#5 - Complex Buying Decisions Are Done By Buying Groups. Introducing Patterns of Interest.
In May 2000 the pandemic caused a surge in the volume of customer inquires for many healthcare companies. Contact centers were overwhelmed, creating longer hold times and and increasingly frustrated consumers. Trying to address the increase traffic by adding people to the contact center wasn’t sustainable.
Consider this scenario: In the spring of 2020 a healthcare executive holds an urgent internal meeting with their team to discuss what they were going to do about the surge of inquiries stressing their operations. A commitment was made that fixing the problem quickly was the teams top priority.
Minutes after the meeting ends, a Client Experience Director eager to find a solution Googles “virtual assistant customer care” and self-explores to the IBM’s Customer Care website where they download a white paper that explains how IBM has solved this issue at another company and the business case.
The Director shares the white paper with all the attendees of the meeting, most of which visit the website and download the white paper right away.
Let’s explore two scenarios of what happens next.
Scenario 1 - The “Lead-Centric” Approach to Scoring Leads (Hint: Outdated, Broken)
Most inbound marketing scoring systems are designed to be “lead-centric” or focused on individual journeys through the demand funnel. Advanced analytics score the individual person and their activity based on several factors to calculate a lead score. That lead score drives the way the lead is routed and prioritized response.
Typically, the following attributes are used to calculate the lead score.
Company attribute information - industry, size, geography
Person attribute information - title, is the person in the CRM already
Activity information - number of activities, time spent on website, quality of activity (i.e. trial vs syndicated marketing)
The higher the score the more “important” the lead. For example, a target buyer at a target company requests an order quote creating a high scoring lead, often identified as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). The MQL routes to a Business Development Rep (BDR) who is tasked with responding in minutes. On the other hand, a student visiting the website receives a lower lead score that triggers an automated digital nurture email and often isn’t shared with sales.
The limitation is that these systems only look at one person’s activity at a time.
The other drawback of the “lead-centric” approach is the focus is only on the individual Marketing Qualified Lead - the single packet of info that is sent to the Business Development Rep (BDR) or digital seller. There is no context to who else viewed the information or contextual insights that would be valuable to the marketing and sales team on how customers interact and share the content.
In the Pandemic Customer Care example, the marketing system scores each individual persons activity with a medium score that doesn’t create urgency or signal a broader level of interest because each person’s score is calculated independently. Unless the customers is persistent and reaches out to the seller, the activity and interest goes largely unnoticed. In the worse case, the healthcare company is contacted from a competitors sales team who engages and ultimately wins the business.
Scenario 2- The “Buying Group” Approach to Scoring Leads (Hint: Best of Class)
Unlike the “lead-centric” approach, the Buying Group approach considers the engagement of multi people from the same company around a single product area.
“The best buying signal you will ever get is the presence of multiple individuals from the same organization researching your solutions at the same time”
Source: Your Buyer Is A Group, Not A Person. What Are You Doing About It?, Kerry Cunningham, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Alerting that multiple people in the same company, or Buying Group, engages with content demonstrates a much stronger signal than if each person who was active was scored individually missing the pattern.
Terry Flaherty, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester, and the other amazing people at Forrester have been a great partners to me and key contributors to my thinking in this area. Terry, also affectionately known as Dr. Waterfall, is an expert and leading thinker in the modern day demand funnel and buying groups. He recently released a 4 part blog series on why MQLs are over - why marketing qualified accounts are wrong approach and why it's all about the opportunity, that I highly recommend for anyone interesting in going deeper in this area. Link here.
IBM has been on the leading edge of moving from a “lead-centric” approach to a Buying Groups approach. Ari Sheinkin and the Performance Marketing team have created a Pattern of Interest engine named Athena. Athena and Pattern of Interests considers all the activities of a company for a product category over time to identify multi-activity patterns. The Patterns of Interest provides alerts to the sales teams to signal the activity of the Buying Group. The Patterns of Interest have resulted in more opportunities, shorter sales engagements, and more value to the customer and sales team.
In the Pandemic Customer Care example, a buying group approach would alert sellers that multiple people from that same company (and likely from that same meeting) are showing coordinated activities in a short period of time providing a stronger signal than individual MQLs to help inform seller outreach. Instead of a medium score for each individual that often goes no where, the Pattern of Interest raises the awareness of the Buying Group that there is a strong signal to alert and drive the follow up. The seller now has a prioritized alert and also has valuable information based on the Buying Group dynamics - who was involved, what activity was involved, who was first and possibly share the information, who did they share with, etc. Through targeted messaging and activities, the team provides value to the customer and eventually builds enough trust to progress the opportunity and earn the business.
I made up the details of the healthcare company story above, but it was heavily influenced by the work that IBM is doing with CVS Health around Customer Care. Click here for more information on this use case and how IBM helped CVS keep up with the Covid surge.
Leading marketing and sales teams are shifting from focusing on the activity of one person to thinking about the Buying Group. I still see an outdated mentality that sellers think that creating opportunities from inbound interest is the job of marketing and digital sales, but it is not. Sellers need to be aware of the value of these patterns and know where to look for signals and the relationships within the Buying Group to be intelligent about how they drive their outbound efforts.
Thanks for sharing this article, Ayal. I agree entirely about the deficiencies of MQLs. Preoccupation with generating MQLs probably wastes more marketing money and effort than any other single cause. If companies were to track how many MQLs actually convert to revenue, most will find the number is less than 1%. The juice is not worth the squeeze. Yet companies keep squeezing harder.
Ayal thank you for this insightful article. You have so clearly articulated the importance of focusing on the Buying Group and where to look for signals of intent (buying patterns).