How Efficient Tech Stacks Are Driving Business Resilience
Learn how savvy investments drive business resilience and growth amidst challenging times.
David Crane, VP of product marketing at Intentsify, explains why making shrewd investments that prioritize digital initiatives and smart budget trade-offs will drive business resilience, growth, and profits.
With an uncertain economic outlook, many businesses have hesitated to invest in their tech stack. 70% of digital leaders report they didn’t significantly advance toward digital transformation goals last year.
Economic uncertainty has understandably caused organizations to take a conservative approach to technology spend. Though cutting systems and tools from the martech stack appeals as a simple answer to budget problems, it’s not always the most practical one. A key benefit of technology has always been efficiency. And right now, efficiency is critical.
Leaders who choose to uplevel their stacks — and, more importantly, how they use them — will gain a significant advantage over the competition. Strategic tech investments and smart implementations will support resilience today and drive rapid growth when the economic headwinds subside.
Prioritize Tools that Boost Efficiency Across Teams
While much slack remains in the aggregate labor market (primarily in the hospitality, healthcare, and government sectors), many B2B enterprises have been hit hard. This is especially true of the tech industry. And many marketing teams — which are still often seen as cost centers for some mind-boggling reason — are a fraction of their former size. Technology, while not a panacea, is often a key ingredient to the efficiency businesses require today.
However, effective tech implementation is seldom quick and easy, despite the claims of banner ads and seller pitches. It’s usually a one-step-back-to-jump-three-steps-forward process. Diligent navigation of departmental alignment, change management, strategy tweaks, education, skills training — and indeed vendor support — often define successful tech rollouts.
So, how can B2B marketing teams ensure their tech investments achieve desired goals?
- By investing in solutions that support clearly defined strategies and solve well-understood challenges (preferably in numerous ways)
- Ensuring buy-in from all stakeholders
- And developing a thoughtful implementation strategy
So, let’s look at a tech solution that has seen rapid adoption over the past few years precisely due to its ability to drive efficiency and improved buyer experiences across numerous use cases throughout the customer lifecycle: intent data. It’s a top-efficiency driver but not always the easiest to implement, which makes it a great example to explore here.
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Intent Data and Its Many Benefits and Use Cases
At its most basic level, intent data is information collected about an account’s or individual’s content consumption activities and research behaviors. When implemented well – that is, in alignment with a solid go-to-market (GTM) strategy – the leading intent data solutions enable B2B marketing teams to:
- Identify which accounts to target for marketing and sales efforts, enabling more efficient allocation of time and resources
- Locate where prospects are in their buyer’s journey, helping you select the proper engagement channels and tactics
- Understand target accounts’ challenges and what they care about so you can choose the right messages, talk tracks, and content to use with them.
- Surface current customers’ mindsets, needs, and priorities to highlight upsell opportunities and churn risks.
- Identify shifts and opportunities in your market and among target audiences.
- Map and continually update the typical buyer’s journey
- Gauge competitive risks
Moreover, such intelligence can fuel the effectiveness of numerous systems used throughout the demand funnel and customer lifecycle, multiplying the value intent data brings to B2B organizations.
Simply put, the best intent data solutions save time and money while increasing the buyer experience, boosting conversion rates and pipeline velocity, and reducing customer acquisition costs and churn.
The Right Tools Drive Investment
Recent data indicates that 79% of GTM teams leverage intent data to solve a marketing plan’s effective resource/budget allocation challenge. However, not all intent data solutions are the same – the technology, capabilities, and, thus, values vary greatly from vendor to vendor. Here are some of the features to look for when selecting an intent data provider:
1. AI-enabled intent data tracking: This can mean several things, but at minimum, you want an intent vendor that uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the context of the content being consumed by audiences rather than just counting the number of times a target account lands on a web page containing a tracked keyword.
2. Custom intent-modeling: Ask intent vendors how their solutions are customized to your needs. For example, do their intent models weigh topics/keywords by importance to your specific offering, use case, etc.? One-size-fits-all intent models have limited value.
3. The breadth of sources and signal types: The accuracy of your intent-driven insights will depend on a large enough sample size; a target account’s activity on a limited number of websites isn’t highly indicative of intent. That’s why intent solutions that synthesize signals derived from multiple sources – such as ad exchanges, social media platforms, publisher co-ops, etc. – provide greater accuracy and depth of insights.
4. Solutions that help you quickly act on intent insights: Data is important. But B2B marketers – especially in today’s lean teams – are busy. Look for solutions that will put insights into action, such as via media programs or by triggering actions through integrated systems.
The advanced level of intelligence that intent provides allows B2B organizations to deploy time and resources where, when, and how they will have the greatest impact. However, with its many use cases spanning every GTM function, intent data can be challenging to roll out.
Implementing Intent Into the Tech Stack
Setting up intent models, analyzing the resulting data, and acting on the aggregated intelligence can be difficult for ill-prepared organizations. Here are a few important steps to ensure successful intent data implementation:
1. Start with one or two use cases: It’s easy to get excited about all the possible ways to use intent data, but it’s best to start with a focused approach and expand from there. It’s also a good idea to begin with the easier use cases to implement, like digital advertising.
2. Get wide buy-in from all potential stakeholders: Though you’ll likely start with marketing use cases (and just a couple), you should discuss with sales and customer success leaders early on. That way, they’ll be more excited and prepared when the time comes to expand into their use cases.
3. Create a strategy for using your intent solution: As discussed earlier, intent data can and should fuel using your other GTM systems. Get started thinking about how you’ll want data to flow between systems and how it’ll affect the strategies and tactics that drive the use of those systems. For example, if using intent insights for the account or lead scoring in a marketing automation platform, how do you want to weigh that information against other variables?
4. Set key objectives for using your intent data: This will ensure you keep pushing to draw as much value as you can from your intent investment – and as a result, you’ll generate more value from all your other marketing programs and tech investments.
Investing in the right technologies and using them correctly is paramount for B2B enterprises today. While much of this article uses the example of intent data, the key takeaway is this: Technology is an evergreen priority for today’s businesses, and those that look to drive the most value from their current tech stack will outperform those that blindly cut investments.
How are you adapting your tech stack for resilience in uncertain times? Share your strategies and challenges with us on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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