We live in the age of the revenue marketer, when lead gen—and shortening the sales cycle—are both critical core competencies.
“Lead generation is becoming a big focus for most marketers—everything is based on lead generation and conversion,” says Carolyn Hollowell, senior director of marketing at DiscoverOrg, which recently announced a partnership with Marketo with the aim of helping marketers collect more actionable data. “Having more information on your prospects allows you to quality or disqualify leads quicker; but the time it takes to qualify leads is enormous if you have to do it manually.”
The alliance centers on Webhooks, a sales tool that automatically appends missing information when a prospect fills out a Web form. As long as a customer or potential customer provides an email address or some other piece of identifying information, any data that was left out of the form—and is also available in the DiscoverOrg database—is appended to the existing customer record, thereby allowing marketers to stick with existing less-is-more best practices regarding the length of Web forms. Prospects are far more likely to fill out short, frictionless forms that get them to the content they’re looking for as quickly as possible.
In theory, this would also give marketers leeway to ask more interesting questions of their prospects—for example, ‘What are your marketing pain points’ or ‘What project are you working on right now?’—rather than repeatedly grinding through all the usual queries (name, job title, company name, phone number, etc.).
The DiscoverOrg database collects all of the usual information, as well as other interesting tidbits, including physical location, job responsibilities, whether a company is growing or shrinking year-over-year, number of employees, number of IT decision-makers, revenue growth, and Twitter and LinkedIn account information.
The ultimate goal is to enable Marketo users to better target their own customers and potential customers.
“All revenue marketers understand that the more relevant the content you can target your prospects with, the more they’re going to engage with you and see the value of your product,” Hollowell says. “And the faster you can do that, the more revenue you’re going to make.”
