MarketBridge Insider #6
Turning Insights Into Action, Best B2B List Providers
Issue #6, November 6th, 2018
It’s getting harder and harder for large enterprises to get insights into market quickly. There’s always a start-up out there who will do what it takes to get to market first, claim first mover advantage, and make growth harder to come by. Large companies have tremendous advantages in funding, scale, and analytic power—but by the time everyone is agreed on what to do, it’s too late. In this month’s MarketBridge Insider, we look at three approaches to solving this speed-to-market challenge.
- Almost every company measures mentions, likes, negative PR, and so forth with digital listening, but these same companies often struggle to surface actionable insights and get them in to market. In “How Mature is Your Market Intelligence Model?”, Lane Douglas looks at best practices for wringing actionable insights out of digital listening—quickly.
- In “The Promise of the Marketing Data Platform”, Andy Hasselwander looks at the challenge of organizing sales and marketing data for quick, scalable model building and reporting, and proposes an alternative approach to PEPM software and data lakes. By building a loosely coupled, agile marketing data platform based on a “platonic ideal” of sales and marketing data, data scientists and managers can get models deployed faster, moving the needle in weeks, not months (or even years.)
- In many cases, brilliant insights and great analytical efforts never see the light of day because analytics isn’t seen as a product to get in market, but rather as a nice-to-have that gets lost in meetings and PowerPoint slides. In “The Last Mile Problem”, Bill Sheldon walks through a seven-step process for how getting truly actionable insights out of marketing analytics efforts.
Finally, we’d love your help with some research we are conducting on the best B2B marketing list providers out there. We are polling our audience of sales and marketing decision makers on what lists work best, by industry, company size, and list purpose (email, tele, or direct mail.)
Enjoy!
Tim Furey,
MarketBridge CEO
How Mature is Your Market Intelligence Model?
Most people assume that social or digital listening is about looking for spikes, or finding that “one nugget of insight” that will really wow their respective audience. But as companies build towards a more mature model of intelligence, they actually reverse that paradigm and begin looking for continuity of findings as opposed to one-off flashes. The best companies develop a scoring rubric that notes prolonged insight strength, typically including inputs like the number of mentions per month, the level of engagement per month, or simply the occurrence of the insight.
Read the full article and download the PPT summary >
The Promise of the Marketing Data Platform
After twenty years of continuous innovation, marketing and sales technology is ubiquitous, extremely powerful, and very expensive. A typical sales and marketing organization spends upwards of 25% of its budget on technology, broadly defined as the software, data, and infrastructure to communicate, track, optimize, and analyze go-to-market activities. Compounding the difficulty of integrating the data exhaust of multiple platforms is the never-ending march of increasing PEPM (per employee, per month) software licensing agreements for software vendors. Fortunately, even though sales and marketing technology proliferates wildly, the basic data elements of sales and marketing do not. New data elements are certainly added, but the basic data structures of understanding stimulus, response, prospects, customers, companies, and transactions remain wonderfully constant.
Read the full article and download the white paper >
The Last Mile Problem: 7 Steps to Closing the Insights-to-Outcomes Gap
Without focus and investment on last mile adoption of analytical models and insights, companies are severely limiting the return on their data and analytics investments. McKinsey estimates that analytic leaders spend more than 50% of their analytics budget on solving these activation issues. Best-in-class companies start with a very clear roadmap of what business issues they must improve with analytics – and in what order. This is what we call an Applied Analytics Strategy, and it needs to be driven down from the top of the organization.
MarketBridge Research: The Best B2B Marketing List Providers
We are trying to understand the best B2B lists for acquiring new customers. We are interested in lists used to conduct email, direct mail, and telephone campaigns, across small business to Large Enterprise. We are asking B2B marketers to rate the effectiveness, accuracy, breadth, and cost of various list providers. Once the data are collected, we will report back to survey respondents with the overall results. Where possible, we will provide crosstabs of results by industry and targeted company size. This survey is 100% free, as are the results.
Take the survey and sign up to get the results >
