Background
This company is one of the most recognized brands in the B2C and B2B technology space. They empower people across the globe to use technology to realize their dreams. A subsidiary of the company serves a key role in providing the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT, and protect their most important asset – information.
Better Information Required on Key Accounts
The Director of Strategic Marketing Operations for the company leads a team of over 25 marketing professionals with the goal of ensuring agency and vendor partners generate the best outputs for the company.
In collaborating with the marketing and sales organization, the Strategic Marketing Operations team is set up to provide Marketing with a digital view of their customer base, and more importantly, accelerate sales by identifying anonymous web traffic to proactively empower their sellers to pursue the best opportunities.
One of the key challenges was that the company’s marketing and sales teams had little visibility into how accounts were engaging across their web property. Additionally, each salesperson is responsible for hundreds of accounts, making prioritization critical to success. By identifying anonymous web traffic, the Strategic Marketing Operations team could help Sales prioritize their accounts, engage in relevant ways, and ultimately accelerate the sales cycle.
Previously, the Strategic Marketing Operations team was leveraging a solution that used probabilistic models, which made assumptions about account identities. This often returned inaccurate, limited information that couldn’t be reliably connected to the Dun & Bradstreet D‑U‑N‑S® Number – the universal account identifier already in place at the company – which mapped accounts to the various sales teams in Salesforce. This was causing a disconnect between the account identity across online and offline touchpoints, without a clear way to stitch the identity together.
“We had interesting information, but it wasn’t necessarily actionable. We needed better information on the accounts that we cared most about, such as how their activities were changing over time,” according to the Director of Strategic Marketing Operations. This challenge led the team to investigate an alternative solution that leveraged deterministic identity resolution to unmask their anonymous web traffic, which could then also be tied back to the D‑U‑N‑S Number and corresponding account assignments in Salesforce, to more effectively and accurately surface leads to Sales at the moment of engagement on the company’s digital properties.
D&B Visitor Intelligence Helped Unmask Anonymous Web Traffic at a High Scale
After conversations with the Dun & Bradstreet digital team, the Director of Strategic Marketing Operations decided to conduct a pilot of D&B Visitor Intelligence with his Sales team. The solution would help his team identify anonymous web traffic and tie it to a D‑U‑N‑S Number based on deterministic data – providing highly accurate business identity assignment to the account assignments already established in Salesforce. The ability to leverage Dun & Bradstreet’s Live Business Identity across online and offline touchpoints would help eliminate much of the manual work in understanding engagement.
The company was already pushing account data into their web analytics platform, Adobe Analytics. D&B Visitor Intelligence unmasked anonymous web traffic within Adobe and, most importantly, exposed the D‑U‑N‑S Numbers associated with those visitors, which could then be mapped to the Sales team. With a connection to their data visualization tool, Tableau, the Strategic Marketing Operations team set up dashboards for their Sales team to show them not only which accounts were visiting the company’s web properties but also which specific pages those accounts were engaging with and when. D&B Visitor Intelligence was also deployed to the web properties with volumes of over 75 million page visits a month – helping identify anonymous web traffic at a high scale. With these insights, the Sales team was empowered to pursue the best opportunities and open highly relevant conversations with their contacts.
“D&B Visitor Intelligence has been golden from a B2B marketing perspective. The information it returns in real time has been great. Having the data tied to the D‑U‑N‑S Number gives us confidence in the matches and makes the data directly actionable for our sellers,” says the Director of Strategic Marketing Operations.
Valuable Opportunities Uncovered
While the Strategic Marketing Operations team is in the first stages of their journey, they’re hitting key benchmarks and have already had some early wins.
According to the Director of Strategic Marketing Operations, “In one case, we noticed that a particular account was viewing similar product pages repeatedly. We gave them a call and discovered that they were already in the buying process. We were able to uncover this opportunity and be competitive, where previously we wouldn’t have known about it at all.”
Being able to identify engagement from high-priority accounts has allowed the Strategic Marketing Operations team to deliver in-market, highly engaged leads directly to the Sales team to improve collaboration and streamline routing. D&B Visitor Intelligence offers a superior matching technology to their previous vendor by leveraging IP address and cookie mapping back to the D‑U‑N‑S Number.
An Eye to the Future
The Strategic Marketing Operations team is focusing on a roll out to the Sales team now but is looking to expand this capability more broadly to the company’s Marketing team. They have created a series of dashboards that show weekly account activity broken out by audience and even by landing page visited. They’re working to improve this dashboard, better anticipate trends, and design rules to alert Sales teams automatically. They have a weak spot with dormant customers, whom they are hoping to revive with better digital engagement visibility with D&B Visitor Intelligence.
“We’re looking forward to taking a step back each quarter to see how successful we’ve been with engaging our target audiences and tracking those analytics. Ultimately, we’ll set up report cards on our target accounts and monitor their engagement across all our sites with D&B Visitor Intelligence,” concludes the Director of Strategic Marketing Operations.