What is Account Intelligence? A Complete Guide Discover The Components Of Account Intelligence And How To Apply It For Smarter GTM. Are you tired of your sales and marketing efforts feeling like shots in the dark? Do you wish you knew with certainty which accounts to prioritize? And when? How about what matters to them? And who to contact? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, it’s time to discover Account Intelligence. Account Intelligence connects your static company information with third-party data and behavioral insights, providing you with simple, actionable insights for building account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns and sales motions that fill your pipeline and lead to sales. Gone are the days of relying on siloed data! In this guide, you’ll discover everything you need to know about Account Intelligence — including its components, how to use it, and how to get it — so you can start chasing the right accounts sooner and closing deals faster, better, and more often. What is Account Intelligence? Account Intelligence or account-based intelligence is the aggregation of B2B first and third-party data, transformed by artificial intelligence into insights that enable your marketing and sales teams to understand accounts and leads better, create targeted pitches, and convert promising prospects into loyal customers. The data should be clean and robust to help your team understand who your targets are, their intentions, what products or services they’re interested in, and when they’re ready to buy. When building ABM campaigns and planning your sales outreach, Account Intelligence plays an integral role in helping you reach your most valuable accounts strategically with personalized messaging and offerings. Without Account Intelligence, you’re more likely to base your campaigns and sales strategy on guesswork and hunches — and the ROI will reflect that. With this definition in mind, it’s essential to understand the components of Account Intelligence so you can get in on the action. Components of Account Intelligence Account Intelligence combines two overarching types of data — first and third-party — to help you identify the most qualified accounts. First-party data First-party data is the information you collect from your systems and platforms. There are seven types of first-party data in Account Intelligence, including: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data: This includes customer and prospect contact information, orders with your organization, usage, performance, and opportunities. Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) data: Your MAP tool tracks digital behaviors like email opens, clicks, and campaign responses. Corporate email and calendar data: This information is a goldmine of valuable insights, like meetings, email conversations, and new contacts. Sales engagement data: All of the interactions that take place between your sales team and a prospective account in sales enablement and engagement platforms. Website traffic data: You probably have plenty of this data and it’s most likely hiding many anonymous visitors that you need to deanonymize for it to be helpful. Connections data: This data type combines relationship networks that aggregate personal, social, professional, and alumni contacts, so you can turn cold calls into warm introductions. Chat data: This data includes all of the conversational marketing you’ve had in web chat tools during customer or prospect meetings, capturing essential questions and concerns. While first-party data provides essential information, it only tells part of the story about prospective and existing accounts’ needs. That’s where third-party data comes in. Third-party data When you pair your first-party data with third-party insights, you discover more context and fill in gaps — removing the guesswork from engagement. Here are the eight types of third-party data that many B2B marketers and sellers are missing: Company firmographic data: Sometimes difficult to hunt down, this data includes an account’s annual revenue, number of employees, industry, location, and more. Hierarchy and grouping data: Is your target account a subsidiary of a larger company? What’s the corporate structure like? This information can help you find multiple entry points and opportunities to cross and up-sell your products and services. Contact data: This data includes critical decision-makers at target accounts and their information (name, function, job level, title, demographics, location, social networks, email, and phone number) — that should be gathered from privacy-compliant data sources. Intent data: This information uses artificial intelligence to track online content consumption to identify topics that companies are actively interested in and, most importantly, when an account is in-market. Technographic data: This data shows which hardware and software tools your accounts already use, helping you position your solutions as offerings that integrate with, complement, or improve their current platforms. Account identification (ID): Account ID identifies anonymous web visitors on your website so you can know who’s visiting without requesting a form fill. News and social insights: Awareness of your accounts’ recent events — such as mergers, funding rounds, new products, etc. — helps you understand what’s happening in their world, allowing you to tailor your solution and approach. Social content can provide timely and relevant information about target accounts, allowing you to connect on a relevant and more personal level. Advertising data: Your ad data is loaded with impressions, clicks, and all sorts of top-of-funnel engagement markers. As you can see, third-party insights add a dynamic, behavioral, and contextual layer to your static account data across channels and time — ensuring Account Intelligence is always highly relevant and actionable. Example of Account Intelligence in action There are many ways to use Account Intelligence throughout the buyer’s journey. From before a prospect knows your company exists to the moment your rep closes the deal — and beyond — Account Intelligence