CMO Perspective: Using B2B Data & Data Types for Audience Segmentation

Selling your product and services to everyone is unrealistic. So, how do you make the best use of your time? Market segmentation helps you find and accurately target your customers. 

Audience segmentation is to B2B businesses what dessert is like to your favorite meal. 

You can succeed without it, but why would you? The results are always going to be better. Done well, it can cause up to 5X improvements in your sales and marketing results. But you need a secret ingredient: data. 

What types of data should I use? 

Every marketer and sales manager wants market segmentation to paint a more realistic image of their customer base, but they’re not quite sure where to begin. 

Segmentation is usually done at the account level. You need a large quantity of detail about the account, and you need that data on a lot of accounts. 

There are four main B2B data types to look at –

Each data type has its benefits, but when you’re able to leverage each efficiently, that’s when you’ll truly see results in your B2B marketing strategies. 

Firmographic Data

Firmographic segmentation is the grouping of B2B accounts based on their corporate characteristics. It groups customers based on data such as business size (by the number of employees or annual revenue), company location (whether it’s San Francisco or rural Kentucky), industry (by NAICS or SIC), or job title (manager, VP, CEO), etc. 

Targeting all B2B companies with generic messaging will not work. But still, many try.  To maximize your chances of generating qualified leads, focus on who actually buys your product and apply firmographic filters from there.  At a minimum, you may want to consider:

• Industry: Promoting the same content to every industry is a waste of effort and resources. Fish where the fish are biting. 
• Revenue: You want to sell to certain companies who can reasonably afford what you’re selling.

Size: Is your product ideal for small entrepreneurs, growing mid-size firms, or established enterprises?

Technographic Data

Technographic data provides the technology stack of an organization. What kind of hardware and applications are they using? What tools and technologies are there? How do they incorporate and use their different systems and platforms?

Many companies rely on their technology stack to drive growth, competitiveness, customer relationships, and more — regardless of their industry. If you’re in the B2B market, it’s worth learning how technology works with your prospects. 

By integrating technographic data into account profiling activities, you can obtain a more reliable portrayal of the Total Addressable Market (TAM). Once you know the technology stack of your prospects, you can tailor your marketing campaigns for the initial touch. You maximize the likelihood of a response since it demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to consider their current pain points.

Intent Data

Intent data not only helps you expand your reach but also gives you data that you likely can’t collect yourself. Your team can uncover more in-market customers, score leads with greater precision, and reshape your B2B marketing campaign with customized messaging.

Research shows about 10% of buyers are actively buying or want to buy at any time. So, if you have a target list of 1,000 accounts, that means 100 of them are immediate opportunities. The question is, which ones? 

This is where intent data comes into play. You can reasonably forecast what a company wants to buy if you know what they are actively looking for and researching. The more a prospect examines a topic, the more likely they are to be considerating a purchase in that category.

Contact Data

Especially with the “great reshuffle” that has happened in the workforce in recent years, people have been changing their titles, positions, and companies at an increasing rate. It’s hard to keep track! 

When someone leaves a position or gets promoted, and the new person is relevant to your campaign, you’d want to know and include them, right? You want accurate contact data that doesn’t constantly decay and ruin your campaigns before they begin. While it may not seem like a big deal in the short term, those invalid contacts add up and can affect your campaign performance. 

Another thing to consider, do you have all the information you need? Did your company go to a trade show and get names and emails but no phone numbers? Thankfully, data enrichment is an option from B2B data providers to get all the missing data points you need. Never let bad or missing data hold your team back.

How do I use all this data?

How do you utilize this data for your B2B marketing strategies?

It’s easy– account-based marketing (ABM). The ability to deliver higher win rates by concentrating the time and resources on fewer ideal-fit accounts yields better, faster results.

The ABM process itself is relatively simple:

• Build a target list of accounts based on your ICP 
• Identify the decision-makers to build persona-based target lists
• Create custom messaging for those personas
• Select your marketing channels
• Start your outreach

Account-based marketing is all about relationships. Access to quality B2B data can become the most important contributor to engaging and building relationships with the right prospects. 

ABM requires technographic and firmographic data. Adding intent data to the mix can expand your reach and reshape your campaign. You must use every possible avenue to collect more information about your prospects to take a laser-focused approach, so the more data available, the better.

Building Your Lists

The first two steps in ABM require building segmented lists. 

First, you have to nail down your ICP. A well-defined, quantifiable ICP will keep the leads coming in like a well-oiled machine. Where does your solution win most often? Break it down. 

For example:

At Company X, we sell best to:

Location: US Market

Size: 15 – 50 employees

Revenue: $5M+

Industry: Information Technology

Tech: Salesforce and G-Suite

Then your team can prioritize the leads that fit into these parameters, knowing these accounts are the most successful at converting.

The next step is to identify the users you’re going to connect to inside those accounts, and the different types of content you’re going to send them. If you offer payroll software, you’ll want to speak with decision-makers in Human Resources or People Operations. No sense in reaching out to the Sales team for this one. 

Once you have your targets, building the list comes easily. You can generate your list in a tool like SalesIntel in just a few clicks. Your team now has a targeted, segmented list to be exported to your CRM.

Start implementing!

When your team has access to accurate B2B data, their marketing efforts can see up to a 5X improvement. Your team can master the art of segmenting and selling in the B2B landscape with firmographic, technographic, intent, and contact data.

Tools like SalesIntel make this easy and seamless. With all the aforementioned data built-in, it’s a one-stop shop for teams looking to efficiently and effectively focus their marketing efforts. You can run ABM campaigns at scale with over 90 million contacts at over 20 million companies. We enable teams to find and reach the right decision-makers at the right accounts with more than 100 million email addresses and 54 million mobile phone numbers. If your team is looking for accurate, actionable data, give us a shot.