They say, “Necessity is the mother of invention” and this past year walloped us with the need to innovate like no other we’ve experienced. Our lives fundamentally changed as we started working from our homes and doing just about everything online. The Wall Street Journal reports that we were all spending nearly 30% more time online as of late 2020. That’s 30% more video calls, emails, Googling – and time spent surfing Amazon and other online retailers.
We’re also in the new position of juggling work with our personal lives since they crashed into each other in March 2020. We need increased focus to tune out the child having a video lesson in the next room or the dog begging for a walk.
We recognize this. The here-and-now is taking precedence as uncertainty about the pandemic and the economy linger. In fact, Gartner reports a dramatic shift to companies favoring near-term execution versus 3-to-5 year strategic planning.
As much as we feel this as marketing and sales pros, so do our buyers. Buyer journeys have gone almost entirely digital – and not just for groceries or a new work-from-home desk, but also purchases for their businesses. Technology. Software. Services. And the journey of no two buyers is completely alike.
The answer for sales and marketing teams is to embrace the change. There is no going back – and change is only going to speed up. To remain competitive and thrive in this environment requires that sales and marketing teams come together. We need to become revenue teams, passionately focused on our customers and aligned on bringing growth.
But how does technology rise to the challenge of this need?
Dun & Bradstreet just debuted a new solution.
New Buyer Behavior Brings New Challenges
This shift to digital buyer journeys also comes with an increase in the sheer amount of information put in front of buyers every moment they’re online. Because of the upsurge in digital noise, buyers crave experiences that are personalized and efficient. They also demand more control over their preferences and privacy.
At the same time, marketing and sales teams are sifting through more digital buying signals than ever before. The MarTech and SalesTech landscapes are littered with niche products promising to capture and convert those moments. However, with hundreds of tools to choose from – and walled off from each other – marketing and sales teams are often executing their campaigns in siloed channels.
This means intent signals from one channel aren’t shared with others. Marketers and sales teams only know within a given channel where a buyer is in their journey. And, when someone tells your legal team they never want to be contacted again, teams scramble to update a proliferation of fragmented databases and lists.
The tools that are supposed to help are resulting in a costly and disjointed buying journey, far from the goal of delivering efficient experiences that delight customers and keep them coming back for more.
The challenges we hear from marketing and sales leaders are pretty consistent.
- They need to invest more in their digital strategies, but have a hard time selling new investments to the decision-makers holding the purse strings.
- Buyers are increasingly concerned about privacy, but it’s challenging to manage as regulations shift, and marketers need data about their customers to deliver personalized experiences.
- Marketers want to offer personalization, but it’s difficult to scale their efforts.
- Sales teams want to reach the decision-makers, but they’re competing with a lot of noise.
- Marketing and sales teams want to measure their success, but data is either hard to access or inconsistent and unreliable.
The RevTech Solution
What marketing and sales teams need is a single and full view of buyers. You need to know who is most likely to buy, where they are in their journey across channels, and how to reach them in each unique channel. Then you need to make the whole thing feel like a coordinated and personalized conversation.
This means that once you have your ideal audience identified for a given campaign, you need the ability to target those buyers with all of the tools at your fingertips – across paid social, paid search, email, programmatic ads, your website and sales plays.
And you need to deliver compelling account-based experiences customized for your buyers’ needs, wants, and interests. Just account-based marketing isn’t enough anymore. You have to take it the extra step for real, relevant engagement.
Basically, these teams don’t just need marketing or sales tech. They need revtech – a convergence of martech and sales tech into the kind of foundation that lets revenue teams unify data, build audiences, activate campaigns, personalize engaging experiences, and measure results.
Enter D&B Rev.Up ABX
At Dun & Bradstreet, we believe that revtech is the next evolution that will help modern revenue teams to grow and thrive. We’re delivering the innovation that can give these teams the power to engage the right buyer with personalized and coordinated experiences at every stage of the buying journey – and across all channels.
D&B Rev.Up ABX is a new suite of solutions that meets the growing need for technology that brings together everything a team needs to find and engage the right buyer – customer data, activation, and measurement – in several unique ways.
Single 360⁰ View of Your Buyer
Teams can combine their 1st and 3rd party data with the power of the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud and our industry-leading CDP to achieve a single, full view of buyers and customers in one place. Through the consolidation of accounts, contacts, campaigns, and sales plays, marketing and sales teams can work as one toward the same outcomes – growing revenue.
Activate Anywhere – Or Everywhere
Teams aren’t trapped in a single, enclosed platform like other tech on the market. D&B Rev.Up ABX integrates and works with their existing martech and salestech so that they can activate in one channel, many, or all of them in a consistent and orchestrated way. They gain the power of the Data Cloud and our CDP, while also being able to use tools they already have.
This openness and flexibility helps teams to work efficiently and means they can maximize previous investments and use dollars wisely. You can choose the full power of D&B Rev.Up ABX, or use it just in one channel – ads, email, web, sales plays – and then scale up to achieve a coordinated conversation with buyers everywhere they’re likely to engage.
Personalized, Relevant Engagement
Rev.Up uses AI and advanced modeling to help you deliver experiences that will resonate with the right buyers, based on deep account and individual buyer insights and preferences throughout their journey.
AI-driven models reveal who your ideal buyers are and how they move through their buying journeys, both at an account level and an individual level. With the merging of first-party and third-party data, you can build targeted audiences of most likely buyers and engage with relevance at every stage of their journeys. And your buyers who opt-in can get an experience that is tailored to their needs and interests.
Measure to Optimize the Journey
D&B Rev.Up ABX gives revenue teams the power to gain insights on performance and customer engagement to continuously inform and improve your programs.
It’s Built with Privacy Foremost in Mind
We support CPRA and GDPR compliance and help users track opt-in and opt-out for their customers. In D&B Rev.Up ABX, teams can build an audience once and apply their opt-in or opt-out intent signals across activation channels.
RevTech is the Way Forward
At Dun & Bradstreet, we’re not just envisioning a new solution for others. We’re using it ourselves. Our marketing and sales teams have experienced the same challenges as so many others. We had data and models that lived in silos without connecting, and that made it hard to glean the right insights about our customers. We needed a single source of truth, so we made one.
We ran a pilot program that consolidated our data in D&B Rev.Up ABX, created new models to build our audiences, and activated across channels. With this pilot program, we reached 4,400 new accounts that are the right fit, more than doubled the return on our ad spend, and saw a 58% increase in qualified pipeline year over year.
We’re convinced that revtech is the way forward for sales and marketing growth – because we’ve seen it.
The information provided in articles are suggestions only and based on best practices. Dun & Bradstreet is not liable for the outcome or results of specific programs or tactics. Please contact an attorney or tax professional if you are in need of legal or tax advice.