Amar Doshi, the vice president of product at 6Sense, was a recent guest on our podcast, B2B Nation.

In this episode, we discussed:

  • Highlights of the B2B ESP conference
  • The differences between predicting and analyzing marketing and sales data
  • Where predictive analytics is headed and how it will evolve

Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.*

B2B ESP was about owning the customer journey.

“More and more marketers are starting to understand that they must go beyond the tactical lead generation, demand generation, and content syndication efforts. This year’s conference was all about owning the customer journey and being more customer centric. It’s important to be data drive, but it’s also important not to get lost in the analytics and forget the creative process as both are so vital to making things work. With everything going digital and with so much happening online, and this whole new new generation of technologies in the martech space, everyone is trying to figure out how they are going to use these pieces of technology.”

To understand predictive analytics, you need to separate the two.

“View predictions as a different from segmentation analytics. Segmentation analytics is about finding out who your customer is based on some historical number of transactions and looking at firmographic data. What’s the typical size of a company that I sell to? What’s the typical industry I sell to? What are some of the growth or revenue numbers these companies see? What are their pain points? Data like this allows you to segment your market and carve out smaller pieces to go after. A prediction is really about predicting that a specific event will happen at a certain time. Predictive intelligence relies on dynamic behaviors and expressions of intent that are determined by what companies are doing online. What are they researching? Piecing data together allows you to understand who is in the market to buy within a segment.”

Predictive analytics is changing how marketing campaigns are run.

“Prior to predictive intelligence, you would go work with a publisher and ask them to target an audience for you. You hope that from these targeting efforts you are generating demand and brand awareness. You don’t really know whether or not the money you spent was focused on companies that were ready to buy. Now think about the marketer who knows who is ready to buy in their segments. That can generate a very different level of return even though you’re going through the same steps and creating very similar campaigns. You can show prospects specific types of content based on where they are in their buying journey.”

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B2B Nation: Smarketing is a podcast for B2B sales and marketing professionals, featuring expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in the industry. Check out our other episodes on iTunes, or follow us on Twitter: @Technology_Adv.

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*Some excerpts have been paraphrased to enhance readability.