The People Behind the Scenes: Setting us up for Success
This month, we focus on team members who work behind the scenes and have been instrumental in our 20-year success.
Analyzing performance against target goals is vital to the success of B2B outbound. Doing this at regular intervals allows you to respond quickly to changes in the market and spot emerging trends. This year, the ML team’s analysis of key metrics led us to implement several new processes driven by changes in buyer behavior and technological advancements.
As we look back on 2024, here are some new strategies you might consider to elevate your B2B outbound programs and build a more predictable sales pipeline.
Anyone who follows ML knows that we believe success in outbound sales starts with a strong, validated target list of companies and contacts. Earlier this year, we invested in external resources to help us identify who on these carefully crafted lists has the highest “likelihood to engage.” Our chosen partners helped us analyze our lists and segment them into cohorts based on the likelihood to respond to telephone outreach. Combining that data with intent signals has elevated our success rate in reaching target markets on behalf of our clients, and we will be doing more of this in the new year. In the months ahead, we will share specific examples of how this approach has significantly moved the needle on our clients’ B2B sales results.
Related Content: Total Addressable Market Playbook.
I attended HubSpot’s, Inbound 2024 Conference in September. Leveraging Intent Data is a subject ML identified in 2023 as a growing trend, so I was keen on attending sessions specific to this subject.
HubSpot presenters Matt Sornson (GM Operations Hub and Breeze Intelligence) and Karen Ng (SVP of Product and Partnerships) confirmed what ML had begun to observe in 2023… the power of intent data in making outbound sales more intelligent.
Matt and Karen broke intent data into three categories that they called “Intent Signals.”
Understanding where your website visitors come from. This drives Account Based Marketing and Account Based Sales-- strategies our clients use, and which are pretty much table stakes for accelerating your go-to-market program. Related ML Content: “Market Trends Affecting 2023 Revenue Growth.”
Using the content prospects are reading as an intent signal. ML has leaned into this. We use content downloads to infer intent to solve a specific problem at a company level and then go upstream to perform relevant, personalized outbound to the decision-makers at those companies to move them into a conversation. Related ML Content: “These 3 Things Are Working Right Now to Build Sales Pipeline.”
This one is harder to scale and requires more human effort, but it can be very high value. For B2B outbound, these signals let you hone in on initiatives that can be tied to a role change. Again, ML has been doing this for years and in fact the category of Former- Client-at-a-New-Company represented 26% of ML's new business deals this year. Related ML Content: “What’s Your On-the-Move Strategy."
One comment from Matt really got my attention. He said, “Technology makes it easier to capture the data, but it is human-led insights that determine how you can use it effectively.”
And that goes to my final key learning this year that was also validated at Inbound 2024. The only way to cut through the noise and get the attention of senior executives is by providing relevant, personalized messaging and content that will help them solve business challenges. It’s this intelligent outbound sales approach that will contribute most to establishing a predictable sales pipeline.
At ML, our best-in-class processes, our investment in technology, and our commitment to data analytics are all designed to proactively drive conversations. But it’s the human element led by our highly skilled and seasoned professionals that gets our customers in front of the right people at the right time.
All these practices have already set ML up with a strong, predictable pipeline. We are confident they can have the same impact on yours!
