Ranga Kaliyur

Target the right accounts, at the right time with intent-based outreach

B2B sales teams invest significant time and resources into reaching out to prospects who are yet to show any intention of buying. However, this cold outreach almost always yields disappointing results. Even the most comprehensive benchmarks indicate that the average response to cold-calls is only 2%.

And honestly, It’s not difficult to see why.

While it’s easy enough to find lists of companies and leads that fit your ideal client profile, it’s extremely challenging to convince prospects to consider your solution when they’re not yet ready to buy. 

So what’s the alternative to reaching out to the right accounts at the wrong time?

Reaching out to the right accounts at the right time of course! Or more specifically, it’s intent-based outreach based on the pot of gold that is the anonymous, sales-ready companies already visiting your website.

The following guide explores how to identify and convert high-intent accounts with the combined powers of Factors’ accounts identification and Salesforce webhooks. We first discuss how this integration works, before delving into a handful of use-cases. 

How It Works: Pushing website data back into Salesforce

Factors taps into industry-leading IP-lookup technology to identify up to 64% of anonymous companies visiting your website — without the need for form submissions. This includes company names as well as firmographics such as geography, industry, employee headcount, revenue range and more. 

In addition, Factors auto-tracks website activity and engagement at an accounts level with advanced analytics. This includes page views, button clicks, scroll-depth, account timelines, funnels and more. 

With this information, users can filter the total set of anonymous traffic down to ICP accounts that have expressed buying intent:

• ICP criteria: Filter down traffic based on firmographics such as industry, headcount and revenue-range to identify accounts that fit your ideal client profile. 
• Intent criteria: Filter down traffic based on intent signals such as high-intent page views such as pricing, time-spent on page, and percentage scroll-depth to identify sales-ready buyers.

In short, access a list of high-intent ICP accounts that are already visiting your website but are yet to submit a form or sign-up. 

Now, with webhooks and Zapier, it’s easier than ever to automatically push all this account data from Factors into any other tool your team uses. This includes ad platforms, marketing automation platforms, and, in this case, Salesforce CRM. 

How will this help? Rather than going after cold leads with negligible chances of conversion, sales reps can view, segment, and target sales-ready accounts inside Salesforce. As we’ll see in the next section, this dramatically simplifies and improves targeted sales outreach. 

Implementing Webhooks on Factors is easy as pie. See how here.

Use-cases: Making the most of your website traffic

1. Identify new business opportunities

Factors surfaces anonymous, high-intent companies visiting your website. As previously discussed, this data can be filtered down to high-fit, high-intent accounts. 

Using webhooks, this data can be pushed from Factors into Salesforce. In other words, you can automatically create accounts inside Salesforce for companies that match your ICP and intent criteria. 

For example, webhooks can be configured to create a new account when a visitor from a US-based software company with at least 250 employees is live on your website.

Here are a few more examples of what you can see inside your CRM with Factors:

• Accounts that visit a landing page through a search ad but fail to submit a form
• Software companies with at least 500 employees visiting high-intent pages like pricing
• US-based companies that have read through at least half a product comparison blog 

Rather than relying on the 5% of website traffic that submits a form, teams can identify and target a deep new pool of potential pipeline — all within Salesforce. What’s more? Alerts can be relayed to sales reps in real-time through Slack or MS teams so they can immediately reach out to live prospects. 

2. Stay on top of existing target accounts

In addition to recording new accounts visiting your website, Factors can be used to monitor and update data for target accounts that already exist within Salesforce.

For example, say an account clicks on a search ad, submits a demo form, but never schedules time on your calendar. While the account's data is available in Salesforce, it can be tedious to track and update their actions post the demo form submission.

To solve for this, Factors can automatically update CRM properties based on trigger criteria when leads return to your website. Let’s say that the same account is back reading a product alternatives blog or visiting the pricing page after a couple of weeks. This event can be updated within Salesforce, including their last active time.

Sales reps can be notified with real-time when high-intent events take place so as to be able to immediately reach out to leads and improve the odds of conversion. 

3. Accelerate deals with behavioral data

Certain marketing material may or may not be relevant depending on the audience in question. For example, an enterprise-level account may be especially interested in security compliance related content. An early-stage start-up, on the other hand, may find content around cost-effective pricing more appealing.  

Factors can track how various types of companies are interacting with your website to understand what visitors care about most. This data can be pushed back into Salesforce so sales reps can easily assess a prospect’s interactions, priorities and pain-points before jumping into a sales call. 

For one, sales reps can accelerate deals by personalizing the customer experience. For another, marketing teams can gauge what resonates best with the target audience and fine-tune content efforts accordingly. 

4. Rekindle lost opportunities

Use Factors to track how accounts that have dropped off the funnel or former customers are returning to engage with your website. For instance, maybe an account that churned a couple of quarters ago is back interacting with a page that highlights a new feature release. 

This may be an intent-signal that the lead is reconsidering your product. It might be a good idea for sales reps to reach out and share some relevant information on what’s new. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee a conversion. But it’s far more effective than reaching out to an ice cold lead. 

This guide has covered a handful of ways in which pushing account data back into Salesforce can be helpful. Ultimately, the goal is to align visitor data with relevant stakeholders and technologies in order to:

• Drive intent-based sales outreach 
• Refine ABM efforts and spends
• Optimize retargeting campaigns

There are countless other use-cases with account identification working in conjunction with CRMs, MAPs, and more. With webhooks, Factors can push valuable account data to nearly any platform on the planet. How you make the most of that data is really up to you — the possibilities are endless. 

