How to get real value from intent providers

In the ever-evolving landscape of B2B marketing, the role of third-party intent data has become increasingly pivotal. This episode delves into a recent roundtable discussion moderated by Tom Gatten, CEO and Founder of Adzact, featuring insights from industry experts. The discussion explored the integration and efficacy of third-party intent data in account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, highlighting both the opportunities and challenges faced by marketers.

Guests

Amy Bennett, Digital Marketing Manager at Fenergo

Rob Bramley, Demand Generation Manager at GoCardless

Marco Piras, Growth Marketing Manager at Pleo

Let me introduce myself. My name is Tom Gatton. I'm the chief executive and founder of Adz Act, which is a new B2B ad platform. Can I ask you, Amy, just to give a sentence on yourself?

I'm Amy, I am digital marketing manager at Finagho, and my main responsibility is our account based marketing strategy.

Thank you. Rob.

Name is Robert Bramley. I'm the demand generation manager here at Gocardless for the UK and Ireland. My main area of focus is on our corporate and enterprise business accounts. Focusing as well on ABM strategy. But as well as looking at the wider accounts within those growth engines.

Thank you. And Marco.

I'm on the growth marketing team at Pleo. Running experiments on sales sequences by using a number of tools and and processes excited to talk about all things ABM and personalization.

Amy, it would be really interesting to hear you talk. Just tell quickly your story about, the kind of strategies you found that have just been working really, really well.

We kind of launched ABM within our business properly a little over a year ago. And we use Demand Base as our third party. Intent tool. And we found it's such a useful place to kind of bring sales and marketing together. We can see the same data. We can see data from marketing activities and sales activities. And that intent data from across the web. And it's just been a really, really useful tool for us as we're kind of, bringing the strategy to life, to really, help sales and marketing to start to speak the same language, which is definitely, I think, a challenge in account based marketing.

Is there anything that you found that you can use it for that you weren't expecting to be able to use it for?

I've used a few kind of third party intent tools, like throughout my career. So when I came into using it here at Feinberg, I don't think that there was too much that I didn't expect. But, we have found that, it's been really useful across sort of more teams, and we would have expected. So, you know, BDR team is obvious. They're super engaged with it across the business and marketing. But we've now got like our partners team on there as well. It's not just a tool that we can use for account based marketing. We really do have teams across the business kind of using it. Our customer marketing team, to really allow us to sort of understand what someone's engagement is at the moment.

How do you define the audiences? Do you have an understanding of your total addressable market, or are you starting from intent and looking at the companies that are engaging most as a primary signal?

Because of sort of who we target as a business, we have a pretty, solid kind of target account list. So our TAM is very well defined. We don't use it for prospecting so much as prioritization. It does sometimes show us people that we wouldn't be expecting so much, who are engaging, but most heavily, it's to look at both prioritization of those target accounts and then for our account based marketing, to really understand who in a business is engaging what it is they're engaging with and how we can create more personalized campaigns off the back of that data.

I know that Gocardless and Pleo have a broader offering as well. You know, you mentioned ABM, Rob, so that suggests to me that you have a subset of your TAM that perhaps slightly larger, more valuable prospects that you're targeting in a more specific way. But both of you, both Pleo and Gocardless, have a much larger total addressable market, which would be hard to non controversially name, you know, one by one. Do you use it as a primary signal. Do you use engagement third party intent as a primary signal to identify businesses that might fundamentally be a good fit? Or are you loading in audiences into these tools from somewhere else?

