Artificial Intelligence for B2B Marketing:

Ten Essential Questions to Ask a

Vendor

Artificial Intelligence is hot.

Lots of people are banking on artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, machine learning, semantic understanding and other AI tools to finally make Big Data work for B2B marketing.

At Dreamforce ‘16, white hot.

Salesforce upped the ante by making Salesforce Einstein the centerpiece of Dreamforce ’16, calling it “AI for Everyone.”

What exactly is “AI for Everyone”?

If you’re a B2B demand-gen marketer, you’re used to new tools, tactics and technologies and wondering if they’ll work for you.

Artificial Intelligence does work for B2B

“When marketers talk about artificial intelligence for B2B, they usually mean the ability to automate the process of finding, scoring and segmenting the best leads to reach the right decision makers. That’s exactly what we’ve been doing at BloomReach for three years with Leadspace.”Jason Seeba

Head of MarketingBloomReach

But you need to ask the right questions.

And here they are…

1. Will your solution automatically discover net-new leads based on my ideal customer profile?

”Artificial Intelligence for B2B” isn’t well-defined. If you want to improve your demand generation, you’ll have to be very specific. The ability to create an Ideal Customer Profile, based on your knowledge of your customers, is the first essential element to ensuring an AI-based solution will return usable results.

2. Will it automatically score and prioritize leads for marketing automation and my sales team?

AI-based tools should derive intelligence from your CRM data, match it to the external world of available data, and show you how valuable a lead is for you. Ideally that happens with no extra work for you or your sales team.

3. Will my sales team trust the results?

Few things are more annoying for a B2B marketer then rolling out a new demand-gen tool or tactic and learning the sales team ignored the leads. A good AI-based lead-scoring platform shows you and your sales team exactly why a lead got the score it did.

4. How accurate is the data? Does it support both company and person data?You need good leads that convert. A lot of demand-gen platforms get their data from the same old, tired, outdated information sources. And most of them can’t give you both data about a prospect company and the people who work there. You shouldn’t have to choose.

5. Is the data aggregated and updated on demand, or pulled from static lists?B2B decision makers move around a lot. An AI-based solution that uses static data may identify someone as a top prospect days, weeks, months or years after they’ve moved to a new role or company. For AI to work in B2B, it needs an on-demand data source that updates contact records in real time.

6. Will it automatically update the data in my CRM?

It’s great if an AI-based tool can tell you a contact’s data has changed, but then what? Ask if the solution automatically updates incorrect data in your CRM, and appends missing data.

Unless you really love cutting and pasting.

7. Does it work for Account-Based Marketing?ABM is the only B2B marketing topic challenging AI for the top of the 2016 hype list. AI-driven solutions can drive ABM account selection and campaigns, but only if they can find ideal accounts based on your specific criteria.

8. Will it automatically match leads to accounts and identify decision makers?If you can’t tell who prospects work for, how can you accurately score them? What if they work for an existing customer? How can you tell if they are actually part of the buying cycle?

Lead-to-Account Matching is an AI-driven feature that answers those questions, but few vendors offer it.

9. Does it integrate with my current demand-gen workflow?

Demand-gen marketers don’t have time to throw out proven practices and established workflows and start over with a standalone solution.

10.Can I use it with Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua and HubSpot?

Most marketers use a combination of CRM, marketing automation and other tools. Unless you have the budget to rip everything out and start over, you need AI-driven tools that integrate with your martech stack and across channels.

Ask any AI vendor these 10 questions. Then ask Leadspace.Leadspace brings the benefits of AI to B2B marketing today, to more than 120 customers, including seven of the world’s 10 largest enterprise software companies. We know how to make AI work for B2B. Let us show you how it can work for you.

Visit us at Booth 2116 at #DF16, or at www.leadspace.com

www.leadspace.com (855) 532-3772