Target the right accounts, at the right time with intent-based outreach

B2B sales teams spend a lot of time and effort reaching out to cold prospects only to achieve disappointing results. In fact, even successful benchmarks tag the average cold-call response rate at just 2%.

And honestly, It’s not difficult to see why. 

While it’s simple enough to find lists of companies and contacts that fit your ideal client profile, it’s a monumental challenge to convince companies to consider your solution when they’re not in the market for one. 

So what’s the alternative to reaching out to the right accounts at the wrong time?

Reaching out to the right accounts at the right time of course! Or more specifically, it’s intent-based outreach based on the goldmine of anonymous, sales-ready companies already visiting your website.

The following guide explores how to identify and target sales-ready accounts with the combined powers of Factors’ account identification and Zoho webhooks. We first discuss how this integration works, before delving into a handful of use-cases. 

How It Works: Pushing visitor data back into Zoho

Factors taps into industry-leading IP-lookup technology to identify up to 64% of anonymous account visiting your website. This includes company names as well as firmographics such as geography, industry, employee headcount, revenue range and more. 

‍

In addition, Factors auto-tracks website activity and engagement at an account level with advanced analytics. This includes page views, button clicks, scroll-depth, account timelines, funnels and more. 

With this information, users can filter the total set of anonymous traffic down to ICP accounts that have expressed buying intent:

• ICP criteria: Filter down traffic based on firmographics such as industry, headcount and revenue-range to identify accounts that fit your ideal client profile. 
• Intent criteria: Filter down traffic based on intent signals such as high-intent page views such as pricing, time-spent on page, and percentage scroll-depth to identify sales-ready buyers.

In short, access a list of high-intent ICP accounts that are already visiting your website but are yet to submit a form or sign-up. 

Now, with webhooks and Zapier, it’s easier than ever to automatically push all this data from Factors into any other tool your team uses. This includes ad platforms, marketing automation platforms, and, in this case, Zoho CRM. 

How will this help? Rather than going after cold leads with negligible chances of conversion, sales reps can view, segment, and target sales-ready visitors inside Zoho. As we’ll see in the next section, this dramatically simplifies and improves targeted sales outreach. 

Implementing Webhooks on Factors is easy as pie. See how here.

Use-cases: Making the most of your website visitors

1. Identify new business opportunities

Factors surfaces anonymous, high-intent companies visiting your website — even if they’re yet to submit a contact form. As previously discussed, this data can be filtered down to high-fit, high-intent accounts. 

Using webhooks, this data can be pushed from Factors into Zoho. In other words, you can automatically create accounts inside Zoho for companies that match your ICP and intent criteria. 

For example, webhooks can be configured to create a new company when a visitor from a US-based software company with at least 250 employees is live on your website.

Here are a few more examples of what you can see inside your CRM with Factors:

• Accounts that visit a landing page through a search ad but fail to submit a form
• Software companies with at least 500 employees visiting high-intent pages like pricing
• US-based companies that have read through at least half a product comparison blog 

Rather than relying on the 5% of website traffic that submits a form, teams can identify and target a deep new pool of potential pipeline — all within Zoho. What’s more? Alerts can be relayed to sales reps in real-time through Slack or MS teams so they can immediately reach out to live prospects. 

2. Stay on top of existing target accounts

In addition to recording new accounts visiting your website, Factors can be used to monitor and update data for target accounts that already exist within Zoho.

For example, say an account ad clicks on a search ad, submits a demo form, but never schedules time on your calendar. While the account's data is available in Zoho, it can be tedious to track and update their actions post the demo form submission.

To solve for this, Factors can automatically update CRM properties based on trigger criterias when accounts return to your website. Let’s say that the same account is back reading a product alternatives blog or visiting the pricing page after a couple of weeks. This event can be updated within Zoho, including their last active time.

Sales reps can be notified with real-time when high-intent events take place so as to be able to immediately reach out to target accounts and improve the odds of conversion. 

3. Accelerate deals with behavioral data

Certain marketing material may or may not be relevant depending on the audience in question. For example, an enterprise-level account may be especially interested in security compliance related content. An early-stage start-up, on the other hand, may find content around cost-effective pricing more appealing.  

Factors can track how various types of companies are interacting with your website to understand what target accountscare about most. This data can be pushed back into Zoho so sales reps can easily assess a prospect’s interactions, priorities and pain-points before jumping into a sales call. 

For one, sales reps can accelerate deals by personalizing the customer experience. For another, marketing teams can gauge what resonates best with the target audience and finetune content efforts accordingly. 

4. Rekindle lost opportunities

Use Factors to track how accounts that have dropped off the funnel or former customers are returning to engage with your website. For instance, maybe a client who churned a couple of quarters ago is back interacting with a page that highlights a new feature release. 

This may be an intent-signal that the account is reconsidering your product. It might be a good idea for sales reps to reach out and share some relevant information on what’s new. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee a conversion. But it’s far more effective than reaching out to an ice cold prospect. 

