Traditional B2B sales have always struggled with top of funnel prospect identification. While other business functions embraced analytics years ago, the revenue functions have lacked the data to drive continuous improvement processes between Marketing and Sales. Todd Abbott spent decades watching this problem firsthand as a sales and marketing leader before deciding to tackle it head-on with his company, Delivr.ai.
Building a Career in Data
“I’ve been a sales and marketing guy my whole career,” Todd says, describing his path from early success to leadership roles. But what set him apart was his relentless focus on data. “What I’ve learned over the years is that the translation of strategy to execution really requires a very robust management system that’s grounded in data.” This obsession with data shaped his leadership style. When growing businesses 100% year over year, Todd developed systems to track the key elements of the business processes. “Think about it as being a pilot in the cockpit,” he explains. “Whether I’m a first-line manager or an executive, I need to know where we’re executing and where we’re not to keep driving for continuous improvement in execution to deliver results consistently”
Applying this philosophy to the revenue functions, there has been a lack of data between the marketing and sales functions to drive true alignment on the components of the revenue engine required to deliver growth consistently, and it starts with delivering qualify leads at the top of the funnel for the sales teams to convert. The internet has dramatically changed how buyers buy products and services. Gone are the days when salespeople could walk in with a simple “What keeps you up at night?” approach. Buyers are not interested in talking with sales as they now do their own research before ever talking to a vendor. “Nobody wants to disclose themselves to a company to then be sold to,” Todd notes. “The internet has democratized information for individuals to do their own research making the consultive sales approach a challenge.”
This shift has created a new challenge: identifying and engaging potential customers when they are doing their anonymous research on solutions to their business challenges. Traditional marketing has focused on generating demand with digital advertising and implementation of email campaigns – what Todd calls “spray and pray” tactics. “Google and Microsoft and Amazon love it because they’re getting so much revenue from digital advertising to a broad segment of the market,” he says. “But only 10% of your target market is typically in the market at any one time at best.” Addressing the Marketing-Sales Divide
This inefficient approach created friction between the marketing and sales teams. Marketing claims success with what Todd calls “vanity metrics” – website visitors, form fills, and trade show booth visits – which gets credited as MQLs despite many of them not in a buying cycle. The problem is the criteria of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). “Many that do a form fill just wanted some information and should not be categorized as an MQL. Most that came to our company trade show booth are also looking to get educated,” Todd explains. “As a result of the poor qualification of these prospects, sales gets conditioned to not prioritize their time following up because they know it’s a waste of time. “Meanwhile, sales teams are then tasked with converting MQLs into meetings for conversion into SQLs. The experience with poor quality MQLs results in the sales teams not motivated to engage in these with poor-quality leads. “As a CRO, I was always sitting in monthly executive business reviews listening to the reporting of the marketing metrics concluding, ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t do anything to drive the revenue growth my sales teams need – they need truly qualified leads.'”
Leveraging Individual Intent Data
We simply need to get more efficient with our marketing dollars and deliver higher quality leads at the top of the funnel! Delivr.ai takes a fundamentally different approach to solving this problem. While previous ABM or buyer intent solutions tried identifying company-level buying interest or intent coming from an IP address, the Delivr.ai team focuses on identifying individual behavior. “We take 35 billion signals daily from the internet,” he explains. “We then parse those signals with a complex AI engine to understand exactly who is researching what topics.” This granular tracking allows companies to identify not just which organizations might be interested but specifically which individuals within the buying group are actively researching for solutions. “Think of it as an audience filter,” Todd says. “Tell me who your ideal customer is, what the titles of the typical buying group members are, and then what they would be searching on the internet when they in a buying cycle.”
The AI engine then leverages an identify graph of 270M people’s data across devices and email addresses, to deliver a comprehensive picture of buying behavior. When someone shows increased activity around relevant topics, companies can now target their outreach to just those that are in market. “It is a shift from demand generation to demand identification enabling you to put all of your effort in developing hyper-targeted activation strategies,” Todd explains. “by delivering digital ads and email campaigns customized to the person based on their title and areas they are researching on the internet.”
Transforming B2B Lead Generation
After operating somewhat stealthily to build its customer base, Delivr.ai is now preparing for a broader launch. Todd sees an opportunity to fundamentally change how B2B companies approach lead generation, moving beyond simple form fills, and trade show leads to identify genuine buying intent at the individual level. “We remove all the anonymous search activity to identify intent at the individual level,” Todd says. “In a B2B sale, it’s often lower-level people who start the research, not the executive decision maker. With Delivr.ai, you can identify who they are, as well as when the decision maker starts researching as they learn about the vendors their team is evaluating to shortlist for consideration.”
For companies willing to embrace this data-driven approach, the potential impact is significant. With the identification of actual buyers in a buying cycle identified from the Delivr.ai Platform, the marketing and sales functions can truly align on developing the tactics that best convert versus the historical debates on the quality of the MQL’s and lack of top of funnel leads. The result is businesses can dramatically improve their conversion rates while reducing wasted effort on unqualified leads.
To learn more about Todd Abbott and Delivr.ai’s approach to modern lead generation, visit his website or check out his LinkedIn profile.