We've got about 85,000 odd merchants at this point. That's probably more than that. Now. Naturally, within that, there's kind of different approaches to those market sizes. If you're dealing with like an SMB that's only got a couple of employees. The focus will be entirely different. And so the company or organization structure is, you know, more defined to address them in the sense that, you know, if you're working on SMBs, you're almost treating it more like it's a B2C action, in terms of onboarding them. So they tend to be using a lot more organic tools, you know, like your SEO and your organic social and a lot of, like, web traffic ads as well. We're a lot more targeted in what we do in the upper echelons of business sizes. So we're loading in specific audiences, as you say, we've got ABM splits, whether that's by like company size, the vertical that they sit in. A bunch of different aspects. The third party intent side is, to your point, Amy, like ours, feeds into more of the decision making. Sometimes that happens behind the scenes. So we're talking with our product marketing managers, who are looking at some of the third party intent signals, you know, within the payments landscape, some areas, or some verticals might show interest in, you know, particular parts of the payments landscape, direct debit, open banking, these kind of things. And that's helping drive kind of content and messaging that leads into how we engage on a first party side. I guess the caveat with third party data is you've got like a large volume, so you've got to kind of wade through it to find reliable signals of buyer intent. So I think that's why it helps drive some of the first party campaigns that we make. But we definitely don't treat it as a source of truth. You know, it's more to aid, what we already know when expertise.

When you started working with third party intent, you thought that it should be able to do or you hoped that it would be able to do that you found more difficult than you expected.

I guess that depends on the tool. I mean, I've used sixth sense and Demand base. I think that they both have got a lot of benefits to provide us, I think demand base. I've found there's been difficulties on the reporting aspect it's difficult to track down the clarity. Obviously, it's got to sink into a million different things, including quite, sometimes robust CRM like Salesforce. And so I know that it becomes a real headache for your marketing ops team, to get kind of like an efficient account scoring account funnel system in place. So we found a couple of headaches around that, and then routing it through to like reporting dashboards, things like looker, that sort of thing. So I don't necessarily pin that on the tool itself. I think that's just a teething problem of anything within a tech stack. I think like the winner of these ad platforms will be the ones that can, can basically create like ease of integration and ease of. Providing clarity on those sort of details because I think it's difficult for, users to kind of be enabled and to educate themselves onto how to best use the platforms. Obviously, we've all got csms but try and support, but sometimes we don't even have the questions for the answers we want. So, you know, there's a lot of, difficulties that we experience. But yeah, I'd probably say reporting is the main area of difficulty we're having at the moment.

It's very easy to get into integration. Hell, when you have a number of different platforms. I mean, they're very ambitious with the number of different platforms they have to integrate into. And of course, that's kind of the whole point. But it's a difficult challenge, of course. Marco, tell us about your experience. Things that have gone well, things that have been challenges. And then perhaps we can talk about how we've attempted to use third party intent to feed into personalization.

Absolutely. So on third party intent, I will say that we use it as a data point, but it's also for us, not the primary data point. We don't have sales follow a process whereby they leverage a third party intent. Often. Sometimes third party intent becomes something interesting for us, and it happens on a very ad hoc basis where we might have, some information, on some companies that tell us that they are likely interested in Pleo and then we use that piece of information, but it's not part of a formal process. It doesn't happen on a recurring basis. It's been more ad hoc. With that being said, we are interested in using third party intent as one of the data points we use and as part of our journey in becoming a company more mature from an ABM standpoint. I think that all companies in the space of ABM wants to to send the right message to the right audience. This tends to be a theme across vendors, and every vendor does it in a different way. So we don't use any specific vendor. We are just very much concerned about the quality of the data we have in our CRM. And then we build our own process to do six sense or demand based like scoring, where you're able to say, these accounts are at this stage of the journey, these other accounts are at another stage. And that scoring model is fed by data points, which might be third party intent signals, or they can be other data points. And we can use these data points to then write the message. But it's all it's all custom built internally. The vendors we rely on are more, focused on giving us data than, providing us with anything else. When we have data points around third party content that we think are good for us and can be a good signal that we leverage those data points. It sounds like, Marco, you're taking more sort of an atomized approach and looking down at the fundamentals of the data. You mentioned using Clay.com I think, to Joaquin, which is, possibly more on the do it yourself kind of side of things than something like Apollo or Zoominfo, which attempts to create a kind of a, a centralized space to do absolutely everything. Clay is kind of getting data from lots and lots of different data providers and provided it in little atomic. You know, little bits that you can pay one by one for. And so it sounds like when you're when you're thinking about third party intent or first party intent, you're building your own scoring system and trying to get the highest quality sort of feeds one by one rather than a central platform.

