How to Build a Sales Model With G2’s Buyer Intent

A B2B sales strategy is always about the customer's emotions. Building an account pipeline in a B2B business is a work of art. It doesn't just involve hunting and gathering the right accounts.  Investing in the right target accounts is a combined effort of different verticals in a business.  Direct investment in these accounts determines the sales outcomes – from sales churn to future retention.

The exact intent of the buyer is not one-dimensional. Knowing what platforms they explore, system requirements, infrastructure, and expected ROI can make sales cycles faster.

G2’s Buyer Intent follows some aspects of this journey to provide account intelligence that helps to build an account pipeline. The scoring methodology reveals how strong the signals are, helping sales teams detect which accounts have high intent and are ready to engage with a vendor.

How data determines success for sales teams

It is crucial to determine the integrity of a software product by putting the buyer's needs first. Buyers can have objections at various stages of the purchase funnel based on technical abilities, integrations, and customer feedback. 

G2 Buyer Intent scores account for two core factors: Buying Stage and Activity Level. 

The buying stage in the G2 Buyer intent (Awareness, Consideration, or Decision) notifies your outbound reps whether an account is in the early, middle, or later stages of its journey on G2.  This data metric can make or break a sales deal, as it can help gauge the buyer’s knowledge of the product or industry and help customize an outreach strategy accordingly.  

The activity level (High, Medium, or Low) describes how active prospective companies are based on the recency and frequency of their visits to your profile, category pages, alternatives, comparisons, and pricing pages on G2. 

Making use of this score as a priority indicator would empower you to delegate your sales workflows across multiple channels. Access to quality data impacts investments and helps target the correct and reliable account. 

The G2 buyer intent signals are quantifiable metrics that let you know the exact position of your prospects on relevant pages across G2. This information allows sales teams to design effective elevator pitches and reach the prospect with a message that includes their research interests.

Cold outreach and unforeseen sales advances can lead to poor results. Having no prior knowledge of your prospect’s challenges and organizational concerns causes blindspots for your sales team and makes for a poor prospect experience. This is where real-time insights from buyer intent data come in to improve sales outreach and increase response rates.  

How to use Buyer Intent signals to track your prospects

With Buyer Intent, you can steer your sales efforts in the right direction and make the buying journey easier with the following features

Sponsored content signals track ad insights on G2

Sponsored content signals are top-of-funnel signals that enable you to optimize search keywords by returning the pay-per-click (PPC) value. The feature lets you know how many prospects are viewing or clicking on your advertisement on the product page of the competitor profile on G2.

These insights can help you design search ad copies, target the right search keywords, and maintain your campaign with high-intent traffic.

The following example shows a clickable and sponsored ad on a target software category webpage that aligns with buyer intent signals and helps optimize ad campaigns.

Courtesy: Project management category

Once you hit the initial goal, the views and impressions data will help you design a sample sales pitch. In this context, your email can also contain additional G2 resources to back claims.

Category signals map to the early buyer journey  

Brand visibility matters in  SaaS. If you pitch your product within the wrong software category, the probability of receiving leads decreases. G2 category signals indicate the buyer viewed one or more than one software category that includes your product on G2.com.

Category signals also indicate what SaaS solutions appeal to your target accounts. This anticipates their budget allocations, purchase trends, communication, and sales differentiators on their radar. Their presence on a particular category page is a positive nudge to reach out and pitch your product.

The category signals are also classified as top-of-the-funnel intent information, a prerequisite to building a sales funnel or understanding buyer needs.

Alternative signals give an opportunity to repitch your product 

Alternative signals are triggered if your audience explores the “vs.” or competitor alternatives within the G2. The signal reciprocates which competitor page has the spotlight and how you can differentiate your value proposition specifically from them. This process can help with competitor benchmarking.

With the alternative signal feature from G2, you can target middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) buyers with more specific product information that will help with their technical queries and decision-making. Analyzing alternative page signals provides room for content optimization, SEO optimization, and personalized connections with users to stay ahead of competitors.

Alternative signals make buyers evaluate the options, pros, cons, features, ROI value, ROAST value, and other data elements. These signals can help prioritize certain requirements that make you a reliable vendor.

Courtesy: G2

Profile signals trigger automated sales and marketing communication

While designing a sales funnel, researching the ideal customer persona (ICP) is crucial. Profile signals show which accounts are studying or viewing your product on G2.com. It gives a list of players reviewing details on your product page. 

Targeting your sales and marketing approaches in the right direction, building turnaround time (TAT) for email responses, and highlighting your unique selling propositions (USPs) with integrations, features, and ROI would maximize your conversions and get the ball rolling.

The profile signals are a middle and bottom-of-the-funnel sale stage where you can either shortlist many marketing qualified leads (MQLs), schedule calendar meetings or trigger high-touch sales and marketing outreach.

Pricing signals show who is considering the budget

This signal lets you know that users have checked the pricing page of your product or service. Pricing is a delicate factor that many brands are wary of. Buyers might be price-sensitive or ROI-sensitive. Optimizing your pricing and introducing it in the sales cycle will help educate your prospects in their journey.

Here is an example of a pricing page on the G2 marketplace.

Hypothetical sales scoring and prioritization model for target accounts

Consider a sales scoring model that assigns scores based on buyer engagement. In the Awareness stage, interactions like page visits or page impressions earn a low score, while product clicks, demos, or trial requests garner a high score. 

By looking at the G2 interface, my.G2, the buying stage metric would have more significance in your scoring as the accounts as it helps to show purchase conversion potential. Accounts that have a low activity level (page clicks, impressions, or content subscriptions) could be scored low and be lower in the account pipeline.

