI targeting narrows the target by focusing on companies with a 2X, 6X or even 12X chance of closing. Leadspace takes the guesswork out of B2B revenue for companies like Microsoft, Salesforce and Gong by targeting the fewest number of companies with the highest odds of closeable business. 

More than 25 thousand sales and marketing professionals use the Leadspace Drive platform to build and operationalize their total addressable market (TAM), identify their ideal customer profile (ICP) and optimize their campaigns with fit, intent and persona models. Sales and marketing teams use Leadspace to give them a competitive edge so they know who their best customers are, understand their whitespace opportunities, and can dramatically improve the effectiveness of their sales and marketing programs.

Our Awards

Americas Sales Intelligence: Enterprise High Performer – Fall 2023

Enterprise Sales Intelligence: High Performer – Fall 2023

Customer Data Platform: High Performer – Fall 2023

Americas Customer Data Platform: Enterprise High Performer – Fall 2023

Enterprise Customer Data Platform: High Performer – Fall 2023

Enterprise Lead Scoring: High Performer – Fall 2023

Enterprise Lead Scoring: Easiest To Do Business With – Fall 2023

Enterprise Lead Scoring: Best Support – Fall 2023

Users Love Us – Fall 2023

*This report is based on ratings by business professionals. Leadspace received user reviews and responses for each of the relationship-related questions to qualify for inclusion in the results index.

What Customers are Saying About Us

G2 reviewers recognize Leadspace for its superior solution with notable recent feedback from enterprise customers including 

• Leadspace helps with ABM motion.
• With Leadspace analytics I discovered new opportunities.
• Allows me to find the most detailed, accurate and consolidated buyer profile details.

“Our customers are the most important part of our business. Hearing from them validates that Leadspace products are unrivaled in the industry,” said Marge Breya, President of Leadspace. “With Leadspace, sales and marketing teams prioritize and laser target the accounts and buyers who are both most likely and ready to buy their product. Our customers see results.”

Conclusion

Simply put, it’s no surprise that Leadspace is earning awards! Having achieved so much as such a small company within our industry, we owe it all to our product. Our product already speaks for itself, but we can’t wait to show the world what we’re cooking up next. None of our competitors have the secret sauce that Leadspace does, and with more and more people starting to recognize and experience our product, we fully expect to see game-changing exponential growth in the near future. Our goal is to be the single source of truth for B2B sales and marketing teams. We’re so proud of our team for all that Leadspace has accomplished, and we cannot wait to see how many badges we earn this time next year! 

Of course, we especially want to thank the people over at G2 for all of their hard work, wonderful platform, great communication, and this amazing opportunity they’ve given us to evaluate our product and provide such valuable feedback. We look forward to using it to improve our product. Thanks, G2!

To sum it all up, not everyone wants or needs your product – but you can find the ones who do with Leadspace (and you can trust that we have the best support and are the easiest to do business with) – just ask G2.

To learn more about what Leadspace users have to say or leave a review, visit G2’s Leadspace review page. For more information about Leadspace, please visit www.leadspace.com, connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Come see what makes Leadspace Drive the fastest road to revenue today.

The post Leadspace Earned 9 Awards by G2 Across Multiple Categories in Fall 2023 Report! appeared first on Leadspace.

The battle between sales and marketing has always been about this opportunity cost balance. When is a lead qualified enough to put money into the sales development team qualifying it and the sales team pursuing it? Sophisticated demand teams get this balance right by constantly improving the mix of their engagement scoring models to include activity (often called first party intent), third party intent and predictive scoring to pre-weight scoring for the right accounts and buyers.

Let’s talk about why opportunity cost is so important and why it’s at the heart of the sales and marketing “is it a good lead” frustration. Let’s take two cases – the high velocity sales team and the high-value sales team.  

Imagine a selling market where minutes really count where enriching, scoring and routing the lead within 2-3 minutes makes the difference between winning or losing to the competition. It’s typically a single-buyer buying team with a deal size less than a few thousands per month and a sales cycle that is in days or weeks. The high-velocity sales team is all about getting the right contact information and the strongest signals possible to time their pursuit. They are looking to close a high volume of deals and they typically can’t afford to spend a lot of time in the qualification process. Step one is all about lead enrichment – are you routing the lead to the right territory and is there the right phone or email or LinkedIn contact information so that they can quickly engage. Step two is the scoring – enough information so that they can quickly get the most compelling product value proposition in front of that prospect. And they might only have one or two times to make that pitch. Scoring must be tuned to arm that sales person with this – can they tell which product that’s most likely to be sold, what are the intent topics is that account showing for that product, which buyer persona do they fit so that the value prop can be tuned and have they attended any webinars, downloaded content, or even just raised their hand to speak to a sales person. Time and precision is of the essence for these velocity teams.  