Yeah, it is fair. We currently do it in, in HubSpot because that's the, tool we use for everything. I particularly like, Clay and I've been, sponsoring it internally. It's not a tool we use just, yet we we use HubSpot. And I believe that Clay can do some things, that HubSpot do it in a complicated way, in an easier way. So I think it can be a layer before HubSpot. We currently do, everything with HubSpot. So the data that we get it in HubSpot immediately, and then any anything that we do with it is done within HubSpot. What I would like to do would be to have Clay as a layer, before HubSpot, so we can clean up the data and then send it over to HubSpot. That would include, scoring. Personalized messages, for example. It's certainly cleaning up, the data we get from the different vendors and all and all sorts of things. But it can be done with HubSpot as well. It becomes getting the data, into HubSpot, from the different vendors and then creating rules via workflows, to then use the data.

Let's talk about personalization then. This was, you know, the theme that came out of all the conversations was what we're trying to do here is, as Marco says, get the right message for the right audience. Amy, it sounds like to a large extent, you are working in partnership with the sales team here and their relationships with people and at least companies that they know already. And it's more about kind of exposing what marketing know to allow sales to act appropriately. Would that be fair?

We've been quite heavily going after our enterprise accounts in North America over the last year. So, you know, their existing relationships, the sales teams have been in contact with these businesses for years. It's a case of using the data and insights that they have from their conversations over the years. And then just layering that third party, data on top to really create those personalized outreaches. We found it really useful, you know, understanding, what it is they're viewing on our website, who is viewing what, so we can understand what our different personas are interested in.

And then, yeah, looking at that intent data as well, I think one of the challenges we've found with the intent data is obviously you have to load the keywords in, and it's making sure that we have the right kind of set of keywords there that are not too broad because like, people in these businesses are going to be searching for the general topic areas across the business. So we need to make sure that they're not too broad. And we're actually getting insights there in what people are searching on the web. But that they're not too focused so that we do actually get data. I wouldn't necessarily say that we've got it exactly right yet, but that's definitely an area that we're working on at the moment so that we can start to get the most value, from understanding what people are looking for across the web.

Can I ask you about the challenge of identifying the individual's interests over time? So you mentioned, who's viewing what. So this is often a complaint about, Intent platforms is that, you know, I say to sales, oh, look, you know, JP Morgan appears to be interested in our content and sales. Say, what am I going to do with that, mate? There's 20,000 people at JP Morgan. So tell us how you've managed to mitigate some of those challenges.

That's definitely a challenge that we've had. And we will continue to have because we're targeting. Very large businesses. A huge thing is sales and BDR have worked really, really hard to, stay on top of data cleanliness. So as much as possible, we want to know who these people are. BDR have worked really, really hard to kind of map out who our buying committees are. And we've been able to obviously get these people, into Salesforce so that we can, understand who is doing what. If we see anonymous data. A lot of it, you know. Yeah, we take with a pinch of salt. You know, we've got analysts, people in much lower job levels that will be looking at our website out of an interest perspective, but not because they are a buyer or are in any way going to influence a purchase decision. A lot of it's been about working out that balance. If we have one anonymous person on our site. That's interesting, but whether they would be a relevant person or not is like kind of irregardless. But if, you know, we're seeing from a specific account a lot of anonymous people coming on our site and perhaps a surge, then we're using that as an indicator of interest. So it's more about the looking at the number of people and if that value, because one person on our site doesn't indicate that they're going to buy but Ten new anonymous people on our website in a week, that indicates that they're interested in us for some reason, that to us kind of shows the value then in what they're doing.

