🕵🏻♂️ Account blindness
5 pillars of data you need to collect about target accounts, and how to use signals to deliver the best next personalized CTA for every account.
Signals became a new MQL for a ”good” reason.
Everybody has targets. With long sales cycles, it’s extremely hard to show marketing impact on revenue. So marketing tries to capture as many signals as possible to justify that they created awareness. They create modular playbooks and insist that Sales must act immediately while the signal is hot. It moves the ball to the sales side.
Sales have a messy CRM data and other things on their plate. They don’t have time to properly review the signals and the accounts, so they act without context, and obviously don’t get a reply to their outreach.
The truth is that most teams have no strategy in place on how to leverage signals properly to activate accounts. Marketing creates infrastructure to capture signals, transfers the engaged accounts to sales. and asks them to follow-up.
Every signal is treated as a buying intent, ignoring:
The already known context about the account
Historical interactions and relationship
The level of intent and demand behind every signal
Without a strategy in place, every signal is just making more noise and trains B2B buyers to ignore sales outreach.
Very similar to MQL handover, but under a new sauce.
In today’s newsletter we’ll share:
4 pillars of data you need to collect about target accounts
How to use signals to deliver the best next personalized CTA for every account
How to leverage your marketing and sales mix to align with the level of intent of every signal
The fastest way to turn event leads into a pipeline
Most event teams don’t lose ROI on the event floor. They lose it in the 7 days after.
Badge scans give you a name and a title. They don’t capture what was actually said. So leads sit in a spreadsheet, get uploaded to a CRM a week later, and by the time a rep follows up — the context is gone. The conversation is cold.
Blinq closes that gap (learn more here: https://blinq.me. It captures the lead, enriches it automatically (email, phone, LinkedIn), and records conversation context with an AI Notetaker — in real time. Everything syncs to your CRM the same day, not the same week.
How would you act on this signal?
Before we dive deeper, let me share with you a simple, real example. In our intent data platform we saw a highly engaged account that doesn’t have known visitors.
Following the conventional playbook, I, as a sales rep, would open Sales Navigator, find several potential decision-makers, send a connection request and email using modular content. Or, add them to the email sequence, and move forward waiting for their reply.
But what if I knew, that this account:
Has a champion who attended our live ABM workshop 2 years ago
There 36 subscribers for our newsletter on Substack
7 people from their team attended our Full-Funnel Summit in March
9 visitors generated 31 page visits in the last 90 days, including our consulting page
They have 5 people with ABM keyword on their LinkedIn profiles
They are hiring regional AEs
They want to build a global ABM program
Does it change the context, the best next call to action, and how should we engage with them?
Absolutely.
The problem is that this data is usually scattered among multiple platforms. Sales act on a few signals instead of the whole picture. That’s why there is no real personalization and point of view required to generate enterprise deals.
We call it account blindness.
To be able to draft a fully personalized plan for a strategic account and act on signals correctly, we need to answer first: what do we already know about this account, and what are we missing?
To answer it, ask any of your senior sales reps a “litmus test” question:
“If you had to bet your compensation on this account, what would you need to know about them?”
They are likely to give you multiple data points that belong to 5 pillars.
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5 pillars of data you need to know about your target accounts
Here is the list of 5 data pillars, starting with the standard one: firmographics and technographics.
1. Firmographics and technographics
Publicly available information to qualify and segment the account:
Company size
HQ location
Revenue
Tech stack
2. Touchpoints with the account
Every interaction with the account, collected in one place:
Meetings with decision-makers at events
Webinar sign-ups and attendance
LinkedIn engagement
Email replies
High-intent page visits
Newsletter subscribers
Content hub visits
This is the most problematic area, because these insights are living in different platforms.
3. Buying committee
Who are your economical and technical buyers? Who are your target users? What are their jobs-to-be-done, goals, challenges, and how does our product fit?
You need to identify real people beyond the titles “VP of.. / Chief .... Officer”, who influences your opportunity. Think about the next 6 roles :
Champions
Decision-makers
Influencers
Blockers
Connectors
Insiders
* Check this guide where I describe different buying committee roles.
Make sure you have accurate emails and LinkedIn profile URLs.
4. Product need evidence
What tells us that this account might have a need in our product?
We usually uncover these signals from deal analysis. In our case, the product need evidence signals are:
Hiring regional VPs of Sales or AEs and enterprise SDRs
Hiring ABM specialist
Having 2+ people with ABM keyword in their profiles
5. Strategic initiatives and challenges
That last pillar helps us to prepare our account narrative and point of view, aka showing “we’ve done our homework and have a solution for you”. It might not be accurate in the beginning (it’s ok), but it, at least, shows your target buyers you understand them and have ideas how to help.
This data includes:
What strategic projects are they investing now relevant to our product? In our case it is planning to launch or refine ABM program, building a global ABM program, regional expansion, or going upmarket.
What’s been changing/trending last year relevant to our product? Why?
Relevant 3rd party signals
What challenges do they face?
What metric do we want to influence on the account level?
How do we plan to impact it?
What can we do uniquely/differently for them?
As you might already guess, most of this information is not available publicly. But without it you can’t really prepare a good account narrative.
We use progressive profiling to constantly engage target buyers and capture the missing insights.
Progressive profiling: how to collect account insights across multiple touchpoints.
Obviously, you won’t be able to collect all the insights in one interaction with the target account. That’s why we always recommend having a mix of time-based and signal-based playbooks (learn more here: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/how-to-create-playbooks-for-long ), and leveraging your current marketing plan.
Every signal or every upcoming activity gives you an opportunity to collect the missing insights. But the way, how you’ll engage cold vs engaged accounts would be completely different.
If you have enough context and are in an active conversation with the buyer, you can reach out directly and ask if they have questions or need help with anything.
If the engagement happened a long time ago, or this is a newly engaged account, you need to fill the gaps in your account knowledge first.
Here is a practical example.
Next week we host a live Account Priorization workshop (you can sign up as well here: https://luma.com/t1b1i39f).
If we’ll look at the account I’ve shared in the beginning of this newsletter, I do not know whether account prioritization is a challenge they are facing. Instead of pitching because of the signal, I’d reach out to their champion directly with this message:
“Hi. Next week we’re hosting an account prioritization workshop. As you have 7 regional teams, I’m wondering how you handle it. Do you have a central framework regional teams adopt, or do you let them run their own process? If yes, how do you maintain account selection quality? P.S. I would be absolutely thrilled to have you and the team on it. It’s a paid workshop, but I can give you free tickets. Just share how many people you’d like to sign up, and their emails.”
This one message does two things at the same time: it nurtures a target buyer and collects a missing insight I can use to prepare a customized ABM project memo for them.
From the same event, we can capture way more private insights by:
Adding a question to the sign up form (E.g. Do you plan to launch an ABM program this year?)
A poll during a webinar (e.g. What’s your biggest challenge with ABM?)
A question on the thank-you page, and many more
When we have all the insights in place, we can build a real account narrative with our point of view, and a personalized engagement plan.
But the best part?
Up to that moment you’ll create brand awareness and build a relationship with your strategic buyers which drastically maximizes your chances to generate a sales opportunity.
TLDR
A lot of B2B companies deal with account blindness. Sales are not aware of marketing engagement with the target accounts, marketing is not aware of sales interactions.
The worst thing happens when AEs, SDRs, or marketers leave the organization and take all account information away.
This way companies lose an opportunity to identify high-quality accounts that are either in-market or ready to engage, and leverage the historical data to create personalized experiences for them.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you’re already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We’ll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.