This is the first in a series of three articles on how you go about deciding what data you need – and how you get it. We will begin, appropriately enough, with what a start-up is likely to want then move up to a more established company and finally to a large corporation.
I was at a seminar last week in New York on global market entry, and I asked one of the panellists what his experience had been of reaching out to a target audience in an international market ahead of a physical presence. This has the benefit of gaining awareness, testing the offer with relatively low risk and picking off some low-hanging fruit in a soft launch. The panellist wisely pointed out that, except perhaps in the case of a pure e-commerce operation, customers would soon expect at least some kind of support infrastructure in the same time zone. A beach head landing is by definition temporary – it moves inland or is swept back into the sea.
I reflected a bit on this and came to the (rather obvious) conclusion that the best marketing and data in the world will not be of any use if they outrun your capacity to sell to and then support customers post-sale. That, I think is one of the benefits of the current focus on account-based sales and marketing – what I called in an earlier article account based growth. The discipline forces you to concentrate on organisations most likely to buy your product or service sooner rather than later.
This discipline is even more important for start-ups where resources are limited, it’s hard to scale and where the initial selling is often done by the founders.
The golden rule for new businesses is therefore is to think about the quality not the quantity of data that will support your marketing efforts. This may seem another obvious comment – but once a business develops revenue momentum it sometimes makes sense to follow the ‘long tail’ of prospects. But start-ups can seldom afford to play the numbers game. For B2B, you need references, case studies and advocates – not just one-off buyers. For B2C you need to pay close attention to testing segments for future analysis and roll-out.
So, where and how do you start? Divide the task into two:
Phase 1: Decide who you need to engage with in line with your strategy for growth and produce a detailed data requirements document.
Go about it like this.
a. Go back and look at your business plan. Whether you are just starting out on your own or have received one or more rounds of seed money, you will have in writing some degree of market planning and will certainly have thought very carefully about your future customer base and where the prospects will come from.
b. Take a first stab at segmenting what we might call the near-term addressable market – say, for six months to a year out. I don’t mean at this stage producing a brief for a data provider or an internal marketing resource with details of size, decision makers, demographics or firmographics. Look at it in the form of a pyramid first of all:
Prime targets may be just your immediate contacts or network where you have had an early indication of a sale. Or, in B2C, a wider group where you know your offer will be compelling. Initial engagement marketing will be aimed at sectors which will need a more protracted marketing effort, including the use of digital campaigns, SEO and inbound marketing techniques to develop engagement, but where sales may be expected to come within the first year. Second phase prospects are targets that can be developed as you take on learning from the first two groups and budget increases.
c. Evaluate the probable sales cycle and effort needed to engage with each group and match back to your revenue plan, cash flow and budget.
d. Look at buyer personas within the pyramid. Who is going to buy?
e. Now it’s time to develop a scoped-out data requirements document. It may well be a sub-set of the overall marketing plan, because it will also need to inform your inbound marketing – the people you want to attract to your website. This should reflect all the discovery work and thinking that you have done in the earlier stages. It will be based on your marketing budget, sales cycle, resources and overall timeframe. Risk factors, competitive threats and the economic outlook all play a part in this. The document should include as full target descriptions as you can manage:
- For B2B, account firmographics, decision maker and influencer demographics based on personas, competitive products they may be using and all the contact detail you may need.
- For B2C, personas are key. But bake in the variable you will need to test or track.
Phase 2: Getting the start-ups data.
These days, the problem is not so much struggling to find data options as which to choose. In a way, that makes it more complicated. There are far fewer ‘source agnostic’ data experts than even five years ago, so it is harder to simply turn over data sourcing to an impartial third party. But if your data requirements are especially complex, an experienced data consultant may be a good decision. Here are some other approaches:
B2B
As I noted before, in B2B particularly it is important to build in-depth data. Look at four key attributes:
- Foundation data – core firmographics (size, region, SIC code or other industry classification) can be supplied by a number of reputable firms in the US and Europe. It is harder in parts of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
- Account rich data. Some suppliers also provide information on what products and solutions are ‘installed’ at an account, often at the site level.
- Contacts. You may need to build these out through calling and LinkedIn is definitely an option here on a small scale. And there are a lot of online tools to research company hierarchies and full contact details like email and phone. Some suppliers will also track visitors to your website – and append company details and potential contacts.
- Intent and behaviour. There are multiple sources for buyer intent – either at account or contact level. But use these carefully and also triangulate with other variables. By definition, these intents are based on more common purchase, are expensive and sometimes are very general. Start-ups usually offer niche products and solutions.
B2C
You will probably be relying much more than B2B marketers on an inbound approach that draws prospects to your website. You will also need to be careful in many countries that you abide by increasingly stringent privacy regulations. So, the emphasis in B2C will be less on data acquisition than data capture of customers and prospects that will guide future digital strategy on Facebook and elsewhere. Obtain as many variables as you can – and build in to your testing. Google Analytics and other tools are relatively cheap to install and simple to use.
Read also:
How data drives 5 key steps to maximising account-based growth
Can better use of data revive outbound telemarketing as a revenue accelerator?