As a sales leader, you know that getting your prospect’s attention is already half battle won but also that getting your prospect’s attention is no less than a war in itself. 

Most sales and marketing professionals unequivocally agree that arming cold outreach with personalisation is one of the best ways to capture your prospect’s attention. Personalisation, however, rests on B2B data, as it is this data which helps you to get to know your prospect, segment them according to their similarities and craft targeted messages that would be meaningful to your contacts. 

In this blog post, I will discuss the essential B2B data types that you need to excel at B2B sales.

6 types of B2B data that you need to know

There are a number of data points you can use to target and engage with your potential buyers. Below are these data points in 6 broad categories with illustrative examples:

Demographic data – the who of your target market

Demographic data defines the ‘who’ of your prospects i.e their personally identifiable information (PII) that gives a face to your target audience. 

For B2B SDRs, this means collecting the following data points:

• Name: Chew Flintstone
• Gender: Female
• Salutation: Ms
• Email: chewflintstone@rockquarry.com
• Title/ Designation: Director of Marketing EMEA
• Location: Bedrock city, Arizona
• LinkedIn URL: www.linkedin.com/in/chewflintstone

Why is demographic data important?

If you are looking to wow your prospects with personalised messaging, demographic segmentation is definitely the starting point. Your prospect’s demographic information is also the first thing you need to qualify or disqualify them as a potential customer. A simple demographic segmentation can help you to categorise your diverse customer base into smaller groups of individuals and appeal to their specific preferences.

Descriptive data- the bells and whistles in demographic data

Descriptive data enhances demographics by giving you more details on your prospect such as their seniority, department, tenure, languages spoken etc. 

Descriptive data includes information like:

• Seniority: Director
• Language: English
• Department: Marketing
• Tenure: 36 months

Why is descriptive data important?

Descriptive data helps you personalise your communications further by giving you a frame of reference in messaging. A key benefit of getting descriptive data on your prospect is that it allows you to craft separate sales copy for executives, managers and directors. If you are addressing the higher management, you would not want to discuss the nitty gritty details such as the immediate product benefits or features, rather you will want to talk about the overall benefit of your solution. For example, when reaching out to a director, you can focus on the big picture things like how your solution can help save x hours in productivity, on the other hand, in the sales copy intended for executives, you can talk about features like user-friendliness and easy integration with CRM.

Firmographic data- the company information of your prospects

Firmographic data is the ‘who for’ part of a prospect’s profile and gives you information about their company. That is, which company they work for, what the company does and where it is located. 

Firmographic data means collecting the following data:

• Company name: Rock quarry
• Company location: city/region/postal code
• Industry: construction
• Company size: number of employees 
• Type of business: B2B or B2C, product-based or service-based, SaaS
• Annual Revenue: $10 billion

Why is firmographic data important?

Firmographic market segmentation helps you discover ways to market your product to specific groups of customers, depending on their industry. For example, if you are targeting construction companies, you can follow a more detail oriented strategy in your outreach as most construction professionals are practical thinkers. By grouping prospective organisations based on similar attributes, you are sure to benefit from new advertising opportunities, more relevant messaging, and increased ROI.

Chronographic data- the when of your outreach

Chronographic data can give you a likely ‘when’ as in when to send out your communications. Chronographic data, also popularly known as ‘sales trigger’ by B2B marketers, allows you to use the small window of opportunity to present your offer to your prospects based on a specific event or change in their life.

Chronographic data includes information such as:

• Prospect gets promoted/ changes department
• Prospect moves to a new location
• Company receives new funding
• Company signs up or partners with a competitor
• Company announces a recruitment drive

Why is chronographic data important?

This type of time sensitive data can often highlight when a prospect or company might be ready to buy. Using chronographic data as a guide in your campaigns can personalise your communications, while also triggering the ‘scarcity marketing’ phenomena in customers. For example, a person who has recently been promoted to a sales manager would be very interested in learning more about how your solution can increase productivity of his/her sales reps.

Psychographic data – the how of your outreach

Psychographic data defines the ‘how’ of your outreach strategy. Psychographic information about your prospects such as their values, attitudes, interests and personality traits can help identify what triggers motivate them to action and thus help in crafting your message.

Psychographic data includes data points of your prospect such as:

• Personality
• Values
• Attitude
• Interests
• Lifestyle

Why is psychographic data important?

