The digital transformation revolution delivered mountains of data for manufacturers — about customers, prospects, marketing engagements, sales outreach, and more.
To deal with this influx of data, manufacturers onboarded CRMs, marketing automation platforms (MAPS), sales engagement platforms (SEPs), and other technologies to store and sort information. But maintaining that data remains a time suck for companies that must devote time to:
- Merging legacy data with new business systems
- Cleaning redundant or inaccurate information
- Updating contact records
- Shuffling data sets between systems in an attempt to keep data synced, and
- Combing through the data for insights
We’ve reached a critical mass of data — a point of true information overload. What’s needed now is intelligence.
Data management activities can take hours. Intelligence can eliminate that effort, freeing your team to selling or crafting campaigns. Intelligence can also remove the burden of sorting through a mountain of data to find a gold nugget. It finds it for you, making your data immediately actionable.
So what is “intelligence,” anyway? It’s the distillation of data into the most important pieces of information that actively show you where your activities can make the most impact. It delivers:
- Real-time data about which buyers are actively searching for solutions like yours, and
- The best path forward for engaging those buyers in ways that will move the needle
The key to unlocking this data is leveraging artificial intelligence that is built to slice through Big Data and find B2B insights that your teams can use to:
- Focus on the right buyers
- Deliver the right messages at the right moment, and
- Automate as much as possible.
Find the Buyers Hiding in the Data Pile
One of the best advantages AI offers is the ability to sort through data to determine trends. By analyzing mountains of data, AI points out certain trends and starts predicting outcomes.
A powerful example of this AI ability is surfacing buyers who are the best fit for your business and likely to buy from you.
Manufacturing buyers are constantly performing activities that reveal when they are looking for products or services like yours.
Those activities include:
- Reading about topics related to products
- Visiting your website
- Comparing you and your competitors
- Reading industry publications
Those activities happen online and are generally anonymous. Even among your own website visitors, 97% won’t fill out a form. That makes it incredibly difficult to understand when a prized account may be researching your business.
AI solves this problem by capturing those activities, analyzing patterns, and tying otherwise anonymous buying signals to specific accounts. It can tell you, in real time, who is interested and if that buyer is a good fit for your business.
How does it know that the buyer is a good fit? By comparing revenue generated by past customers and then looking at the buying journey of your best accounts, AI can identify prospects with similar characteristics and behaviors.
Suggesting Best Next Actions for Your Sales and Marketing
So, AI can help you figure out the best accounts to target. But what about figuring out the best way to engage those prospects?
AI can also suggest the next steps your sellers and marketers should take to start engaging those accounts.
For example: Your AI-powered sales intelligence technology has uncovered a medium-sized parts factory that has been searching for a manufacturer of a specific material that you sell. They’ve visited your product pages, researched your competitors, and read industry publications about the best fit for their needs.
Because you haven’t encountered this account before — or haven’t engaged them in a long time — you don’t have a strong starting point. But your AI assistant can understand what steps are likely to win the business because of its access to historical performance of similar accounts.
Some examples of recommended actions include:
- Engaging a key persona in a department responsible for buying decisions
- Following up on a previous campaign that a buyer engaged with
- Enrolling target contacts in campaigns aligned with their research
Instead of spending time trying to identify the right path forward, AI points you in the right direction. You get to spend more time influencing the deal and less time groping for information about the prospect.
Conclusion
AI is the next evolution in digital transformation. Manufacturers can use this technology to turn piles of data into actionable sales intelligence.
By recognizing the most likely buyers, AI saves you tremendous time and allows you to focus on accounts that are likely to turn into deals.
You’ll also be able to target them with better marketing and stronger consultation thanks to AI-derived insights into the best way to serve your accounts.
Ultimately, AI can help you close more deals, drive more revenue, and make more money.