It sounds like the technology Marco is using for personalization is, you know, we're starting to think about a slightly larger scale. So Clay, which is hoping to improve quality sort of basic contact information and background of individuals and then you can use it to write like AI powered, message snippets for every person. And Amy, you're more about empowering the salespeople to have individual conversations where they might already know the individuals there. And Rob perhaps you're somewhere in between. Tell us how you think about this, and how Gocardless is kind of dealing with the two ends of your market.

Yeah, we sit more obviously with me having much more focus on the larger business sizes. We sit more within the, having quite close cadences and report with our sales team as well. As you'd expect, that kind of features within, weekly sort of updates and cadences that we have with teams to clarify, what signals we're seeing within, you know, we have like a set of tier one accounts kind of thing, a must win account. And within those it will be very granular in terms of the signals that we're looking at within them. So, you know, we will be reviewing those deal stories within the DB platform. And looking at, yeah, obviously the anonymous stuff is is helpful. I've noticed from a few, friends in B2B marketing, like people are applying a lot different values to that engagement, in terms of how that contributes to like qualified accounts. I think for us at the moment, it's quite low. It's not considered unless, as you say, there is like a huge amount of individuals that are unknown are showing third party intent. And we can kind of say, right, there's a buying committee of some sort there and we apply a multiplier. As a result of that, I'd say that's kind of a level of customization we are doing is that if we get ten plus, anonymous hits, we are applying multipliers once it gets past that threshold. But prior to that, you know, we're looking at like decimal points worth of engagement minutes or scores or whatever you want to have. Because as you say, it's difficult to truly understand if there is real interest there, if they're just looking up more of the, general or specific payment terms, like we start valuing more when people are visiting pricing pages and stuff like that. Naturally, that's when it gets into, our known realm of data. Not outside of the invisible funnel. In terms of, like a customization that we're running through the third party, I would probably say we have recently launched, quite a successful email campaign that was based off of some third party data groups where we realized we were getting a lot of good search terms, around certain topics around open banking, particularly in this area called, integrated bank payments. From that, we sort of located some key verticals, that were highly engaged through that data. And as a result, we set up some email campaigns that were already existing. If you've got sort of nurture flows within your organizations, but if you, have that marker with on your account record in your CRM. So let's say the, the vertical for purely hypothetical sake is I'm in a finance business. Some of the dynamic content within the email template will tailor to integrated bank payments versus a different piece of, you know, some capsule content that would apply to others. So it was a relatively smart, albeit time consuming, use of the data to make it a little bit more tailored to individuals, within certain buying groups. But as mentioned, I think to to get into that level of granularity, I think we realized in hindsight, you know, you're still being heavily reliant on those kind of search terms and those data, and there's no way of truly proving if the CEO is looking at this kind of data or if it's just, say, junior analysts, which unfortunately make it a lot less important to us.

There are ways if you run ads on LinkedIn, for example, you could run ads just, you could run the same ad just to the CEO and then copy that campaign and run it to the CMO. And then you would see different engagement per company from CMO's CEO. It would be more like buying groups like the marketing team or the sales team. You might be able to get some some indications there. But yeah the IP level you can't of course. What about sales morale and sales kind of buy in for this sort of thing? Amy, I'd be interested to hear your your experience here because we've kind of talked about one of these challenges of how do you communicate the value of third party intent, whilst kind of making it okay that you're not getting this deeper level of of granularity?

We've worked really hard over the last year to kind of build this, strong relationship between marketing and sales, and really align our strategies, so that, you know, we have the same aim. As there always is in every business, there's definitely been, ups and downs, but we really have we've got to a good place where, you know, we are mostly speaking the same language, really understanding each other as teams.