Psychographic data can uncover what drives your prospect to buy. As buyer motivation is a key aspect of user persona, you are able to craft your outreach campaigns on a granular level with psychographic data. This data can also help with targeted messaging and the creative, as different groups of people are likely to respond to different messages. This helps you build the right outreach strategy, and you can even use psychographic targeting to put your message in the right place in front of the right people.

Behavioural data or intent data – the analysis machine

Intent data tracks the online behaviour of the prospect, and helps guide the sales process depending on how the prospect is interacting with the campaign. This data type is usually collected after or during the campaign, using specialised software and tools. 

Intent data points include:

• Website clicks
• Form completions
• Event appearances
• Email open rates 
• Click through rates

Why is intent data important?

The purpose of B2B Intent Data is to gain insight into the digital activity of prospects to make predictions about their buyer intent based on their engagement. Searches, website visits, and downloads can be tracked to generate intent data so your sales and marketing teams know which groups of your prospects are ready to buy and which ones require more assistance. In other words, intent data helps you know which stage your prospects are in the buying process, so you can categorise them into Sales qualified leads (SQL) or Marketing qualified leads (MQL).

How to use B2B data to generate leads?

Now that we have gone through the different types of B2B data, let us look at how you can use a combination of these data types to improve your outreach campaigns and generate sales. 

Define and segment groups based on B2B data 

Detailed information about your prospects such as their age, gender, location or other specific data can be used to create very targeted campaigns. 

For example, hubsell’s software allows you to use static placeholders to capture variables such as their first name ({{firstName}}) or job title ({{title}}) and dynamic placeholders for variables such as seniority ({{seniority.name}}) and department ({{department}}), so you can update entire lines of text for each prospect from one template.

Create content that best resonates with your ideal audience

Once you have segmented your audience based on their specific interests and needs, you can use this information to craft content that best resonates with these groups.

For example, you can create multiple copies of your sales message for different audiences such as associates, managers and senior management. As someone at ‘Manager’ level may be more interested with day-to-day tasks and shorter-term goals, however, someone at ‘Director’ level or higher may be more inclined to respond to something that can help with business growth or expanding into new markets.

Use B2B data to target key accounts with Account Based Marketing (ABM)

B2B data can help you start the sales process by selling directly to your best-fit, highest-value accounts via account based marketing.

Account-based marketing is a strategy in which marketers treat every account as a market of one and personalise efforts to address the buyer’s specific needs. By developing sales strategies that appeal to those high-value accounts, you are much more likely to make them your customer, as opposed to using a spray and pray approach.

Use incoming data (behavioural/intent) to optimise campaigns

Suppose you have executed your outreach campaign. How do you get to know whether or not it is hitting the mark with your prospects? One surefire way to do so is by analysing the intent data to find out your prospect’s engagement levels.

With the wide adoption of sales automation, many companies are already using 1st party behavioral data to optimise their lead scoring model. This scoring model attempts to quantify the intent of the visitor based on a series of activities. For example, when leads visit your product overview page, their lead score will increase by say, 5. If they visit your pricing page, indicating an even greater interest in buying, it will increase by 10, and so on. When a lead’s score reaches a threshold agreed upon by marketing and sales, an alert is sent to sales to reach out to that prospect. 

3rd party intent data can be incorporated into your existing lead scoring model as well. Consider the scenario where a lead has researched topics related to your product on other websites, and has carried out an action e.g. downloaded your whitepaper. This indicates they are clearly interested, and you should immediately send out an email as you want to strike while the iron is hot.

To learn more about how intent data can help optimise your outreach campaigns, check out our blog on intent data here.

In conclusion, better data equals better leads

By adding context and colour to a prospect, B2B data helps marketers better understand who their prospect is and whether or not they fit their buyer persona. Marketers who understand their customers’ profiles can offer more personalised, relevant content because they know their customers’ interests and can anticipate their future needs. This blog discussed 6 types of B2B data, a combination of which can help you achieve personalised outreach. A quality sales automation platform like hubsell allows you to get rich data profiles across all these categories of your prospects and carry out automated targeted sales campaigns according to the specific criteria set by you.

New readers

For those that are unfamiliar with hubsell, we provide an end-to-end B2B leading solution with on-demand generated B2B data and multi-channel personalised outreach automation software to generate sales qualified leads. 

Our DPaaS (Data processing as a service) enriches the contacts in your CRM with over 25 data points, ensuring the most qualitative, near real-time B2B data for your sales and marketing teams. 

Book your discovery call today to see how you can scale your opportunity generation.