How to Reach the Right Contacts with the Right Messages w/ Victoria Godfrey [Episode 388]

Joining me on this episode of Accelerate! is my guest Victoria Godfrey, CMO of Avention, now part of Dun and Bradstreet. Among the many topics that Victoria and I discuss are the various ways Avention is helping drive revenue and growth for companies by harnessing target account and contact information. We also discuss account based everything, and how aligning marketing with sales, following the data, helps improve the number of closed deals.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Avention works with company and contact business data. Victoria joined Avention a couple of years ago, after a career in marketing. Avention tools offer B2B data, relative to target accounts and contacts, that help drive revenue and growth.

Avention offers iSell, an easy and effective subscription desktop app that gathers all the information a salesperson needs to go after new accounts and customers, with SWOT analysis, and company and contact information.

Another Avention tool is The Art of the Start, pairing marketing and sales, to pick the best sales qualified accounts. Messaging is tailored to the target account and their contact, focused on getting the right message to the right person.

Victoria’s team uses Avention tools to reach targets by looking at triggers, news alerts, company information, reports, and more, to discover the important drivers and initiatives of the account. Account contacts receive tailored messages.

It is critical for marketing and sales to be aligned, to send a unified message to the account. Reps are responsible for engaging contacts with the aligned message.

When marketing and sales are aligned, they own the funnel together. Marketing owns the top, sales owns the bottom; each influences the other. The revenue is attributed to both. If the CEO is not supportive, alignment is unrealized.

At Avention, Victoria, and the head of sales spend a lot of time in each other’s offices, discussing mutual needs, budgets, efficiencies, and results. Data and Martech tools empower transparency and alignment.

Marketing and sales use data tools and experienced judgment to pick accounts together, to assign resources, and create the unified messaging point. Frequency depends on the sales cycle and strategy. Avention does this, ongoing.

Because of the intensive use of resources, you will use parallel paths for sales: some are account based, and some use conventional sales efforts.

Victoria discusses data-driven sales. Data has made great changes in marketing, and martech has boomed over the last decade or so. The same is true in sales. Data drives revenue growth. To neglect data is to lose opportunity.

CRM data is being used by some companies mainly for reporting results. More emphasis should be paid to using data to engage enterprises and drive more sales.

Avention also offers DataVision, that combines your data with Avention data, to segment clearly the key and top-priority accounts.