Technology vendors marketing to B2B e-commerce companies must find ways to personalize their campaigns to reach the right contacts with pertinent information related to a prospect’s website.

William Wickey

Online shopping is easier and more popular than ever—just look at the massive sales logged on Amazon.com’s recent Prime Day. But when it comes to business-to-business e-commerce, technology vendors targeting corporate customers face many challenges, including:

  • Contact data for prospects is very difficult to find
  • Vendors are unclear about the markets they’re selling to
  • Vendors are not sure about the types of prospects they’re selling to
  • Vendors are not clear about what products they are selling

Companies that provide e-commerce software and services are relatively sophisticated in their approach to targeting prospects. Many of them use BuiltWith and other services to identify the website technology that prospects are already using, as well as tools to calculate the gross merchandise value of a prospect’s online transactions. These steps help e-commerce technology vendors identify companies that match their ideal customer profile, or ICP.

It all starts with good data. That is the essential ingredient for the success of any e-commerce sales and marketing program.

What the e-commerce technology market needs are ways to help sellers find contact data for the right prospects and to gather custom account information to better organize prospects into market segments. By dividing a large total addressable market into segments that share similar characteristics and pain points, marketing and sales teams can conduct scalable outbound campaigns that contain relevant messaging without having to hand-customize for every single account.  It all starts with good data. That is the essential ingredient for the success of any e-commerce sales and marketing program.

To be an effective seller, you need to know who you are targeting, what you are saying in sales pitches, where you are saying it, and when you are saying it.  We can break this down a bit by understanding the most important three data points—what I call demographic, firmographic and technographic—that you need to know to boost your B2B sales.

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  1. The Demographic data point: title/role, seniority

The most important demographic data is a contact’s title or role because it explains how each person fits into an organization.  According to a report by Forrester Research, nearly 66% of B2B marketers identified engaging key decision makers as their top challenge. Understanding this data helps you determine who has the influence in the decision-making process.  When researching this data, things to consider include who will use your product, who will pay for your product, and who influences the decision to pay or use your product.  Knowing this information allows you to focus resources and streamline messages to the right people in an organization.

One way sales teams can identify this information is by drawing the connection between high-volume e-commerce marketplace sellers on platforms such as Amazon, eBay, etc., and their official business information, by looking at seller profiles and contact information on their websites or social media. This type of research is resource-intensive and a continuous effort, but accurate contact information is essential for outbound prospecting.

Shipping location can offer a clue to help identify prospects. Another method is to identify online seller websites that all use a common technology (such as BuiltWith) or use Stripe payments, and then the sales teams can search “About” pages for names, and look those names up on LinkedIn.  For a less-time consuming approach, sales teams can also buy this data from providers, such as LeadGenius, ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg or Dun & Bradstreet.

  1. The Firmographic data point: size and type of company

Next you must be aware of “firmographic” data points. A company’s size or annual revenue is an important data point for segmenting and targeting accounts. Companies of a similar size have similar structures, decision makers, capabilities, organizational red tape, budgets, pain points, etc.

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Generally, revenue-generating teams executing a B2B strategy sell into more than one market by company size (small, mid-market or enterprise) and/or industry vertical. And, they tend to pitch several product offerings to several groups of buyers.

Roles and seniority of contacts will vary as a company grows, and the department you may sell into will vary based on the size of the company and product offering. The role of a marketing director in a 50-person company is much different from that of a 2,000-person company.

Different industries may have different structures as well, beyond a company’s size.  A key component for success with B2B sales is well-defined messaging to the diverse needs of an organization’s decision-making panel.

  1. The Technographic data point: Custom technology needs

As sales professionals try to figure out how to better segment prospects into targeted groups, there are many data points related to their interests in products that sellers should consider. Depending on the seller’s products (or marketing/sales process), having just a few of these could be the key to effective segmentation of prospects for outbound targeting and messaging.

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For example, take a business selling an e-commerce tool designed to convert happy customers into advocates. It could choose to frame an outbound email sequence around how well a prospect’s products are currently being reviewed by customers on a platform like eBay or Amazon. If the seller has lots of good product reviews, this may prove to be a good indicator that it  will adopt and have success with the advocate tool.

Depending on what is being sold, one of the following data points related to a prospect’s e-commerce operations could be relevant when communicating with a prospect. Any of these data points can be merged into automated email sequences to create personalized messaging that, compared to generic email templates, is more likely to resonate better with a prospect.

* most positively reviewed product on Amazon

* highest-priced item in their own online store

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* average price of products

* shipping options

* video platforms used

* average number of video views

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* total number of videos

* shopping cart software

* internet hosting service

* seller’s business location

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* seller’s shipping location

* social media engagement

* email hosting provider

* SEO descriptions

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* widgets used

* web traffic

Identifying custom data points helps you see unique attributes that speak to intent and hopefully a propensity to buy.  Custom data helps answer key questions that will guide a winning messaging and segmentation strategy.

With a strong understanding of these three data points—demographic, firmographic and technographic—you can use the information to help strategically boost your B2B sales efforts.  Highly personalized messaging to multiple decision makers can make the difference in closing accounts more quickly and increase the customer lifetime value.

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William Wickey is senior content marketing manager at LeadGenius, a provider of  lead generation data and market intelligence for e-commerce sales and marketing teams. Prior to LeadGenius, he consulted on book launches and customer acquisition for such New York Times Best Sellers authors as Ryan Holliday, Robert Greene and Neil Pasricha. Follow him on Twitter @LeadGenius.

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