It's little things like I don't think about when I talk about like stats from paid social and stuff, I'll just really quickly rattle off like, oh, we had this many impressions, clicks like page views, etc. And actually like it was by having these conversations that we realized, you know, the sales don't necessarily know what all of these things mean. And so really working together to educate each other on what it is that we mean and what good looks like. Because I might say, you know, we've had 15,000 impressions from a company and they're like, fab, is that good? What does that mean for us? I think definitely having one central place where we can all see, most of the same data is very useful, for how we communicate. That's, first party, content consumption as well. Right? So email opens and website visits as well as the third party stuff.

Yeah. We tend to centrally look at demand based and Salesforce. Now they it doesn't mean that, they see everything. We have yet to pull out. Kind of email opens. You know, you can see if an individual person is opening an email. But like, total email opens or like LinkedIn impressions, for example. That data isn't currently being surfaced to the sales team. You know, the the same as Rob, we have, regular cadences, with our sales teams and that's, you know, where we share that data and discuss it and what it means.

What about, Marco? Maybe you could share with us any flows or techniques that you have found. Work really well using third party intent or, similar sorts of data, especially any flows, any kind of techniques that you didn't expect to work quite as well as they have. That's always really interesting. Any anecdotes you can share there would be super interesting.

Yeah. What we have been doing recently has been to align with the way the sales team works, which is to go industry by industry. That's the kind of thing we do. We don't really go beyond that at the moment, when it comes to, designing. Coordinated efforts with the sales team. And we go industry by industry, and we write sequences as the marketing team, and we have them tested against the sequences that the sales team writes. And the goal is not to see who wins. The goal is to see what content wins. So we can then run more experiments and continue to learn.

As Amy was saying, have a common language about what success means, because I found sometimes that the sales team, especially if they've got a relationship with a company or they feel like they have a relationship with some people or a company already, might sometimes dismiss some of the more statistical evidence because, as we all know, it is a great feeling that your knowledge of a personal relationship trumps everything else. But have you been able to kind of establish and get an agreement on what experimental outcomes actually mean and what success looks like?

It's been difficult to do it at the sales rep level. It's been easier to get that alignment the sales manager level harder to get the alignment of the sales director level. So generally speaking, hard to have everyone aligned around the language and the work. It definitely got us going. I'm definitely happy of the experiments we are running, but if you ask the same question to SDR so many other people in my in marketing, as SDR managers or a sales manager and sales director, I think you get different answers. I think there's a there's a long way to go there. Something that has been helpful in the past for me. It's been to define. The key metrics. One metric more important than anything else. And then look at the progress against those metrics together in a no judgmental space where space really means a meeting where everyone looks at the metrics. We can see what's the progress that we are making. We're making against the goals and then we take it from there.

What's an example of one of those metrics. An easy one would be meetings. For me it would be, contacts are shared with sales team, and for them it would be, calls made. That's like one example of three metrics. Where one is shared across the teams, which is meetings. But then there are other two that are more team specific and I think it's really key to have a space where people can look at the progress against those metrics without feeling pushed too much. And there can be open discussion around, like, what's slowing you down or preventing you from hitting your goals. And then you can take one week to work on, what the output of the discussion has been and then look at the metrics again.

Thank you, Marco. Anyone else got any thoughts about particular flows that have surprised you with how well they're working at the moment?

What I mean is techniques or strategies or, kind of flows of content. You talked about events, Rob, and how important they have proven to be in kind of, bringing together, strategy around ABM. I guess a flow of a buyer through a series of experiences.