This guide has covered a handful of ways in which pushing account data back into Zoho can be helpful. Ultimately, the goal is to align account data with relevant stakeholders and technologies in order to:

• Drive intent-based sales outreach 
• Refine ABM efforts and spends
• Optimize retargeting campaigns

There are countless other use-cases with account identification working in conjunction with CRMs, MAPs, and more. With webhooks, Factors can push valuable account data to nearly any platform on the planet. How you make the most of that data is really up to you — the possibilities are endless. 

Target the right accounts, at the right time with intent-based outreach

B2B sales teams spend a lot of time and effort reaching out to cold prospects only to achieve disappointing results. In fact, even successful benchmarks tag the average cold-call response rate at just 2%.

And honestly, It’s not difficult to see why. 

While it’s simple enough to find lists of companies and contacts that fit your ideal client profile, it’s a monumental challenge to convince prospects to consider your solution when they’re not in the market for one. 

So what’s the alternative to reaching out to the right accounts at the wrong time?

Reaching out to the right accounts at the right time of course! Or more specifically, it’s intent-based outreach based on the goldmine of anonymous, sales-ready companies already visiting your website.

The following guide explores how to identify and target sales-ready accounts with the combined powers of Factors’ account identification and Pipedrive webhooks. We first discuss how this integration works, before delving into a handful of use-cases. 

How It Works: Pushing data back into Pipedrive

Factors taps into industry-leading IP-lookup technology to identify up to 64% of anonymous website traffic at an account-level — without the need for form submissions. This includes company names as well as firmographics such as geography, industry, employee headcount, revenue range and more. 

In addition, Factors auto-tracks account-level website activity, engagement, and intent with advanced analytics. This includes page views, button clicks, scroll-depth, account timelines, funnels and more. 

With this information, users can filter the total set of anonymous website visitors down to ICP accounts that have expressed buying intent:

• ICP criteria: Filter down traffic based on firmographics such as industry, headcount and revenue-range to identify accounts that fit your ideal client profile. 
• Intent criteria: Filter down traffic based on intent signals such as high-intent page views such as pricing, time-spent on page, and percentage scroll-depth to identify sales-ready buyers.

In short, access a list of high-intent ICP accounts that are already visiting your website but are yet to submit a form or sign-up. 

Now, with webhooks and Zapier, it’s easier than ever to automatically push all this identification data from Factors into any other tool your team uses. This includes ad platforms, marketing automation platforms, and, in this case, Pipedrive CRM. 

How will this help? Rather than going after cold leads with negligible chances of conversion, sales reps can view, segment, and target sales-ready accounts inside Pipedrive. As we’ll see in the next section, this dramatically simplifies and improves targeted sales outreach. 

Implementing Webhooks on Factors is easy as pie. See how here.

Use-cases: Making the most of your website traffic

1. Identify new business opportunities

Factors surfaces anonymous, high-intent companies visiting your website. As previously discussed, this data can be filtered down to high-fit, high-intent accounts. 

Using webhooks, this data can be pushed from Factors into Pipedrive. In other words, you can automatically create organizations inside Pipedrive for visitors that match your ICP and intent criteria. 

For example, webhooks can be configured to create a new company when a visitor from a US-based software company with at least 250 employees is live on your website.

Here are a few more examples of what you can see inside your CRM with Factors:

• Accounts that visit a landing page through a search ad but fail to submit a form
• Software companies with at least 500 employees visiting high-intent pages like pricing
• US-based companies that have read through at least half a product comparison blog 

Rather than relying on the 5% of website traffic that submits a form, teams can identify and target a deep new pool of potential pipeline — all within Pipedrive. What’s more? Alerts can be relayed to sales reps in real-time through Slack or MS teams so they can immediately reach out to live prospects. 

2. Stay on top of existing target accounts

In addition to recording new accounts visiting your website, Factors can be used to monitor and update data for target accounts that already exist within Pipedrive.

For example, say an account clicks on a search ad, submits a demo form, but never schedules time on your calendar. While the account's data is available in Pipedrive, it can be tedious to track and update their actions post the demo form submission.

To solve for this, Factors can automatically update CRM properties based on trigger criterias when account return to your website. Let’s say that the same account is back reading a product alternatives blog or visiting the pricing page after a couple of weeks. This event can be updated within Pipedrive, including their last active time.

Sales reps can be notified with real-time when high-intent events take place so as to be able to immediately reach out to accounts and improve the odds of conversion. 

3. Accelerate deals with behavioral data

Certain marketing material may or may not be relevant depending on the audience in question. For example, an enterprise-level account may be especially interested in security compliance related content. An early-stage start-up, on the other hand, may find content around cost-effective pricing more appealing.  

Factors can track how various types of companies are interacting with your website to understand what target accounts care about most. This data can be pushed back into Pipedrive so sales reps can easily assess a prospect’s interactions, priorities and pain-points before jumping into a sales call. 

For one, sales reps can accelerate deals by personalizing the customer experience. For another, marketing teams can gauge what resonates best with the target audience and finetune content efforts accordingly. 

4. Rekindle lost opportunities

Use Factors to track how prospects who have dropped off the funnel or former customers are returning to engage with your website. For instance, maybe a client who churned a couple of quarters ago is back interacting with a page that highlights a new feature release. 

This may be an intent-signal that the account is reconsidering your product. It might be a good idea for sales reps to reach out and share some relevant information on what’s new. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee a conversion. But it’s far more effective than reaching out to an ice cold prospect. 

