BACKGROUND
When I started as CMO at Talend, we had a pipeline issue in every region (North America, EMEA, and APAC), and across every segment (Small Business, Mid-market, and Enterprise). I was also facing a budget reduction, so I wasn’t going to be able to spend my way out of this problem. It was going to require focus and prioritization, and the best way to clearly identify the best, most repeatable opportunities was to lean into data.

As recent research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has shown that only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market at any given quarter, it was even more clear that I’d need to be shrewd in how and where I invested the company’s limited resources (like time and money).

My logic was that if we could find the most engaged buyers that aligned to our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and prioritize the company’s limited resources intelligently, we would enjoy more operational efficiency and earn the best chance at building pipeline successfully. And if we build a repeatable integrated marketing strategy, or an engine, this could turn into a source of competitive advantage.

Enter intent-based marketing. Intent-based marketing is one of the more exciting innovations in marketing automation that sits at the intersection of AI, automation, and digital behavior monitoring. It allows marketing teams to identify organizations that are actively searching and engaging with content and messages that align to the products and solutions that the company sells. Some technologies will also segment the engaged buyers based on how much activity happens around different topics from each business.

Unifying the work that my team had done on building an data-driven ideal customer profile (ICP) with the definitive account targeting models that are used to direct Sales teams to specific target accounts, I led my team to build a machine that identified which accounts were the best fit for our products, overlaid that with a finite number of target accounts in each region and segment, and organized the information in a way that was simple for our Sales teams to act on quickly.

Despite the budget reductions that we faced when I stepped into role, within 12 months the marketing organization was outperforming key marketing targets from the previous year. Most importantly, we were attaining pipeline model targets across every region and segment. Intent-based marketing was a critical part of the overall equation to drive the growth engine that was needed to support quota.