How to Calculate the ROI on Your B2B Data Investment

It’s time to freshen up your B2B marketing strategy. How do we know? Because few companies take the time to intentionally update their B2B marketing strategy. This decision ends up costing them in the long run.

We will lead you through the process of calculating the return on investment (ROI) of your current B2B marketing strategy. Once you have calculated your current ROI, we’ll help you find a strategy to help you increase your ROI and meet your sales goals every quarter.

What is ROI?

But first, what is ROI? And what can calculating ROI tell you about your business strategy?

In the simplest terms, ROI is the ratio between the amount of money you spend on a specific investment and the amount of money that the investment makes your company.

In the case of B2B marketing, we are talking about mROI, which stands for marketing return on investment. According to Harvard Business Review, mROI is a difficult ROI to calculate because it is tough to tell how much your company benefitted from one tactic over another. This is why many companies have a place in their online purchasing to ask their customers how they found the company.

When is ROI a Useful Metric?

Although ROI sounds straightforward, it is not always a useful metric. As any businessperson will tell you, in the early days of a business, business people find themselves spending much more on marketing than in their later years. This means that your ROI will not be as strong in the early days of your business.

Whenever you calculate ROI, you need to have a threshold of how high ROI should be to continue with a tactic. Early on in a business’s life, that threshold should be lower.

ROI is also difficult to use when it comes to investments that take a long time to payout. Some investments will not have a positive impact on your company’s finances for years.

That being said, B2B data is an investment that impacts your company soon after you make it. For this reason, ROI is a useful metric to use when you want to look at the impact of a B2B data purchase on your business. Hence, evaluating ROI becomes crucial within the research process for M&A dealmakers, providing insights into the effectiveness of B2B data in driving strategic decisions and deal outcomes.

How to Calculate ROI Manually

To fully understand what ROI can tell you about your business, you need to learn how ROI is calculated. There are lots of great ROI calculator tools that mean you will never have to make this calculation by hand, but you’ll want to understand the theory behind it.

Calculating ROI means subtracting the cost of the investment from the financial value gained from the investment. Then, divide this value by the cost of the investment to find ROI. This can be represented by the equation:

ROI=(Financial value gained-cost of investment)Cost of investment

When you are making this calculation, there are a lot of values that are easy to forget in calculating the financial value gained, according to a Harvard Business Review article. Be careful and make sure that you are including the value of human time in your calculations.

Tools that Calculate ROI

Now, if you do not want to calculate the ROI for your data investment by hand, you try an ROI calculation tool.

SalesIntel ROI Calculator

The SalesIntel ROI calculator has been designed to help your team understand the difference between the ROI from your current lead database and the ROI from SalesIntel’s contact data.

Simply plug in your team size, the average salary per sales rep, the hours that each rep spends researching on average, and the expected revenue contributions per rep, and we will take it from there.

Many of our clients were initially intimidated by the cost of investing in better sales data, but when they saw the difference that our data could make in their ROI, they decided to invest.

ROI-Based B2B Marketing Strategies

When examining B2B marketing strategies, it is important to use ROI to gauge the best choices. There are a few tried and true strategies that generally boost mROI if implemented correctly.

These strategies include

Database marketing
Using better B2B data
Increasing speed to lead
Growing your funnel with new tools

Let’s go over these strategies one by one and talk about how they can improve your ROI. Remember, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to increasing ROI. This is partly because different markets will react differently to different strategies. Furthermore, companies of different sizes and ages will have varying success with each approach.

Increase ROI with Database Marketing

According to BloomTools, Database Marketing is a fantastic way to increase your ROI. Database marketing is a flexible B2B marketing strategy that allows you to segment your market and reach out to different clients with different offers.

Database marketing is an organized marketing technique that gives your company the chance to “experiment” with different marketing strategies on prospect segments before investing in one specific strategy for all clients.

Beyond providing better service to clients, database marketing will also boost your ROI by saving time. Your sales reps will spend less time on research per client, which will lead to better ROI outcomes.

Calculating ROI for Database Marketing

If you switch to database marketing (or already use database marketing) you will need to know how to calculate its ROI. When you do this calculation, start by thinking about your ROI goals.