I will probably have to pivot away from the third party element of this, but I, I don't mind that obviously. It's only just one compartment of a much bigger process that we're all working on here. But yeah, I mean from an ABM perspective, on the event side. We've had some success quite recently, with trying to change up the game of how we do our hosted events. I mean, you know, there tends to be that split, right? You do some in the field, we get the most success out of like, the paper meeting bookers. We're not really looking for like, high footfall, high traffic booth kind of, events at the moment. We're looking for kind of like targeted accounts. Essentially a lot of these events will kind of give you an opportunity to have like 20 pre-booked meetings with like targeted accounts. So that's a home run for us. Like we send an AE or an SDR there. They get the meeting in, usually converts the opportunity or demo same day. So it's just kind of like an easy one for us to get a return on and usually like the pipeline ROI on that is quite efficient. On the other side, on the hosted side, I've only been in this role for about six months, but I did my first event, that I wanted to just sort of take a punt on where we kind of moved away from, because I find a lot of events, particularly in the B2B world, seem to be quite samie. It's always like, here's a high bar and a panel and that's your lot kind of thing, especially within the payments landscape, super consistent across that vein. So we wanted to try something a little bit different. So we leaned a little bit more into the experiential side. I think if you can do something that's a little bit different, fun, but ties into the content somewhat, I think you'll end up getting a much higher registration rate and engagement rate, particularly within like key accounts. You're still doing customized invites and messaging around it. We did an event called Go Faster with Gocardless. It was at the, F1 bar, over in Saint Paul's. So we had like a private suite, a bunch of racing simulators in there, and we had like a leaderboard and was doing, you know, like lap times and giving away, like, you know, like a fancy five star dinner for people that finished well. And, you know, we saw on the feedback surveys that, you know, it was kind of a mix between some people going for the content of like how you can get faster with your payments as well as other people. That said, like, I just came here because it looked like a lot of fun and enjoyed and we got like a great return on tier one accounts registered for that. Again, that's very far off where the conversation started. But I think that that's where you can get value from events, if you want to apply, maybe a sort of slight pivot to pose on. The theme there is named invitees. So in both cases you are going after specific named individuals. You're inviting them to an experience you have reason to believe they're going to enjoy. I saw in your well, I don't know whether it's exactly in your space, but paddle worked out that a very large proportion of their buyers were of a certain age group and invited them all to a blink182 concert, which I think works quite well just because they'd worked out the demographic quite well. Bentley come on the podcast recently, talking about the events that they do, which is exactly, as you say, much more experiential. They want women because the majority of buyers of Bentleys are female now, apparently. They want to focus on, you know, green energy basically, and sustainability. So they did this event in Brighton and took them all on a sailing yacht to a wind farm. And then, I don't know, it was this sort of experience. And each purchase of a Bentley, of course, is worth, you know, upwards 150, £250,000. And it made me think in the B2B world, of course, sometimes the purchases of your product, Amy, are probably of that, you know, of that order. But we rarely give those sorts of experiences to people that we kind of want to engage with anyway.

I can share real quick about two sort of flows, that have worked really well for me. Our previous companies, they're more for startups than I think, for established companies. That's why, I'm not running the same type of initiatives at Pleo, but, I think they slide in well and fit with the conversation around third party intent as well. There are two campaigns that they run in the past, where I reached out to some people, with a series of emails. And then I was, passing on the, the ones who reply to the sales team. In both of these campaigns, the angle was, the feedback angle where you're asking people for feedback on your product or to learn more about their experience with another product. And then the conversation would evolve into a sales conversation when these people were interested, obviously, but also because these people were the right fit from, the information we had about them. So it would usually go like they would reply to my emails. Then I would share them with an SDR and like introduce them to the SDR. The SDR would have a call, then the call would go well and I would have a call, and then finally they would become customers and they initial audience was sourced via third party. Data in that one audience was people who left a negative review for competitors, and the messages were super personalized, and they were addressing the reasons why they didn't like the competitor. And the end goal was, again, feedback. Let us know more. We're building a similar tool. We don't want to make the same mistakes. And the other audience was complimentary solutions. So I would find people who talked on social media about the complimentary solution. And I would reach out to those people telling them, hey, you're super happy about this tool. We have a tool that is super complimentary to this one you are using and can like can level up your process if you use them together. And it would go the same way. And like the replay rates were insane. We're talking about very small groups. The first group was around like 100 people. The second group was just 25. But then the replay, the meeting rate was 25%. It was like 1 in 4 would take a meeting. That's why I shared initially that it's better for startups because not necessarily, these numbers work well at the larger company, but for a startup that needs to get customers really fast, this can be super successful.