Now let’s turn to look at a different selling market where the deal size can be in the hundreds of thousands to millions and the sales rep might only be able to pursuit 5-10 deals every quarter. These deals have a long selling cycle – months to sometimes years. They have complex buying teams – often 7-10 influencers. This value sales rep is thinking about how to qualify and align the value of the company’s portfolio to that lead. They are thinking about whether the account is the right kind of company that has successfully bought their product and whether that person is influential enough to go after.  Who are all the buyers who might be influential in the process. And are they engaged? Is this a customer already so that they are already pre-qualified in the procurement system. The scoring model here needs to focus not so much on timing but on the odds of that business being closable. Propensity to buy and intent are important to get those odds right at the account level and figure out which product is the right way in. It might take into account the buying team in addition to the individual buyer engagement into the scoring model. Are all of the buying team personas engaged? 

In both the high-value and high-velocity selling motions, getting profile enrichment right is key. And enrichment happens not only in all of the core systems or data warehouses, it happens on the inbound lead funnel and in the real-time web interactions. And it’s always a combination of first and third party data in blended company and person profiles. Profile enrichment starts with regularly updating, cleaning and validating data, removing duplicates, and standardizing information. The profiles must take into account information not only from the RevTech stack but also the company’s operational systems, and financial systems. Building trusted profiles is only half the battle – the next step is to integrate them across the Customer Relationship Management (CRMs) and Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) to ensure sales and marketing are operating from the same, active data in pursuit of the same goal. Integrating systems provides a unified view of customer information and interactions, resulting in several significant advantages.

The next step is the scoring. As invaluable as engagement scores are, they’re not particularly useful by themselves. You know someone has engaged with your content, but… does their company match your ICP? Has their company shown intent for your type of product? Does that person have the buying power or persona necessary to buy from you? Knowing someone has engaged with your content doesn’t mean you start dumping your sales & marketing resources in pursuit of that person’s business. You need to qualify them first. There are simply too many unknowns that need to be known before you allocate your valuable, limited sales and marketing resources. We don’t want to waste precious time and money chasing down leads that aren’t likely to close in the first place, so how do we determine which of the high-engagement scoring people are most likely to close? How do we prioritize them?

So let’s talk about what should be in the scoring model. Clearly the activity-based scoring is critical. The prospect is revealing their interests and intent through the webinars/events they are intending, their engagement in the social channel, the content that they are downloading on websites and the frequency by which they are doing it. More points are given for higher value activity. Points are taken away if the activity isn’t recent. The activity part of scoring is always about the direct pulse of activity. Activity engagement isn’t enough however when we are talking about opportunity cost. If two leads do the same things, which should you prioritize first for sales?

Sophisticated marketing teams add or subtract points with predictive signals as well. If the account has a high propensity to buy, 50 points might be added to the score. As the intent level increases at the account level, 10 points might be added per level. The buyer persona fit might be used to give negative points for students or interns and higher points for prospects who show certain skills and interests. Weighting the engagement activity scoring with predictive scoring is the tie breaker. It means that the prospect who fits all the predictive criteria might only have to do half or a quarter of the activities before they are routed to sales.

The Weighted Engagement Scoring Model  

So let’s go through the elements of the scoring models to identify the right company, the ready company, the right person, and the ready person. Engagement scores represent the ready person. But again, the ready person doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the right person from the right and ready company. We need to correctly weigh and apply our scoring models in the right order.  So what should be in a Weighted Engagement Scoring Model?

1. Company Fit or Propensity to Buy Model – The Right Account: An AI-model built from your historical conversion data set (opportunities). Applies scoring that indicates a company and/or person’s likelihood to be a good target buyer. Use cases include propensity to buy, inbound lead conversion, higher LTV, upsell/cross-sell, etc.

2. Company Intent Model – the Right Time: A weekly set of customized signals that monitors your accounts for intent (third-party and/or first-party), and applies scoring based on the level of intent activity specific to a customers’ products/category.

3. Buyer Persona Model – the Right Person: An AI-model based either on standard personas, or your custom persona profiles, to 1) score the existing database and inbound leads based on their closest persona fit (including skills and other identifiers), and 2) find net-new contacts within accounts that lack the right buyers using persona targeting.

4. Buyer Engagement Model – the Right time: Your external first-party scoring model that is built through either simple point scoring for engagement in a marketing program or interaction with website content. It is typically implemented within the Marketing Automation Platform (Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Hubspot, etc.) and the higher the score the more engaged the buyer.

The sales teams are very familiar with weighted models. Their revenue forecasts are all about applying a weighted average of how far a deal is in the selling process, what’s the urgency that the sponsor is applying, and how complex is the procurement process. It’s time for marketing to move beyond simple engagement scoring models based on activities to Weighted Engagement Scoring Models that are a combination of predictive signals and the engagement activity. In conclusion, the Weighted Engagement Scoring Model is the answer to striking the right balance between sales and marketing investment. By applying Fit, Intent, and Persona models, then bringing in your first-party engagement scores, you can determine which opportunities to focus on, then get the right campaigns in front of the right targets at the right times – as efficiently as possible. Then the Weighted Engagement Scoring Model makes the decision of when to route that lead to sales for the most effective and efficient selling. It’s all about finding and creating closeable business. Get the full Revenue Radar Guide to see how Leadspace can add the AI targeting to your scoring model.