can help you determine the best time to engage and what to say. A typical example of Account Intelligence in action is identifying anonymous accounts that visit your website. When someone uses a search engine that leads them to your website, Account Intelligence uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help you identify who they are, match it to their behavioral data to assess their level of engagement, apply predictive analytics, and determine your next action. It usually isn’t feasible to track and analyze this information manually, and that’s why Account Intelligence is so incredibly important. Want to see how Account Intelligence works for yourself? Explore our solutions and see Demandbase’s Account Intelligence in action. How to use Account Intelligence Account Intelligence benefits your entire revenue team — including marketing, business development reps, sales, your customer success team, and revenue ops. Here are the top advantages of using Account Intelligence: Identify more accounts within your ideal customer profile (ICP) Are your best accounts of a certain size, in a specific geographic area? Are they in specific industries? Do they use certain types of technology? Once you know the characteristics of your best customers, you can use Account Intelligence to find more accounts that fit those same criteria. Then, if they’re showing intent or high engagement, they become one of your top priority accounts within your ideal customer profile (ICP). Create compelling, personalized experiences Your customers don’t purchase products. They buy solutions to their pain points. Account Intelligence helps break through the B2B noise to engage your ICP at critical touch points throughout the buyer journey. Was your target account recently in the news because of a company merger? Did they recently launch a new product? What problems do they have? How can you solve their problems? The more dynamic information you know about your accounts, the easier it is to tailor your messaging with personalized ads and web visits, or customized sales outreach. Know when to engage Traditional marketing often relies on hunches and leaves your team blind to which prospects are the most likely to buy today versus the accounts you should nurture for later purchase. But there’s no guessing with Account Intelligence. With it, your sales team will know exactly when to engage with prospective accounts. Head off competitive steals When you know which companies are researching your solutions or tools similar to yours, Account Intelligence helps you head off the competition. Get alerts and detailed insights regarding how an in-market account is investigating solutions. Close more deals Account Intelligence unifies sales and marketing teams by providing a single view of each account, what matters to them, and where they are in the buyer journey. By equipping your sales development representatives (SDRs), account executives (AEs), and marketers with Account Intelligence, you can cultivate prospects and existing customers from multiple touchpoints and move them through the buyer’s journey. Software for Account Intelligence There are many tools that offer pieces of Account Intelligence, but Demandbase One™ is the only platform that injects Account Intelligence into every step of the buyer’s journey, giving you intel to identify your best opportunities earlier, engage more intelligently, and secure the purchase faster. With Demandbase One, powered by Demandbase Account Intelligence, you can create a friction-free buyer journey that offers value at every stage. Here’s a closer look at how it works: ABX Cloud: Use Account Intelligence to orchestrate sales and marketing moves across channels and teams, and inject relevance into every step of the B2B buying journey. Advertising Cloud: B2B ad tech built for complex account-based sales cycles and buying committees. Sales Intelligence Cloud: Develop an informed sales strategy that allows you to sell smarter, not harder, to real people, with real problems in real-time. Data Cloud: Fill your go-to-market (GTM) systems with clean and intelligent data that gives you an inside look into your accounts and helps you make informed business decisions. With these four clouds, Demandbase One helps you engage B2B buyers when and how they want — giving you an edge over the competition. You’ll be able to: End account blindness and hunch-based selling. Get a clear view of all your accounts. Eliminate vague marketing messages that miss the mark. With a 360° view of your customer, you can easily spot opportunities and approach customers who want to buy your product with welcome, relevant messages. Improve the account-based experience (ABX). Reclaim the time wasted on cold sales and marketing tactics while minimizing lost opportunities. Employ intent data to curate a personalized and timely experience that deepens conversations with your accounts and nurtures brand loyalty. Make your GTM engine smarter. Align your channel strategies and avoid “omni-spamming” — i.e., bombarding prospects with irrelevant offers and advertising that’s just noise. From knowing the critical decision-makers to intelligent marketing messaging, Account Intelligence will help you execute go-to-market strategies that reach the right people and at the right time. At Demandbase, we’re all about making B2B better by getting smarter. Demandbase Account Intelligence equips your team with the insights and optimization necessary to win over B2B customers. Get started with Account Intelligence When it comes to your next ABM campaign, you have two choices. Continue to pour resources into producing more content in the hopes that something will stick. The B2B prospect you’ve emailed for months has to respond eventually, right? Or, leverage Account Intelligence to say goodbye to account blindness, omni-spam, and hunch-based selling. It’s a no-brainer — Account Intelligence gives you the hi-def view of target accounts you need to make your campaigns and sales efforts more successful. But remember, not all Account Intelligence platforms are created equal. See Demandbase Account Intelligence in action. Learn More