This guide has covered a handful of ways in which pushing visitor data back into Pipedrive can be helpful. Ultimately, the goal is to align account data with relevant stakeholders and technologies in order to:

• Drive intent-based sales outreach 
• Refine ABM efforts and spends
• Optimize retargeting campaigns

There are countless other use-cases with account identification working in conjunction with CRMs, MAPs, and more. With webhooks, Factors can push valuable website account data to nearly any platform on the planet. How you make the most of that data is really up to you — the possibilities are endless. 

Remember the days when the role of marketing was limited to promotions, campaigns, and branding? Because we…don't 😅. Marketing has evolved into an all-encompassing function that covers everything from demand generation and sales enablement to CX and pipeline growth. 

And at the helm of all this? The Chief Marketing Officer.

CMOs today are responsible for far more than just creative strategy. In addition to leading traditional marketing functions, It’s essential for CMOs to stay on top of product-market fit, consumer trends, competitive landscapes, and marketing’s bottom-line impact on revenue. 

And none of this would be possible without data. 

In fact, 64% of marketing executives strongly agree that data-driven marketing is crucial to business success. But how exactly is data, analytics and visualization influencing (and even improving!) the responsibilities of a CMO?

This article highlights everything you need to know about the evolution of CMO responsibilities and the profound impact of data and technology on the marketing function. 

Understanding The Current State Of CMO Responsibilities

Data and technology has transformed the current state of CMO roles and responsibilities. Here’s how:

Intuition can only take you so far

In the past, CMOs relied heavily on intuition and creative judgment to form strategies that may or may not work. These decisions were based on personal experience, high-level market trends, and subjective industry knowledge. 

Now, CMOs work with data-driven insights to guide their decision making process. No doubt, intuition and personal judgment still play an important role in successful marketing. But it certainly helps to back up a hypothesis with hard-hitting numbers. 

As businesses increasingly become digital-first, collecting relevant data across the customer journey has become far more accessible. Marketing leaders can leverage this data to drive results across brand strategy, customer acquisition, and retention by understanding what works and what doesn’t.

In addition to validating decisions, data-driven marketing also encourages dynamism and adaptability within various marketing functions. Experiments that would otherwise take months to produce results can be answered in a matter of days with journey analytics, heat maps, and A/B testing. This results in an agile, hyper-efficient marketing function that’s primed to optimize ROI and drive growth. 

Data delights marketers & customers alike

Just as data and analytics benefits marketers, so does it benefit buyers and the overall customer experience. Back in the day, marketing teams had very little information to work with. CMOs had no choice but to make broad assumptions and rely on spray & pray tactics to attract buyers. 

For one, targeting a wide audience with generic messaging can be expensive for smaller teams with limited budgets. Secondly, it can be ineffective (and annoying to customers) given that broad messaging that tries to appeal to everyone, generally appeals to no one. 

Today, CMOs can use cutting-edge visitor identification technology, account scoring, and intent data to specifically target sales-ready buyers with relevant marketing initiatives. This improves the buying experience for customers by swapping spammy email blasts and cold calls with personalized initiatives for the right accounts at the right time. Ultimately, this personalized marketing bolsters brand perception, improves conversions with fewer resources, and drives customer lifetime value — which is far more cost-effective than acquiring new customers.

The more things change, the more they stay the same 

Since the days of David Ogilvy, driving sales has been the north star for marketing. This, most definitely, hasn’t changed. That being said, the accuracy and granularity with which we can measure marketing's impact on revenue has improved dramatically in recent years.

Gone are the days of tedious, unintuitive marketing reporting. Several plug and play solutions can automatically consolidate marketing and revenue data across campaigns, content, website, CRM, and more under one roof. As we’ll see in later sections, this unified data can then be used for further analysis, visualization, and dashboarding. 

It’s also easier than ever to quantify the influence of every customer touchpoint on pipeline and revenue with sophisticated tools like multi-touch attribution. All this, to help CMOs’ prove and improve marketing’s impact on sales. 

How Is The Data Boom Shaping The World Of Marketing?

Now that we’ve established the importance of data and analytics, let’s explore a few data-based tools and techniques that CMOs can leverage to drive ROI and shape marketing strategy: 

1. Customer Segmentation & Personalization 

Customers, especially B2B ones, expect a personalized experience at every turn of the buyer journey. For instance, if you’re a CMO, you likely receive dozens of cold emails every week — but only respond to, if any, the well-researched, personalized mails that are actually relevant to you. It’s no different with any other buyer. 

Customer segmentation allows marketers to slice and dice their audience based on firmographics (revenue range, head count, etc), technographics (techstack), and intent data (engagement, page views, etc). This in turns allows marketers to personalize their efforts and target high-intent buyers with tailor-made efforts. Less spam, better conversions: win, win! 

2. Account Intelligence

B2B SaaS marketing teams invest heavily in driving relevant traffic to the company website. Unfortunately, even the most optimistic benchmarks find that only about 5% of website traffic actually convert through form submissions or sign ups. So is the remaining 95% of anonymous traffic simply taken to be potential pipeline down the drain? Well, until recently, yes 😳. 

Now, with IP-lookup technology, marketing teams can tap into databases with millions of companies to identify accounts that are already visiting the website but are yet to convert. 

How can CMOs and marketing teams use this?

• Optimize RoAS by retargeting accounts from paid ads who are yet to sign-up.
• Know in real-time when target accounts are live on the site, to strike while the iron’s hot
• Run relevant marketing efforts based on what target accounts are engaging with.

