How to cut cost with Dreamdata
At Dreamdata, we spend a lot of time talking about how to repeat and scale B2B go-to-market efforts - whether that’s Google Ads, G2, or Sales. But generating revenue is only one side of the coin. Optimising your go-to-market strategy also means cutting waste and cutting cost.
So, in the context of shrinking budgets that we now find ourselves in, we’ve put together this post to offer an overview of how Dreamdata helps cut the cost of your go-to-market.
In this post, we’re outlining how Dreamdata can help tackle the two main areas of waste in the B2B go-to-market. Specifically, how you can:
Cut marketing cost wisely by identifying and scrapping poorly performing channels, campaigns and failed experiments with revenue data.
Slash sales waste by catching dead-end leads early, and leveraging account sales signals.
Cutting cost by dropping the dead weight in your marketing
If there’s a source of waste that most B2B go-to-market teams point to, it is failed (and failing) paid efforts.
As every performance marketer is painfully aware, cost is everywhere. CPC, CPM, CPA, you name it. And the means to drive up that cost are equally ubiquitous: a bid turned wrong, a campaign experiment left too long, or a cheeky branded keyword campaign, it’s all there.
By connecting marketing efforts to pipeline and revenue, Dreamdata offers a much clearer picture of ROI. Meaning that cost, true cost, can much more easily be brought down without disrupting the campaigns and channels that actually do work.
Let’s take a look at a few ways you can do this using the platform.
Shutting off the bad performers - whether individual ads, ad groups or whole channels
The constant monitoring of channels and campaigns is the bread and butter of the modern marketer.
Observe the link between cost, clicks and conversions, and bob’s your uncle, you can cut all the campaigns where cost is high and conversions low.
Simple, right?
Wrong.
What if you’ve got a high-cost campaign that pulls in just 10 leads… but of which 5 are closed with record-breaking deal size? Certainly worth keeping.
Yet, without the link to revenue, you’re unable to make that informed decision.
Cost, true cost, is relative to the revenue that’s generated by the campaign.
For this, you need to connect the dots between (and have relevant attribution modelling in place to assign the relevant value).
From keyword level right through to channel, you need to make sure that cost vs. clicks isn’t what’s driving your cost cutting. Rather, you need to measure Cost per Acquisition, or the higher level Customer Acquisition Cost.
You can dig into our detailed guide for cutting CAC here.
And can check out our #dreamdatarecipe Cutting Cost on your Google Ads with Dreamdata.
Reducing the cost of experiments with time-to-revenue
Perhaps the biggest source of waste for the average B2B marketer - especially performance marketer - is experiment failure.
Experiments are part and parcel of the job. How else can you test keywords and break into potential audiences? Yet, the gambles are often high risk, and always high cost.
The trick is of course to drop experiments as soon as they fail to show any potential. But for that, you need to have your time-to-revenue metric at hand.
That is, you need to know how long it takes for your deals to move from very first touch to closed-won.
In B2B there’s inevitable latency in setting up the experiment and seeing the cash coming in on the other side - of course, this assumes you’ve made that link in the first place (more on that in the next point below).
An experiment will be a flop if you shut it down before it can actually begin to deliver the goods. I.e. there will ONLY be a cost involved.
Or conversely, an experiment that’s left running for too long, with nothing to show for it - in terms of quality pipeline and revenue generated.
When you know your time-to-revenue, or time-to-value, you can much more easily benchmark the length of time to run experiments for, and so stop the waste.
With Dreamdata you’ve got as easy access to this key metric as you can get.
Targeting and audience building to put money only where it needs to be
Doing marketing and not knowing your target audience/ segments like the back of your hand is like handing out cash on the street blindfolded.
Whether with lead gen front or ABM, marketers need to have concrete data on who actually buys the product, and of course, what resonates with them.
That is, you need to know who is mostly likely to buy your product soonest - and you need to get them into your funnel.
This requires a robust, data-based, Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
By collecting data from across the B2B go-to-market tech stack, Dreamdata builds rich account (and user) profiles, enabling a data-driven ICP process.
What’s more, because the data is dynamic, you’ll always have the most up-to-date criteria of your ideal customer profile available.
With this, you’ll be able to ascertain what your most successful recent customers look like.
You might be interested in this post on how to nail your LinkedIn matched audience with Dreamdata.
Discover what content to divest from
But of course, it’s not only paid marketing that’s a cost factor. Content, and brand, although less in-your-face, can equally chomp away at the budget.
Content marketing is the meat-on-the-bones of any go-to-market operation. It provides depth and insight into the product, market and company that would otherwise go amiss. Without content, you can pretty much forget Organic as a channel, and any hope of establishing a trustworthy brand is also pretty much lost - can you tell a content marketer is writing this? #contentmarketingapologistandproud
Yet, content marketing and brand more broadly can easily become a source of budget waste.
