7 Data-Driven Reasons Why B2B Demand Gen Fails 3. THESE NUMBERS ARE ALWAYS CHANGING An often overlooked but critical aspect of data is time. Time raises essential questions such as, “When will this company be ready to buy a new accounting system?” or “When will this company be ready to expand into international For many B2B sellers, markets?” Velocity, a related concept, is also important. Some companies move the prospect’s direction quickly while others move slowly. and velocity matter more than its current For many B2B sellers, the buyer’s direction and velocity matter more than its state. current state. But even the simplest form of temporal information, trend data, is difficult to find. And if the underlying metrics relating to a company’s current state are inaccurate, computing accurate trend data is even more difficult. Temporal data is critical in B2B sales and marketing because it can unearth “sales triggers” or signals that a company is ready to buy a particular product or service. A sales trigger for one B2B seller might be a sharp increase in headcount, for instance. Conversely, a sales trigger for another B2B seller might be a decrease in headcount. To obtain any sense of trend you need at least two data values at different points in time. Remember when we spoke about 50 trillion points of data a minute ago? If you need an entire snapshot of a company at two different time points, you just doubled the amount of data you need to process. You can see just how much data we need to wrangle in order to gain even a basic picture of how companies change over time. 4. THESE NUMBERS MEAN SOMETHING DIFFERENT TO EVERY SELLER The quality of a B2B lead list is not just a function of the data that describes the buyer—it is also a function of the data that describes the seller. What a seller sells and how they sell it plays a key role in determining who is likely to buy, when they are likely to buy, and what message will move them to buy. This means that two different sellers of the same exact product may get different buyer target recommendations. In fact, we’ve actually seen this phenomenon at LeadCrunch with our own customers. And now if you factor in at least two different time points for the seller, we double our data again. www.leadcrunch.ai 5 www.leadcrunch.com