What is a realistic goal for your company’s ROI on this specific campaign? Is it a campaign that should have quick results, or do you need to wait patiently to see exactly how the campaign will impact your sales? Are you factoring in continued subscription or upsell chances?

Next, you should decide what your KPIs (key performance indicators) for this campaign will be. Will you look at the net profit? Average sale volume? Leads generated?

Finally, you should calculate your ROI from the campaign using the formula we discussed above. When you have your ROI, you can combine it with the KPIs to determine how successful the campaign has been so far.

Finding Accurate B2B Data

Although database marketing on its own can boost ROI, it becomes a stronger B2B marketing strategy when it is combined with great data. But, what makes data great?

Some say having ideal data means having a steady stream of new leads. At SalesIntel, we have a somewhat different approach. Although the volume of leads is important, the most important thing that makes data great is accuracy.

Accurate data is a gamechanger for many businesses’ ROI. There are a few ways you can ensure you are working with accurate data. The best way is to calculate the ROI on your current data and then compare that ROI to the ROI of competitors or the ROI you could achieve with a different source. You want to focus on the outcomes of the data instead of the input volume.

Another way to check the accuracy of your data is by doing a deep dive into your data source. This deep dive can help you figure out whether you can trust your B2B data. If your data is AI-verified, it is probably not as accurate as data that has been verified by a real human being.

The Value of Human-Verified Data

Human verified data is more accurate than AI-verified data. Why is this? Because although AI can churn out a higher volume of data points, humans are much better at checking the data quality. Human-verified data also generally comes from companies focused on quality over quantity.

SalesIntel is a great example of this difference in values. SalesIntel promises data at least 95% accurate, which is a higher value than AI-verified data can provide.

Increasing Speed-To-Lead

Another way that your company can increase ROI on their data investment is by increasing your company’s speed-to-lead. For those unfamiliar with this term, speed-to-lead refers to the time it takes for a company to respond to a lead in its funnel. You can increase speed-to-lead in a variety of ways including:

Give your sales team better data, which will mean they are spending less time verifying data and more time responding to leads.
Invest in software that will ensure that you are only responding to qualified leads and real people.
Automate more steps of your funnel so that leads are served by AI for the beginning of their customer experience.

Growing Your Funnel With Tools

Another B2B marketing strategy that you can use to increase your data ROI is growing your sales funnel. Your sales funnel is the process that a client moves through as they go from being a prospect to being a client.

By growing your funnel, you cast a larger net to collect more prospects. While you could do this by targeting anyone and everyone, there are also tools that you can use to grow your funnel precisely and increase your return on investment.

SalesIntel Tools For Increasing ROI

SalesIntel has a suite of tools that you can use to increase your ROI across marketing and sales.

Buyer Intent Data

Intent data will help you increase your ROI by showing you who is already in the market for your solution. Buyer intent data is focused on identifying purchase intent signals from a business across the internet. This makes it a revolutionary alternative to traditional contact data because it will help you sell to buyers already in the market for your solution.

Data Enrichment

Let’s say that you have data, but you feel dubious about its quality. SalesIntel offers data enrichment solution to help you improve the quality of your data without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. SalesIntel’s additional data enrichment services add onto your SalesIntel subscription to take your pre-existing data and comb through it, searching for errors and omissions. Then, it replaces the stale data with fresh data.

VisitorIntel

SalesIntel’s VisitorIntel tool helps put company names to your website visitors. Once a visitor hits your site, VisitorIntel takes over and works to learn as much as possible about different businesses interested in your site.

The ultimate goal of VisitorIntel is to determine high-priority prospects already visiting your site and put your team in touch with decision-makers from those companies.

Research on Demand

As we mentioned above, SalesIntel provides our customers with human-verified data. But what if we don’t have the specific data human-verified a customer needs? This is where the Research on Demand tool comes in.

With Research on Demand, our clients can mark any data that they need to be verified, and a member of SalesIntel’s team will verify it for you. This is a unique service, and it completely changes the game in terms of quickly launching specific sales and marketing campaigns.

As you calculate the return on your B2B data and search for B2B marketing strategies, remember, you are not alone. SalesIntel is ready with a team of sales experts who are ready to help you find the tools and data you need.