I think that's a great idea. As you say, it was for small businesses, so totally understand, was that quite like a process wise? Was it a member of your team or yourself kind of going through researching these and passing them on to your kind of outbound sales team? Or was it. I'm just curious to know, like, obviously it's great to understand at these kind of things are scalable and, it's like you're able to scrape that data somehow or like apply them in automations or anything like that. Just keen to know, like what you did process wise. You could scrape it with clay, but, the best startup story. So it was completely unscalable. So it was actually a freelancer in Bangladesh who was doing this work based off of my instructions.

Has anyone tried to use third party intent for this? So you could, in theory, put keywords related to a competitor. You could look at people that are, researching or complementary or related products and then send those accounts messages that you would hope would resonate because they appear to be researching specific topics or competitors.

I'm not personally doing that. We do have intent data signals within our account engagement and account funnel. If they have been looking at particular competitors, there's a minute amount of, engagement score that would be applied because we know that they're potentially in market. In terms of outreach? No, if we were at the point where we knew, that there was a lot of traffic like that, they were engaging with particular products with that company that aligned to ours. We know that there's a high enough frequency, and then it clicks off some kind of, automation or action for someone within sales team to follow up within that topic that's your sweet spot, right? But that's sounds great, but very hard to execute, I think. And then, you know, maybe that's only one topic within one type of automation rule. It just becomes like a massive headache, which when you're, you know, constrained by your resources is not, you know, all that doable.

We're not doing that at the moment at Finagho. But in a previous role we did similar, but through Google ads versus using the intent data. So if somebody searched for a competitor on Google ads, if they clicked on our ad, we would use the UTM parameters, dynamically in the content. To, pull through to, personalized landing pages. Kind of speaking, us versus the competitor, for example. You could probably use intent data for that. But like Rob said, it would be quite an onerous process. I think using intent data, it would be even more manual probably. Which would be, a lot of work.

It depends how much data you had, I suppose. So like in a perfect world, if the intent providers gave you the entire browsing history of all your prospects, like you probably could have enough information to mine. Okay. What messages worked really well for this client when they became a client, and then apply that to other people with similar patterns. But given that you're taking a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of people's browsing activity, and particularly I'd be interested to know how it's working for you in different countries around the world. Because I've seen elsewhere that I found it very difficult to apply the same techniques in Europe that I'm able to do in the US. There just isn't enough data to do that sort of thing. Have you guys found the same thing? Geographic wise.

Definitely. With the bigger businesses we're going after in North America, there's loads of data, probably too much data, actually. So it just becomes a sea of noise. And you really you have to work hard to pull out what you really need and can get from the data. Like, for example, businesses we go after in the Dach region, there's a lot less data, a lot less activity. From them, they behave very differently online. We don't get as much engagement on social, for example, which means that we're getting less data come through. It's definitely different depending where in the world they are. Each come with their own challenges. One of our bigger challenges would be when we're looking at a global account, really trying to dig into where activity is because, you know, like all third party data, it's not 100% accurate. So we might have data coming through in Salesforce saying that they're based in EMEA, where demand based might be telling us that they're based in APAC. You really have to dig deep to make sure that your data is accurate there.

Just horrendous pollution of volume of clicks and impressions from an increasingly small group of businesses. The last 50 companies we've analysed LinkedIn activity. 32% of their spend on LinkedIn ads was on just 100 common companies across all these 50 businesses. And there were, Amy, the ones that you're talking about, a really big one was the US Air Force. They have tens of thousands of employees there all around the world, and they are a very deep pool of kind of idle time. Apparently, these people are spending a lot of time hanging around on LinkedIn. I do sometimes wonder how many of them are Chinese spies as well, but apparently working for the US military, and they're spending a lot of time on LinkedIn messaging people, and they get served a huge number of ads. I suspect it's the same thing where you have a very large American business that has tens of thousands of employees around the world. There's quite a lot of engagement because they are a big fraction of the population of the world.