The post Are You Wasting Your Salespeople’s Time? Apply Weighted Engagement Scores in Marketing appeared first on Leadspace.

Early personalization and nurture efforts leveraged job titles alone to segment content campaigns or to bucket inbound lead nurtures or cadences. But job titles in the B2B space are not standardized, change frequently, and often give no real insight into the seniority, buying power or even specific functions the person serves within their company. On the sales side, reps will search around in their sales list vendor for companies they know and guess at who would be good to reach out to, by eyeballing job titles. Often job titles are incorrect and not up to date. As a result, persona-based marketing and sales campaigns/outreach can be off base. 

So where do personas fit into modern sales and marketing approaches? After you’ve determined the right companies with a propensity or “Fit” model (based on firmographics, demographics, and technographics), and determined which of those are ready companies with intent models, the third step is figuring out who are the right people to pursue within those companies by scoring their personas. Is their current role at the company in line with the personas of your historical successes? Does their persona typically make decisions to buy your type of product or service? Who does have the purchasing decision power at the company? Who might see the value in your product and be able to bring it up the chain of command quickly and effectively? Simply put, are they the right person to invest sales and marketing resources into?

A persona model uses AI-analytics to determine the best people for you to target. Persona models leverage standard and/or custom-built persona profiles to score the existing database and inbound leads based on how well they match your product’s buyer or buying team and historical success. Persona models enable you to actively find net-new contacts within accounts and set your sights on the right buyers for your product. Instead of just relying on a potentially noisey/generic signal like job title, persona models enable you to identify and target your key buyers using a much wider range of insights such as title, level, dept, job functions, and technology expertise. Additionally, applying exclusion logic and adding weights to individual signals enables you to optimize your model, prioritize the right buyers, and ensure you’re reaching out to them with the right message that’s tailored to them.

A persona score is essentially a “fit” score, but at the person-level. With a persona scoring model, you can hone-in on the department, level, right job title, role or expertise to go after by identifying the best contact in a company for your type of product.

With Leadspace’s Persona models, each buyer profile within your database is assigned a Persona score (0-100), where a higher score represents a closer match to the level, skills, department and buying center of that profile to your ideal persona. Leadspace includes over 80 off-the-shelf personas in the Leadspace Persona Library that span across all departments and job functions in the most popular B2B buying centers. Custom persona models can also be built and leveraged for specific buyer use cases.

With Leadspace Personas, you can create buying team scoring and net-new campaign audience members for digital campaigns. With our persona-matching scores, it’s easy to match content accordingly to optimize targeted nurture programs and content syndication at every step in the buyer journey. They can also be used to score entire databases to categorize prospects, leads and contacts into actionable content campaigns. When integrated into Salesforce or Dynamics, sales professionals can quickly assess the best persona from ambiguous job titles to understand the best lead or contact to pursue in an account.

Key Features & Use Cases for Persona Scoring

• Route inbound leads directly to sales or specific nurturing streams based on Persona.
• Recommended content stream by persona, or product-best offering typical in cross/up-sell scenarios.
• Keep your database current as job, skill or expertise changes with up-to-date categorization that leverages personal demographics and buying behaviors from social signals and interests to mathematically assign personas beyond nondescript job titles.
• Laser-focus campaign segment members by leveraging our 80 off-the-shelf personas as well as your own custom personas.
• Match your Marketo, Pardot or Hubspot scores against your Salesforce prospects and accounts, then apply engagement scoring on top of your persona scoring to identify the best engaged contacts/prospects to go after (lowering regional sales and marketing list buys).

But remember, persona scoring is a relatively new technology that isn’t offered by most lead scoring model providers yet. However, if your Customer Data Platform (CDP) does leverage AI-powered persona scoring models, you can finally add the personal touch that’s necessary to achieve unified, best-in-class, active buyer profiles at scale. This means active buyer profiles that automatically populate with personal demographics and buying behaviors from social signals and interests to statistically assign personas instead of nondescript job titles. Match the right people and optimize your marketing and sales engagement by leveraging a combination of predictive AI models to accurately prioritize the top 25% of leads that deliver 60-80% of your business. After you’ve achieved persona scores, start creating and activating precision nurture segments based on engagement scores and other account or buyer personalization insights to further optimize your conversion rates.

In short, do not rely on job titles to make persona-based decisions because they’re not standardized, and there’s so much more that goes into someone’s persona than their job title. Automating the classification and weighting of role, capabilities, expertise, and buying power is a lifesaver when compared with manually integrating all of that information into your buyer profiles, then ranking and regularly updating them. You can automate the process by implementing a CDP with AI scoring models to quickly and effectively identify and prioritize the right people to invest your sales and marketing resources in! For more information about using AI persona scoring models to prioritize your most closeable buyers, get the Leadspace Revenue Radar Guide here.

The post AI Persona Scoring – When Job Title Guesswork Doesn’t Work appeared first on Leadspace.