How Anonymous Web Traffic Turned Into A Closed Deal in 10 Days

The sales cycle for B2B can be long and inefficient.

Sales team members often have to coordinate with each other, marketing, and other departments to provide the right answers at the right time, to the right buying individuals within target accounts to deepen engagement. It’s complex!

Sales have a set of target accounts they’re running and looking at all the time. Though some accounts will not be prioritized for outreach, especially if the company is running 1:Many Account-Based Marketing (ABM). So what should your sales team do with the (often overlooked) warm account leads? How do you make the process more efficient, significantly reducing the time from early engagement to deal closing? How can ABM and the Demandbase platform help you take action when accounts are showing buyer intent?

Capitalizing on Anonymous Intent

Account engagement goes through ebbs and flows based on business priorities and marketing initiatives. Even high-value accounts who have “gone dark” will remain on your target account list for marketing to nurture the contacts until they’re ready for a discussion. But how do you know when they’re ready?

We found ourselves in this exact position. One of our enterprise manufacturing accounts had been in a sales cycle but wasn’t quite ready to commit. After six months of inactivity, Collin, the Sales Development Rep assigned to the account received notification from our Engagement Platform that account engagement was trending onsite. He noticed someone on the account was looking at content had been visiting content about an upcoming webinar.

Ten days later, the account team closed a deal.

How Account-Based Marketing Drove the Deal

In a typical demand generation marketing process, sales would have to wait for a “hand raise” by contact at their account before they know one of their assigned accounts was showing interest. But with ABM, sales can take passive research signals such as visiting high-value content pages and turn it into an opportunity to follow up with key contacts in the account. That’s exactly what our account team did.

Collin consulted with his Account Executive, Matt, to get some background on the account and learn more about the key contact. Armed with this history along with his insights from the recent site activity, Collin reached out to the contact to provide information that would compliment the content being covered in the upcoming she was researching webinar but didn’t register for. While the contact didn’t respond to Collin, his outreach prompted her to return to the site. It turned out she had a very specific question she needed to be answered.

We want our target accounts to be able to quickly get answers, when and how they want. We use Drift, a member of the Demandbase Partner Ecosystem, to give high-value accounts the opportunity to get answers through web conversations. The account contact started a chat with her question and Collin was able to follow up via email with a more detailed response. This kicked off the official sales cycle. The deal closed in a fraction of the time of traditional B2B deals because we were able to:

• Identify a surge in account interest
• Engage Sales to provide consultative support to the prospect
• Provide immediate answers to specific questions during a web visit
• All without a traditional demand gen form completion

How You Can Do the Same – 4 Takeaways

1. Use technology like Demandbase to turn anonymous web traffic into recognized visitors from identified companies
2. Equip Sales with these insights through web reports or push notifications to your reps using Demandbase Engagement Platform so they can keep track of account activity and bursting intent to reengage a warm target.
3. Demonstrate value by consulting rather than selling while they’re in the early consideration stages and push that conversation along in a way that feels natural, not forced.
4. Integrate your marketing technologies with your ABM platform to increase the timeliness of account interactions and the value of your tech stack.