Definitely. There's hundreds of thousands of people. If we're targeting a big bank, for example, this might be someone that works in a branch of the bank. And we need to know, like, really try and identify these people to bring them out, and sort of exclude them. But that type of person is not never going to be known to us. It's a sea of data and really trying to work out where you can get the most value from it without putting too much into it. You know, the third party data is very important and it helps to build a much bigger picture. But our own first party data is obviously much more valuable. Talking about first party and third party data? Have you seen? Effects of the Digital Markets Act in the European Union, for example, which in theory should allow publishers or should force publishers to allow people to opt in to link their personal data to advertising and intelligence platforms like third party intent. But that only really started to come in 2024. Has anyone seen any change in the level of engagement or intent information they're able to get from the European Union?

No, I wouldn't say we've noticed any change at all.

Me neither. But I usually get the feedback from vendors that there is less data on Europe. That's a common pattern.

I saw a sort of customer success managers are keeping things from us. It's not applied in the UK yet. But I think there is similar regulation coming in here at some point. All right, we're just coming into the last five minutes or so now of this session. Would anyone give any advice to anyone considering implementing a third party intent platform? Any kind of considerations, perhaps, that they should have before. But before doing a demo or taking the plunge or working out where it fits.

Yeah, I would think some of the key advice, right, that comes around bringing in a tool like that is to make sure you've got the rest of the infrastructure around it really polished. So when you think about like having a pretty rigid account funnel, good account segmentation, making sure that's all coordinated with appropriate campaigns, in my mind that sort of aligns to like having awareness stages, as I'm sure you guys have adopted in the past and like finding segments of like high fit, high value accounts. All of that is super important to have covered first. And then I think in order to get the real value, from the third party data, just understand how it contributes to the sort of wider group of inputs and levers that you might be activating within your digital marketing campaigns and demand gen. As long as you've covered those areas and you've got good, kind of grading, scoring that applies within the third party and third party data. I think then you can start to get value of it and you'll see it applied throughout deal stories. If you're being overly reliant on third party data, I would say that's potentially a red flag for you. I mean, the first party is first for a reason. And you want to make sure you've got a known person engaging in a known way in particular areas which can help, drive those sales led conversations. Which a third party that will obviously support in qualifying those accounts and getting them over that line, which makes them more aware to the sales team. And it can potentially help with that first touch outreach for them. But again, I wouldn't advise anybody to see it as like the Holy Grail it's quite interesting that everyone has described how they are defining their audience. And it's obviously hasn't been the third party intent as the primary way of defining the term clearly.

To add to Robs, I would say understand what your use cases are going to be. I think Rob mentioned earlier, about that. But, when you look at something like Demandbase or SixSense there is so much data and it can become very confusing very quickly. I do find that the vendors tend to come to us and say, you know, what are your use cases as opposed to really handing out exactly how you should use that data. So just really know what you want to get out of a platform, with third party data. So that you can get the most value out of it for yourself. On top of these two things, I would say. Talk to the salespeople and understand what their needs are, not just how they are used to work, which is what they will ask for, but more what they need and how they like working, what motivates them, what makes their work enjoyable. And then you can design a set of processes and a tool stack, that addresses those needs. I think that's really important because it's hard to get adoption from sales if they don't feel like they've been heard. And, and the solution is addressing their needs. So I found that to be important.

Thank you so much for being with us today. This has been a really insightful conversation, I think, and for anyone listening to this who's in the process of working out where third party intent fits in their stack, I think this has given them a really good way of understanding how to think about the primary way of defining a total addressable market. Different strategies in which this can impact. And all the supporting technology and processes, really an alignment that are necessary to get the most from it. There are also some just fantastic ideas come out of today. I hope this has been, added some value to you. Thank you all so much for being on today, and we will speak with you all in the coming week to make sure you're happy with the report we're providing. And thank you to all our listeners.