3. A/B Testing & Heatmaps 

“What would work better on this landing page: Headline A or Headline B?” 

Questions like this are exactly what A/B testing tools help answer with practical data. Rather than relying on individual judgment or biased surveys, A/B testing showcases multiple versions of a web page, creative, etc to a particular audience. Based on real-life performance, A/B testing can reveal what works better very quickly.

Heat maps are also valuable in identifying what visitors or users are engaging with within your website. This provides insight into points of resonance and friction for the target audience. 

4. Customer Journey Mapping

B2B customer journeys have always been lengthy, nonlinear, and complex. To solve for this, several solutions (including Factors.ai) can help unify and visualize various touchpoints along the journey in an intuitive manner. This helps CMOs achieve a bird’s eye view of the entire buying process from first visit, to sales engagement, all the way to deal closure. 

5. Multi-Touch Attribution

As businesses embrace digital transformation, CMOs and marketing teams are increasingly adopting multi/omni-channel marketing to deliver a consistent, persuasive experience to online buyers. Marketing channels range from search ads, email marketing, social media, organic blogs, marketplaces, and more. 

Without making sense of the numbers, it can be difficult to know which of these channels actually influenced conversions. Multi-touch attribution is a sophisticated analytics technique that collects and credits every touch point along a customer journey based on its relative influence on conversions. 

All the tools and analytics techniques discussed above rely crucially on data. The more voluminous and accurate your database, the more valuable the insights will be. The following section discusses a few practices for CMOs to make the most of their data.

Fulfilling CMO Responsibilities In The Age Of Data Analytics & Visualization

Here are a few key practices for CMOs to reap the benefits of data and analytics tools.

1. Build a culture around data 

As previously mentioned, none of the tools or techniques discussed in preceding sections would be possible without data. It’s essential for CMOs to create a strong, unequivocal culture around data-driven marketing — whether it be maintaining hygienic CRMs or qualifying a hypothesis with data-backed experiments.

It’s also just as important to eliminate siloed data by unifying numbers and KPIs under one roof. This ensures that the entire department, if not organization, is on the same page.

2. Pick the right tools

Every marketing department is built different. CMOs must invest in appropriate tools and marketing technologies to support their team based on size, scale, and objectives. For example,  heatmaps or attribution tools may not be essential to a smaller team that are just starting out. On the other hand, visitor identification, customer segmentation, and dashboarding tools can provide significant ROI for early-stage teams with limited budgets. 

In addition to functionality, here are a few more aspects to consider when investing in a martech tool:

• Pricing
• Customer success
• Integration with existing techstack 
• Ease of use
• Reliability
• Security

3. Create relevant dashboards

It’s definitely not feasible (or recommended) for CMOs to stay on top of every little marketing effort that the team’s working on. Instead, CMOs may rely on a bird eye’s view to guide strategy and improve performance at a higher level. CMO dashboards offer an intuitive view of all things marketing at a quick glance. 

Suggested reading: The complete guide to building a SaaS CMO dashboard

Based on the nature of your business, your CMO dashboard may reflect marketing spends, marketing sourced-pipeline by channel, MQLs generated by campaign, and other high-level marketing KPIs. You definitely don’t need to be bogged down by CTRs and likes, unless otherwise there’s a true anomaly in performance.  

4. Ensure privacy compliance

Lastly, in an increasingly privacy-first digital ecosystem, it’s important to ensure privacy compliance with all the tools and technologies that associate with customer data. SOC2 Type II and GDPR are industry-standard security frameworks that you should look for in every data-based product you’re considering investing in. (Psst…Factors is SOC2 Type II, GDPR, PECR, and CCPA compliant) 

How CMOs Can Take Marketing Data From Insights To Impact

Before concluding this article, here’s a quick highlight of the profound value that data can have on influencing and improving CMO responsibilities in this digital age.

• Optimize spends: Rather than relying on guestwork, CMOs can confidently allocate spend towards initiatives that work. This results in less marketing leakage all around. 
• Real-time decision-making: Rather than relying on intuition alone or waiting several weeks, CMOs can take a glance at a dashboard to make quick, data-driven decisions. 
• Drive marketing ROI: CMOs may adopt powerful tools like attribution to understand what works when. This results in the efficient allocation of resources and maximum ROI. 
• Reduce CAC: With the right set of data, marketers can personalize targeting and improve conversion rates with less spend. This, in turn, reduces the cost of acquiring customers and even improves the overall LTV of customers. 
• Prove marketing impact: Finally, marketing data and data-leveraging tools help CMOs quantify the impact of marketing on bottom-line business objectives like pipeline & growth. 

And there you have it. We’ve seen how data has well and truly disrupted the role and responsibilities of a CMOs. Luckily, it's only for the better. CMO responsibilities have transcended creative strategy to encompass a wide range of bottom-line objectives — all of which can be turbocharged with the right data analytics tools and technologies. 

Curious to see how Factors help CMOs drive marketing results and business growth? We’d be happy to have a quick chat! 

Leadfeeder and Albacross are well established lead generation platforms that help B2B teams identify, enrich, and convert anonymous website traffic. There’s no doubt that both tools are great at what they do — but which one is the right choice for you? And might there be an even better alternative? 

This blog highlights everything you need to know about Leadfeeder vs Albacross — and why you might want to consider Factors.ai as well. 

