Translate data signals into actionable strategies.
Behind the Scenes: Accelerating Go-to-Market Planning and Data Activation with D&B DataVision
How Dun & Bradstreet aligned marketing and sales around a single source of customer truth to drive decision making and pipeline growth
At Dun & Bradstreet, we believe that data points are foundational for identifying market and business signals. Leveraging these signals and translating them into actionable strategies enables us to define targeted outreach activities that drive real revenue. With an installed base of global customers in industries as diverse as financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, healthcare, media, IT and professional services, it’s critical that we understand audience needs when we go to market with specific offers and campaigns. Data accuracy and insight is essential for us to successfully drive disruptive marketplace growth.
Background
Access to accurate and timely data is essential for any marketing and sales team to be competitive in today’s increasingly digital economy where buyers are empowered with more intelligence than ever before. With Forbes predicting a 4,300% increase in annual data production as soon as 2020, organizations are increasingly faced with reviewing an abundance of data from disparate sources that complicates the go-to-market planning process.
One of our greatest assets at Dun & Bradstreet is having access to a universe of company and contact information to help us build highly targeted and intelligent marketing campaigns. But how do we consolidate this with the intelligence we’re gathering about product usage, customer satisfaction, sales intelligence information, digital interactions, and many other sources of data? Being able to answer this question quickly and accurately is critical for building an integrated marketing and sales strategy.
Challenge
Despite having access to a rich portfolio of information, like many other companies, relevant customer information resides in multiple, disparate systems. This inhibits ready-access to data that is needed to develop a unified strategy that ensures marketing and sales are aligned around common goals. Without a “single source of customer truth” that is readily accessible and consumable by marketing and sales, we face uncertainties when planning renewal, upsell, and cross-sell campaigns to our customer base, and identifying target prospects in new markets. The continued longevity and growth of Dun & Bradstreet depends on our ability to eliminate guesswork and enable our marketing and sales teams to make better decisions, faster.
Solution
Using D&B DataVision enables us to gain a 360-degree view of our customers by centralizing information silos to visualize, segment, and quickly activate data across downstream marketing and sales systems. D&B DataVision synthesizes both internal and external information from our website, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, and Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) by aggregating it in a readily- accessible platform for faster decision making. Our global Marketing and Sales teams can now analyze and segment audiences in real-time to identify new business opportunities. Furthermore, it extends the value of our comprehensive business database by putting our customer data in context – providing us with the ability to review penetration within an existing account or market, and supplement missing information to fill gaps.
John Kolakowski, Dun & Bradstreet’s Director of Global Customer Marketing, has used D&B DataVision to segment and analyze our prospect and customer database to determine product penetration by market and identify new and ancillary segments. Based on the analysis, he has successfully developed targeted programs to quickly expand into defined markets.
A key responsibility of Deniz Olcay, Dun & Bradstreet’s Director of Product Marketing, is to provide our Sales teams with prospect and customer targets to generate pipeline. According to Deniz, “Previously we’d rely on various teams to stitch together customer data from various sources, apply propensity models, and cross-reference it with on-site activity data to find the lowest hanging fruit for our sellers. This required many meetings, and multiple data pull iterations to generate a list with the right targets.” Deniz concludes, “Using D&B DataVision, I can hop on a quick call with Sales leadership to review territories and we can build targeted lists together in minutes.”
As a result, we identified that close to 50% of the target accounts were already on our Sales leaders’ radar, which meant that 75 net new accounts were now visible as high priority targets. With direct connectivity to D&B Hoovers and our CRM system, the team qualified these as potential opportunities.
Organizational Impact:
By using D&B DataVision, we have eliminated our dependency on custom data pulls and spreadsheets to research and size markets, and are now focused on using firmographic, technology intelligence, on-site activity, and predictive analytics data to guide our decision-making. Through D&B DataVision, a single central view of our prospects and customers enables the global Marketing team to drill down to specific segmentation models and identify targeted growth opportunities. With fewer bottlenecks, Marketing leaders can conduct more detailed opportunity analyses in real-time, and Sales leaders are aligned and confident that data-driven decisions are made. D&B DataVision has ultimately transformed Sales and Marketing siloed teams to a single organization focused on the same revenue-generating goals.