Last updated on January 24th, 2018 at 04:19 pm
DemandBase on Thursday will announce a move to further assist marketers and sales teams to keep up with buyers’ plans via an update to its Conversion Solution tool, allowing customers to link it with major third-party applications including Salesforce, Slack and LinkedIn Sales Navigator,.
The company said Conversion Solution will directly integrate the Real-Time Intent features — which use artificial intelligence (AI) to get a sense of when customers are ready to consider a purchase — with the SaaS apps sales teams use to collaborate, store information and communicate. It will also provide easier reporting on the return on investment (ROI) of account-based marketing (ABM) activities by seeing how well sales teams are using the insights delivered through the product.
Chris Golec, DemandBase’s CEO, told B2B News Network Real-Time Intent drew considerable interest from customers because it allows marketing teams to see when potential buyers are landing on a web site, for instance, and when they might want to have a rep reach out to them.
“Prior to Real-Time Intent, the only other intent solution has been keyword search, but keyword search doesn’t ensure accounts are qualified,” he said, adding that Conversion Solution layers on ‘interest signals’ — like someone looking at a product page, for instance — to provide a fuller picture on buyer behaviour. “Companies want to start relevant conversations with prospects at the first sign of intent and get ahead of the competition.”
Conversion Solution is aimed to help sales teams across the entire funnel, Golec said, including better personalization of sales development rep (SDR) outreach to hyper-targeted ads and better late-stage funnel messaging, like datasheets and service descriptions.
Early customers of Conversion Solution including video marketing platform Brightcove.
“We saw an increase in the number of meetings our SDRs were able to book” after just a few weeks, Chris Bondhus, Brightcove’s vice-president of demand generation said in a statement.
Of course, companies like Salesforce are also adding AI capabilities, which it calls Einstein, across its product suite. According to Golec, the real benefit that AI will bring to sales teams is its potential ability to take on manual, time-intensive, spreadsheet level tasks, and free up time to take on more strategic activities.
Instead of having sales teams spend time scouring the Internet for information on their prospects, for instance, AI is able to ingest huge amounts of public data and aggregate it at a business level, with enough context to truly understand our buyers and help sales teams have more personalized, informed and relevant conversations.
“There’s a great deal of confusion but also excitement around the possibilities of AI in sales,” he said. “Some recognize the competitive advantage but some fear that it means a loss of a human element.”
