Accenture’s go-to-market edge: Unlocking client growth with Intent data

When a leading global professional services organization like Accenture found the need to expand its customer data insights, the mandate was clear. Laura Heck, Managing Director, Data and Analytics, Marketing and Communications, said: “We had a lot of great data. But what were we missing? What didn’t we know about our clients?”

Taking account data insights to the next level

The first-party data that Heck’s team generated provided a solid foundation. However Accenture’s marketing comms team faced challenges common to many large organizations—including disparate data sources and inconsistent measurement frameworks. Despite possessing a treasure trove of first-party data, the organization recognized the need to supplement it with Intent data to gain a comprehensive understanding of its clients.

In broad strokes, Accenture sought to use Intent data that would provide the client insights to:

• Inform their go-to-market strategy
• Deliver relevant client experiences
• Drive growth

The advantage of thoughtful vendor selection

But first things first. Heck and her team had to survey the landscape of Intent data providers before making their decision. “There are many vendors out there in the space,” she notes. “We really needed to choose one that will meet our specific needs and enable us to get our hands on the data and work with it throughout the organization.”

Accenture’s stringent, hands-on evaluation process included a 60-day pilot with two finalist vendors. Heck and her cohorts chose Bombora’s Company Surge^® solution based on three main factors:

• Comprehensive global market coverage. Heck explains: “We provide services for everything from strategy and consulting to technology, operations, and media. We do it all for our clients, so we needed to make sure that we were working with providers that had a robust taxonomy, and Bombora did have that.”
• Data usability. As it built its data foundation and capabilities for marketing communications, Accenture needed a provider like Bombora that enabled customized views that let Accenture work with data according to their needs. 
• Data collection compliance. Because the data privacy regulation landscape constantly evolves, Accenture had to ensure that Bombora fully complies with GDPR and CCPA rules. 

Heck sums it up: “Ultimately, we chose Bombora because they were great partners who worked with us and enabled us to get the data into the hands of our users where they want to be. 

“Bombora’s Company Surge^® provided us with a broad taxonomy, the ability to truly customize our views, and the capacity to integrate Intent data into our system so that we could be where our users are.”

Accenture’s blueprint: Leveraging Bombora for transparent account-based marketing

Heck and her team were able to generate curated reports and data updates for account-based marketers and educate them openly and transparently on issues like Bombora’s data privacy compliance. 

“For our accounts teams,” she notes, “we kept it simple and led with how it could help them. But they also wanted to understand the caveats with the data too. ‘How do I know these are the right people researching these topics?’ We said, you don’t know—but that’s because Bombora is data-privacy compliant.”

Building robust self-serve visualization

Heck and her team could map Company Surge^® to their CRM database. Doing this enabled them to filter and customize their views in detail so they could track trending topic clusters by account, industry, primary market, growth priority, or other categories. 

“We built a Power BI dashboard that lets us see which topics and clusters are surging week to week, as well as which topics and clusters are moving the most.”

Gaining macro insights to inform go-to-market

Accenture teams have expanded their use of Intent data beyond account-based into macro insights that can inform broader strategies. Heck and her team have added Intent data to their social listening, news media listening, and search insights to discern trends, client interest, and competitor momentum around specific topic clusters and keywords. 

“There’s performance measurement and then there’s insights to inform,” observes Heck. “So any tool that’s as robust as Bombora adds value to what we see and what we use to make our decisions.”

Salesforce & Bombora: Accelerating Accenture’s sales engagement & team productivity

Bombora’s integration with Salesforce enabled Accenture to democratize their Intent data in a way that drove sales team awareness and adoption. Heck’s team added a simple one-click route to a table report that gave SDRs a bit more context about the cluster in which a chosen topic lives, the number of topics in the cluster, and other details.

According to Heck, “Sales teams and account teams jumped on it. They said, ‘We want to learn more about the Bombora data’. They started creating their decks to share Bombora with their teams and talk about the benefits of Company Surge^®.” This enables sales to talk to clients earlier in the buying process, originate deals before buying decisions, and increase wins.

Translating Intent-driven insights into advanced analytics

Use your integration of Company Surge^® with your CRM to explore sophisticated use cases, generate advanced client contact insights, tag topics based on resonance with audience segments, and create predictive customer-stage modeling.

Heck draws attention to a specific use case view combining pipeline and marketing engagement data sources with Intent data. That view lets teams note and address marketing and sales activity gaps around specific topic clusters filtered by industry, market, account domain and other factors. “It’s a quick decision maker for revenue teams and a quick heat map, where they could look at all three data sources at once without having to do tons of research work.”

Lessons from Accenture’s adoption of Bombora’s Intent data 

• Conduct a pilot. Besides being a proving ground for your finalist vendors, a pilot enables you to develop use cases and foster internal ambassadors who can inspire adoption.
• Start with the basics. Keep initial data visualizations simple to get cross-functional teams on board and cognizant of how internal data benefits them.
• Democratize the data. Integrate it into your CRM and make it accessible to all revenue teams.
• Keep innovating. Push Intent data usage into advanced analytics and predictive models
  

Ready to transform your go-to-market strategy and achieve invaluable insights like Accenture? 

Discover how Bombora’s Company Surge^® can help you drive more meaningful connections with your future customers today.