Leadfeeder vs Albacross - Pricing

Before diving into features, benefits, and limitations, let’s get the most obvious consideration out of the way: pricing. 

Leadfeeder Pricing

Leadfeeder [Now Dealfront]’s pricing plans start at €139/mo (or ≅$150/mo) and is scaled based on the number of accounts you wish to identify and enrich. Here’s how pricing plans are scaled at Leadfeeder:

Note that Leadfeeder also offers a free plan with barebones features that’s limited to up to 100 companies identified with only 7 days of data storage. While this plan will almost certainly be insufficient, it’s a great way to get started for free. 

Albacross Pricing

Albacross does not openly reveal as much about its pricing plans, but it’s fair to say that they are at least comparable to Leadfeeder. Here’s what we do know about its pricing: 

Albacross paid plans start at €79/mo (or $83/mo). Like Leadfeeder, it is scaled up based on the number of accounts you choose to identify and enrich. 

Both Leadfeeder and Albacross offer 14-day free trials. While it seems that Albacross has a marginal advantage in terms of pricing, it’s only fair to determine which product is the better fit based on features, benefits and limitations as well. 

Leadfeeder vs Albacross - Features

Let’s explore how Leadfeeder and Albacross compare in terms of features

Shared Features

Given that Leadfeeder and Albacross are direct competitors to each other, it’s only natural that they share product features and use-cases. Here’s a breakdown of a few core, common features between the two tools: 

1. Company identification

Company identification is at the core of what both products do. Rest assured, Leadfeeder and Albacross are more than capable of accurately identifying and enriching anonymous accounts visiting your website. More context, around this:

Leadfeeder/Dealfront likely wins the spot for the best Europe-specific company data. The now Germany-based company claims coverage of over 66M+ companies across the world, with nearly half of that being from Europe alone. Within its European coverage, it provides deep data (sourced from national trade registers and chambers of commerce) in certain geographies:

Albacross does not openly share as much about its database but is likely comparable to Leadfeeder. In fact, Albacross claims to have built out the largest proprietary IP-to-company mapping database globally with over 100+ B2B attributes. This, however, is challenging to verify without the numbers. 

2. Filtering, segmentation & scoring

Of course, not every account visiting your website would be sales-ready ICP companies. To help break through the noise, Leadfeeder and Albacross offer comprehensive filtering, segmentation, and lead scoring functionalities. 

This helps automatically filter total identifies traffic down to a few in-market, high-fit accounts based on their firmographic properties (industry, revenue, headcount, etc) and engagement levels (page views, clicks, etc)

3. Integrations

Leadfeeder and Albacross provide a wide range of integrations with CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce), MAPs, Slack/MS Teams, and other everyday go-to-market tools. In addition, integrations with Zapier helps both tools push data back into any other solution that they don’t natively integrate with. 

Integrations are an important consideration when choosing a lead generation tool as it helps eliminate tedious, manual workflow management and empowers automated trigger based actions such as real-time Slack alerts, LinkedIn ads retargeting, CRM updation, and more. 

Of course, there’s more to it than just this. But the previous three points cover the crux of what both platforms help with: account intelligence and activation features. Now, let’s look at why you might want to choose one over the other.

Why Leadfeeder over Albacross?

1. Contact database 

Although Albacross also provides contact data (mail IDs, phone numbers, etc) based on the accounts visiting your website, it’s only included as part of its premium tier plans. Leadfeeder, on the other hand, provides access to over 200M+ contact-level data points across the board. Note that neither tool can tell exactly who is visiting your website at a user-level. Instead, they provide best-bet recommendations from independent contact databases. 

2. User interface 

Based on our secondary research, Leadfeeder has a considerable edge over Albacross  in terms of user interface. While customers rave about Leadfeeder’s UI, Albacross faces some criticism over its useability:

3. Website analytics 

Leadfeeder takes another point over Albacross when it comes to website analytics. While neither tool is especially great at tracking website behavior, Leadfeeder has the advantages of form tracking, video tracking, download tracking, time-spent on page, and other, more granular metrics to gauge accounts engagement.

Why Albacross over Leadfeeder?

1. Pricing 

The most obvious advantage Albacross has over Leadfeeder is its pricing. While Leadfeeder technically does offer a few more features, Albacross is unequivocally the budget-friendly option for teams that are early in their ABM journey. If you already use a contact database such as Apollo or Zoominfo, Albacross should be a good starting point for your company identification needs.

2. Lead history 

Lead history includes activity data, source of visit, time-spent on page etc. If you’re a company with especially long sales cycles, you probably want to track lead history over several weeks, if not the entire quarter. At the moment, Leadfeeder falters in this regard while offering only up to 30 days of lead history. Albacross, on the other hand, extends history to up to 90 days. 

3. Website personalization 

Albacross offers nifty website personalization features via integration with VWO and Google Optimize to empower A/B testing based on the nature of accounts visiting your website. This is a valuable tool for product marketers to experiment with different positionings for different buyer personas. 

Why Factors over the rest? 

And there you have it. A run down of how Leadfeeder and Albacross compare against each other. Before dropping off however, we would be remiss without sharing a little about why Factors might make an even better fit for your lead generation and account intelligence requirement than the latter two. 