The reason for this being that content and revenue, particularly in B2B, are rarely connected. At best, content could be linked to same-session conversions, but quality pipeline and revenue influenced? Forget about it.
Dreamdata’s Content Analytics connects content to revenue. Making it easier to spot the content that is actually influencing pipeline and revenue, and crucially which isn’t.
If there’s a pattern behind the content type or vertical that’s just not resonating with the right audience, it’s time to stop doing it.
Check out our 8 use cases for Content Analytics and our #dreamdatarecipe See the value of SEO in pipeline and revenue generated for more on using Dreamdata to optimise your B2B content marketing.
Slashing waste in Sales with customer journey data
Even with a cost-efficient marketing operation, there is still plenty of room for waste on the sales side of things.
Spending too much time nurturing dead-end leads, missing key ingredients for personalised outreach, and an ill-defined ideal customer profile, all stand to have your sales organisation leaking cash like a sieve.
Using quality qualifications across the pipeline to dump dead-end leads
If there’s one source of waste that stands above all others in Sales, it’s time spent on the wrong leads.
As the worn-out cliche goes, “time is money”. So having poor leads in your pipeline is the surest way to burn through the cash with little to show for it.
Setting up and maintaining a go-to-market funnel that prevents time being spent on dead-end leads is the key to curtailing this waste.
Each stage of the funnel needs to have effective filters to push out any unsellable leads. This primarily rests on three things:
How you’re qualifying the leads (are they ICP?).
How long they’re spending in each stage.
How active they are.
With Dreamdata you have the data to nail each of these three points.
Qualifying leads
As described above (Target and audience), Dreamdata’s dynamic data enables you to keep the definition of your ICP fresh and up-to-date. With the Journeys feature you can easily contrast the accounts in the pipeline against the ICP. To facilitate this process, you can set up quality qualification criteria for the entire go-to-market organisation.
Check out this post for more on setting up your B2B go-to-market funnel.
Time to value (per pipeline stage)
As with the marketing experiments (above), with Dreamdata you know how long your average account takes at each stage of your pipeline.
This functions as a perfect time-limit for how long your Sales Reps should entertain accounts for. That is, you are able to assess how long is too long to give an account to move to the next stage.
Once you know this, you avoid spending any more time or energy (i.e. cost) than you should.
Account activity
No or little activity (with your brand) means that the account’s probably not as warm as it should be.
With Dreamdata’s account journey map you can see the tracked activity level of the account. Have they read one of your newsletters, browsed your product pages, or watched a video?
All of this, at the account level, becomes visible thanks to Dreamdata’s tracking.
Find an easy way to identify the hottest accounts in the pipeline with Dreamdata in this #dreamdatarecipes
From this activity, you can then tweak your outreach (more on this in the next point) or cut them loose. Either way, you’re cutting cost.
Catching prospect’s signals to prevent time-wasting
Let’s face it, it’s not only lead misfits that drive up the closed-loss count and thus the cost of sales. Misnuturing prospects by misreading their signals (or not reading them at all) can result in losing prospects.
Being able to catch the signals a lead is sending out as it makes its way down the pipeline can help time your outreach and personalise the messaging
With Dreamdata’s customer journey map you can time your outreach perfectly.
Instead of the spray and pray approach Sales Rep’s rely on when working only with their CRM, the Customer Journey dashboard shows exactly when a touch has taken place and what that touch was. Meaning you can time your outreach to land after particular activity.
Similarly, once you know what your lead has been up to, you can mould the discussion and personalised messaging accordingly.All of which reduces wasted time and effort, and thus cost.
Conclusion: cutting cost with go-to-market data
Perhaps for the first time since starting their job, the B2B marketer is being faced with cutting the cost of their efforts.
This post has demonstrated how cutting cost needs knowledge of what is actually working and generating revenue in a timely manner.
Without this data, the risk of scrapping activities that are delivering value becomes too great; and with that the cost-cutting exercise could see more than just campaigns on the chopping board…
In this post we’ve shown how Dreamdata’s end-to-end customer journey data tracking can help marketers, as well as sales peeps, cut the cost of their efforts in an efficient way.
We covered:
How revenue (and pipeline data) can help shut off marketing’s worst performers - whether individual ads, ad groups or whole channels.
Why the time-to-revenue metrics matters so much.
What connecting content to revenue means for divesting from the content that just doesn’t work.
How customer journey mapping helps sales drop the dead-weight.
How sales can improve personalisation and timeliness in their outreach to cut time spent on leads.
