A strong, efficient B2B sales pipeline is crucial for the growth and success of a business because it helps ensure a steady stream of revenue and customer acquisition. It enables businesses to forecast sales and plan accordingly while reducing the risk of revenue fluctuations. And in this economic environment especially, it needs to be done efficiently.
Every business wants to create a predictable and consistent sales pipeline. This is directly proportional to how accurately you define your ideal customer profile (ICP).
SalesIntel’s CMO, James Lamberti, recently shared his real-world example of how SalesIntel is drinking its own champagne and leveraging GTM Partner’s revolutionary, eight-pillar Go-To-Market Operating System (GTM OS) to double marketing efficiency in under 6 months.
“It’s inspiring to see our innovative Go-to-Market Operating System deployed so quickly and with so much success,” said Sangram Vajre, bestselling co-author of MOVE and CEO and Co-Founder of GTM Partners. “SalesIntel is truly drinking their own champagne by using their own B2B account, intent, and contact intelligence to power the GTM work they’re doing using our frameworks. Good quality data can make or break a GTM strategy and execution. Other revenue teams can learn from SalesIntel’s success and follow their lead.”
Here’s an empowering and amazing SalesIntel success story.
The Challenge
While SalesIntel has been quickly growing since its launch in 2018, but wanted to increase efficiencies in its marketing and sales activities to grow more rapidly than before. James realized SalesIntel shared a common challenge with many B2B organizations, the ‘go-to-market challenge.’ After attending a GTM Partners Roadshow event, James quickly organized all internal teams (sales, marketing, success, etc.) into a demand center. This demand center would collaborate on tackling the go-to-market challenge and create plans for reaching its goals.
James summarized this process to us, “Two weeks after the event using the GTM Operating System framework, I delivered our six-month ramp-up marketing plan to the company and collaborated with the entire organization to make it happen.
Now, six months later, I’m thrilled with the progress we’ve seen. It’s empowering and amazing. We’re either winning or getting better, and the GTM OS has us aligned on how to do so.”
The Solution: Drinking Our Own Champagne
James explained how he used a four-step process to enhance pipeline efficiency at SalesIntel.
1. Defining the Ideal Customer Profile
SalesIntel followed a TAM/SAM/SOM approach to best understand where they have the greatest growth opportunity. By dividing its CRM into six segments, leveraging internal information, and using its own account data offering, SalesIntel re-defined and quantified its ideal customer profile (ICP).
“What we learned is that our total addressable market, 2023 is a $792 million market. That’s a huge market. We’ve got plenty of work to do. If I can grab 10% of that this year, that’s $79 million.”
The refined ICP definition gave the SalesIntel go-to-market teams a shared definition of a quality account and lead, down to the prospect’s technology. This has helped them create better internal efficiencies for managing inbound and outbound leads as well.
“Obviously, we’ll still get leads from outside our relevant market. The question is, how do you resource around that? What do you do when that happens? For us, we understand very clearly how to resource accounts that are not ideal fits for us at this time.”
2. Surfacing Accounts in Market Today
Knowing who’s in the market is vital. Once James and the SalesIntel team identified their addressable market, they leveraged their own intent data, news data, and website visitor data to provide actionable context for who sales and marketing teams should target in active campaigns.
“That $792 million is still a big net to cast, but it’s one of the things that we’ve done very effectively. Knowing that only 15% of your entire market is ready to buy at one time, this gave us a better target of $135 million in market right now.”
One of SalesIntel’s best-performing campaigns leverages its intent and technographic data sets. Using their ICP as a foundation, James and team added additional layers of technographics to locate ideal buyers currently using a competitor, ZoomInfo, and intent signals to target companies interested in the ZoomInfo solution. This allowed them to create two distinct audiences to capture more leads directly from their competitor.
3. Getting Actionable Contacts
With an updated ICP and narrowed targeting focus, SalesIntel needed to reach the correct people at their ideal accounts. Through the ICP exercise, James helped to expand the buying center from only Sales leaders to including two additional decision-makers; Marketing leaders and RevOps leaders.
James and the team now have three opportunities to reach an ideal customer through their distinct buying roles. The last mile was accurate contact data to segment and reach these buyers with personalized content.
“What’s great about working at SalesIntel,” James said, “is we can drink our own champagne. No CRM or one provider is going to have a 100% perfect match for all the data you need for go-to-market. What we’re able to do is leverage our world-class 2,000+ research team to go fill gaps. This service is available to our users. Why not us?”
James had not experienced this one-of-a-kind service in his previous roles and has been thrilled to access at SalesIntel to power marketing campaigns with accurate targeting, email addresses and more.
Results:
SalesIntel has seen phenomenal results in six short months during an economically challenging 2023. James and the marketing team have seen success in their SEO and Organic channels because of their ability to create targeted content for their audience. They’ve used this same content across other channels and shared their results.
This graph shows where SalesIntel was when it started leveraging the GTM OS in Q3 2022 and where they are today (Q1 2023).
“Our inbound leads are up 58% in six months. Cost per lead has dropped 62%. Why? Because I am taking the 26,000 accounts and all the contacts that I can gather, and I’m using them to load my DSP. I’m using them to drive all my native targeting through LinkedIn, Meta, etc.
“What this means further down the pipeline is we’ve managed to increase ROI of every dollar put into our paid campaigns by 2X.”
“Then finally, inbound pipeline contribution for a business like ours has been fantastic. This is a high-velocity competitive market. There are a lot of providers out there. We have to be efficient on the marketing side, and we’re going from 25% to 55% pipeline contribution from marketing which is a great start.”
James and SalesIntel plan to continue drinking their own champagne and look forward to sharing more wins with us in the coming quarters.
“We’re able to speak directly to the buying center to touch their pain and share how to solve their go-to-market challenges – just like we have.”
About SalesIntel
SalesIntel is a go-to-market intelligence platform that helps marketing, sales, and revenue operations teams deliver up to a 5x improvement in pipeline efficiency by providing quality account and contact data and services.
Our customers are savvy revenue teams from industry-leading companies – like ServiceTitan, ProGlove, Cvent, and Hanover Research – who understand that improving pipeline efficiency in today’s challenging economy is key to revenue growth.
We’ve provided quality data to the industry for over 15 years and only recently made it available directly to you.
See us in action:
About GTM Partners
GTM Partners, a data-driven Go-To-Market analyst firm, helps organizations and GTM vendors to achieve efficient growth by transforming their GTM strategy. We work with high-growth companies to help them unify their GTM teams and to provide them with lasting strategies and frameworks. Our mission is to make go-to-market simple and to be the voice of the industry for all things GTM. See what we do at https://gtmpartners.com/.
Want to learn more about GTM Partners and SalesIntel?
GTM Partners and SalesIntel will present their joint progress throughout the year at GTM Partners’ Monthly Roadshows. Those unable to attend the in-person events can listen on demand to a webinar Go-to-Market Therapy: Nailing Your ICP in 2023.