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In short, Factors does everything Leadfeeder and Albacross do — along with so much more. Here are a few clear advantages Factors has:

1. Data accuracy 

Data accuracy is probably the most important consideration when picking an intelligence tool. Without accurate data, you have nothing to work with. Factors partners with industry-leading marketing and sales intelligence solutions 6sense and Clearbit to provide unmatched identification rates of up to 64% — including highly enriched firmographics and technographics data. 

2. Lead history (again)

Maintaining lead history and account timelines for longer periods of time can be crucial to B2B teams with longer sales cycles. Leadfeeder maintains lead history for up to 30 days. Albacross maintains lead history for up to 90 days. And Factors maintain lead history — including touch points across ad campaigns, website, CRM, sales interactions, and more — for as long as 1 full year (365 days!) That's more than 4 times as long as the closest alternative.

‍3. Analytics & attribution

Factors is built upon strong analytics and attribution foundations — which means it provides far more functionality, customization and granularity when it comes to account-level reporting. Among several other features, this includes account scoring, path analysis, funnels, timelines, attribution, KPI reporting and more across campaigns, website, CRM etc.

Comparison Table

To summarize, here’s a quick comparison table of all three platforms for your consideration:

B2B marketing teams invest significantly across campaigns and content to drive qualified website traffic. However, benchmarks find that only about 2% of this traffic actually converts, with the majority of visitors simply bouncing off or browsing anonymously on the website.

Retargeting the remaining 98% of visitors via LinkedIn has proved to be an effective strategy to recapture interest from anonymous website traffic. While we won’t cover the specific benefits of LinkedIn retargeting here, this case study summarizes how Sage successfully leveraged LI retargeting to: 

• Generate 700,000 impressions in 6 weeks
• Improve lead generation by 4x
• And reduce cost-per-lead (CPL) by 80%

Simply put, LinkedIn retargeting works.

LinkedIn retargeting relies on the LinkedIn Insight tag (aka LinkedIn Pixel) to match website visitors with LinkedIn audiences. 

The LinkedIn insight tag is a simple piece of code placed on a website to help optimize campaigns. While the LinkedIn Pixel serves many functions, including conversion tracking and demographic insights, it’s challenged by shortcomings around website retargeting.

While LinkedIn Pixel works to some extent, we have found an alternate approach that can take your retargeting campaigns to the next level, also known as account-based retargeting. Account-based retargeting works by identifying, qualifying, and targeting anonymous accounts, as opposed to individual users visiting a website. Using a combination of identifiers, account-based retargeting has been shown to deliver:

• Larger, account-level audiences 
• Improved match rate accuracy
• Better segmentation and targeting

And the results? Well, they speak for themselves:

While the LinkedIn Pixel is a must-have solution given its wider functionality, we explore the limitations of Pixel-based retargeting and why Account-based retargeting is an effective alternative ⬇️

Limitation #1 - Match rates

The LinkedIn Pixel works by placing a cookie in visitors’ browsers, so when a LinkedIn user lands on your website, they may be identified and retargeted on LinkedIn. Note that this cookie-based identification takes place at a device and browser level for individual users. This means that, for the Pixel to match a website visitor to a LinkedIn user, the visitor must meet all 4 of the following criteria: 

1. Be an active member of LinkedIn 
2. Explicitly accept cookies on the website
3. Use the same device (phone/laptop/tablet) to visit the website and LinkedIn
4. Use the same browser (chrome/firefox/safari) to visit the website and LinkedIn

While a few visitors will probably fit this criteria, audience match rates via the Pixel are limited by the fact that the majority of traffic either doesn’t use LinkedIn, rejects cookies, or, most commonly, uses different devices/browsers for product research and LinkedIn browsing. 

In fact, only about 42% of B2B product research involves mobile touch points — with the majority of B2B buyers choosing to conduct their research on desktops. On the other hand, a whopping 80% of LinkedIn engagement is via mobile. This is not surprising, given that LinkedIn is primarily a social networking app. 

And so, despite the fact that LinkedIn Pixel works as designed, its match rates tend to be relatively poor, given the practical realities of B2B user behavior.

The limitation: Low match rates as a result of limited, cookie-based matching mechanisms by the LinkedIn Pixel. 

How Account-based Retargeting helps

The LinkedIn Pixel relies exclusively on cookie-based tracking to create its matched audiences. Factors, on the other hand, leverages a combination of three identifiers — IP address, advertising ID, and cookies, to triangulate a data connection and match anonymous traffic to a company.

Factors connects with over 4.2B+ IP addresses and 65M+ company profiles (in addition to cookies and ad IDs) to accurately identify which accounts are visiting your website. Note that this is regardless of whether the visitor in question is a member of LinkedIn, uses different browsers, etc. 

In fact, Factors can also identify remote companies by initially cookie-ing people using their corporate IP address to then re-identify them when they work remotely. To further explain how Factors achieves industry-leading match rates, here’s Viral from 6sense, one of our data partners:

“As a person moves around, their IP address changes. The platform adjusts for these changes by pulling in several additional markers to help match signals to an account. Now, with more variations in IP address data as remote working spreads across industries, our Graph deploys available secondary marker information, like cookies and mobile advertising IDs, to triangulate data connections. The Graph uses additional markers to sift through the noise so that confidence in the match rate remains consistent. Given the amount of signals we track, we don’t map every signal all the time, but we have observed accuracy over 85%.”

- CTO Viral Bajaria, 6sense, Data Partners

‍💡Build Better LinkedIn Retargeting Audiences with Factors‍

Limitation #2 -  User-level targeting

B2B buying decisions are rarely made by a single person. The typical buying committee comprises almost a dozen people from multiple departments and time zones. Selling a SaaS product today might involve gaining buy-in from multiple C-suite executives, individual stakeholders from operations to sales to marketing, and a chief revenue officer – along with legal and implementation teams.

Source: Challenger

Given that the Pixel focuses on individual, single users visiting your website, it fails to capture the wider buying group from each account those users are from. This shrinks your total matched audience size considerably, but more importantly, it inhibits your marketing efforts from reaching key stakeholders and decision-makers who may not have been the ones visiting your site. 

For example, if a junior marketer visits Factors.ai and is retargeted by the LinkedIn Pixel, the junior marketer alone will receive ads — with other stakeholders from the target account being ignored. As a result, this approach relies on the junior marketer being independently influential enough to convince the rest of the team to move forward with the deal. Definitely a tough sell. 

The limitation: User-level targeting, as opposed to account-level targeting, results in fewer stakeholders targeted per account and smaller audience sizes. 

How Account-based Retargeting Helps

While LinkedIn is best for targeting buying groups, it’s important to remember that there is no initial intent to buy on a social media platform. You need to layer in intent signals from multiple sources, such as your website and review sites like G2, to understand how you can best retarget relevant accounts.

Factors identifies intent signals and re-targets anonymous website traffic at an account level. This means that multiple decision-makers and stakeholders from the same company will be targeted on LinkedIn, regardless of which user actually visits the website. This bodes well for multiple reasons:

1. Increases audience size without compromising on the quality of accounts
2. Creates brand awareness at a company level rather than at an individual level
3. Improves odds of targeting the right decision-makers within each account

Even assuming that account-based targeting finds the same 100 accounts as Pixel-based targeting, the former would generate an audience size of 300-500 users (3-5 people from each account), while Pixel-based targeting would only target 100 users (1 from each account). More importantly, a larger audience will improve the odds of targeting decision-makers, ultimately resulting in more leads and conversions. Accordingly, account-based retargeting solves for the practical limitation of LinkedIn campaigns struggling to scale due to poor audience size. 

Limitation #3 - Audience segmentation

The previous two points discussed the LinkedIn Pixel’s limitations in terms of audience quantity. This third limitation highlights why the Pixel tends to fall short in terms of audience quality. In reality, a significant portion of your website traffic wouldn’t make a good fit for your business. Even within the subset of ICP accounts visiting your website, only a fraction would be “sales-ready” at any given moment (with the remaining accounts having to be nurtured until they’re prepared to buy). 

As important as having a large audience is, the quality of this audience plays a key role in determining conversions and RoAS as well. In an ideal scenario, marketing teams should only retarget this subset of sales-ready “3000-pound marlin” accounts.

The LinkedIn Pixel limits audience segmentation based on intent and engagement. With the Pixel, website traffic can only be segmented based on page views. While this is definitely a good starting point, it lacks granularity.

With Pixel, filtering out accounts that don’t match your target geographies, industries, sizes, or engagement levels can be challenging. This also translates to limited personalization options, as you can only segment campaigns by page views rather than by account and engagement properties. 

The limitation: Limited segmenting & filtering options resulting in subpar audience quality and limited scope for personalization. 

How Account-based Retargeting helps

Account-based retargeting with Factors supports granular segmentation based on a wide range of firmographics and engagement criteria. For example, with Factors, you can identify and retarget a list of accounts that meet the following rules:

“US-based Software companies with 100-500 employees visiting our pricing page & G2 profile for at least 10 seconds with a scroll-depth of 20% or more”

Here are a few ways in which Factors helps segment traffic data (in addition to regular old page views):

• Country
• City
• Industry
• Size
• Revenue range
• Time spent on page
• Scroll-depth
• Button clicks
• And a combination of all of the above

‍This level of filtering results in a list of precisely targeted ICP accounts that would make a great fit for your business. Additionally, by integrating your CRM, you may also include/exclude specific accounts, such as existing customers and competitors. 

And guess what? We found the solution to fix your list-building problems once and for all!

Factors has launched Audience Builder, which allows marketers to automatically segment based on their preferred criteria, push these segmented audience lists to LinkedIn, and activate personalized, targeted advertising. 

For example, you may choose to show accounts that visit high-intent pages such as factors.ai/pricing an ad creative offering a free trial. On the other hand, you can show accounts reading your competitor comparison blogs a “comparative” ad creative. The possibilities are endless. 

Real-life comparison: Pixel vs Account-based retargeting 

We’ve talked the talk - now we’ve got the numbers to back it up. Here’s how two campaigns, one that’s Pixel-based and another that’s Account-based, compare to each other. Note that all else (duration, budgets, creatives, copies) has remained the same through the course of this experiment.

Over the same period, we find that CTR is higher under Pixel-based retargeting, likely because this approach targets exact users visiting the website. That being said, Account-based remarketing significantly outperforms Pixel-based retargeting in every other key metric, including leads generated. 

And there you have it. 

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If you want to maximise ROI for your LinkedIn ads, look no further than our latest offering: LinkedIn AdPilot! We offer a wide range of features that allow you to segment audiences based on intent data, implement exposure control for your campaigns and determine the true ROI for your ads.

Speak to our team today to understand how you can use AdPilot to improve your LinkedIn retargeting efforts.