The integration hub in my.G2 can set up the required tools and enablement your RevOps or sales team would need to connect with the audience. Having integrations can build a multi-faceted lead score, since it helps get real-time intel of your buyer insights from other tools in your stack.

On the other hand, if you get the trial sign-up, case study engagement, pricing signal, or comparison signals, your score will be higher. The consideration stage or decision stage would see a higher score. 

Regularly assess and adjust these scores based on the evolving buyer landscape, demographics, new journey touchpoints, and sales trends.

Following a sales intelligence model would ensure you make the most of your brand resources and be at the forefront of your target audience. The B2B purchase cycle is tricky, and a framework is necessary to keep the teams on the same page.

Building a sales prioritization model with revenue intelligence data would give you an analysis of budget, content consumption, and pipeline conversion. Follow a  data-driven sales scoring model to standardize buying patterns, nurture leads, and increase market presence. 

Implementing a sales scoring model within your tech stack would complete the analysis faster than waiting for sales turnarounds and dealing with sales objections. This doesn’t result in integration hassles, data silos, or outliers. 

4 ways the right data helps drive better outcomes

Buyer Intent signals help inform your lead score and status and quantify intent. Learning about what verticals of your product or service apply to the buyers, its cost, returns, and maintenance or upgradation would charge the buyer ethically. These decisions are driven by data. 

1. Assessing resource allocation for effective engagement

Investing in a proper outreach is the first step for sales management. Sales is about planning first,  not talking after. 

Investing your time and effort in understanding the ideal buyer is crucial. The initial investment of resources, labor, distribution of work, energy, and time, along with data-driven practices, will ultimately determine sales success.

Engaging with clients is not a one-way street. Each team has an equal share in learning about buyer persona and utilizing their talent to score a deal. Sales, marketing, management, legal, finance, and HR operations of the selling company have been designed to make future promotions, sponsorships, and collaborations work.

2. Determining best-fit opportunities

Determining the pros and cons of your buyers sorts your sales pitch requirements. Evaluating each aspect of the buyer is essential since you never know how a competitor’s strategy will turn out.

Maximizing B2B ROI via G2 Stack

G2 Stack is technographic data that reveals what tools a prospective organization uses in its stack. It strengthens your sales arsenal by giving real-time competitor insights, deal insights, integration options, budget insights, and return on investment calculations on your product. 

Knowing what software an organization uses can help customize and personalize your sales story. Here is how:

• Using intent data helps in sales prioritization and scoring to get to the right accounts.
• The solution dissects technographic insights of the software market to keep you one step ahead of your competitors.
• With its help, you can integrate additional software within your suite to cater to buyer-specific use cases.
• The solution puts real-time lead activity and review data to make informed decisions.

3. Unify data across multiple systems for more effective scoring

Unifying data helps prepare a set list of accounts for your team to focus on. By unifying data across multiple tools, you can obtain an adequate score for lead performance and where they stand in your pipeline. 

Bringing data from different sources isn’t easy. As a B2B business, you would have sales and marketing KPIs, launch campaigns, press releases, and a dozen approvals in your pipeline. Managing this, along with account intelligence data, becomes challenging.

However, account intelligence data from G2 Buyer Intent would ease the process of lead filtering. By centralizing data across different channels, like paid, social, organic, and ads, it would be easy to connect with buyers for your sales teams.

Integrating AI monty on the profile page would respond to basic buyer queries. Visitors and prospective buyers can ask questions based on software category, product features, pricing, pros and cons, and comparisons in feature relevance and pricing plans to aid in their decision-making.

Once you have an aggregate lead score, it’s time to move to the next stage in your B2B sales funnel and look at the demographics and segmentation data of the prospect. The more you know about your prospect and their team, the chance of converting them increases. While factoring in your investments, expenses, and long-term revenue goals, allocate sales and marketing budgets accordingly. 

Other than this, the G2 Stack also lists down extensions and integrations that would optimize your product for better GTM campaigns. A software enhancement could benefit your future customers, team, and revenue in the long run.

4. Optimizing prioritization of expansion opportunities and accounts signaling churn

As a business, your goal is to lower churn and build net promoter score  (NPS), net retention rate  (NRR), and annual recurring revenue  (ARR). The purchase funnel has different stages, and the customers will not be satisfied until they are sure of the value of return on investment.

Prioritizing expansions by dropping accounts and signaling churn would be a hasty decision, but it benefits in the long run. As you have direct investments in marketing and sales workflows, building a fluff pipeline would increase the opportunity cost operating costs and reduce cash inflows. 

If you spot accounts looking at alternatives or competitor solutions, the CSMs can get a pivot to an upsell or a cross-sell instead. The responsibility of CSMs and customer success teams goes a long way and is counted on by everyone. They must maintain relationships, growth, and retention rates by simply being there for their customers. These signals could be used as a needle-mover to multithread into additional services you provide in front of customers.

G2 partner integrations to help with account prioritization and scoring

By checking out partner integrations within G2, you can find a better way to identify investment opportunities, sales opportunities, and accounts likely to convert.

• G2 + Salesloft: G2’s integration with Salesloft reduces sales stress by identifying revenue opportunities sooner. The tool automates email, social media tasks, alignment, attachments, and project attainment workflows.  This insinuates transparency between designated teams and helps close faster. SalesLoft is a sales intelligence tool that prioritizes high-intent buyer signals to make an informed deal.
  

• G2 CRM Connector + Salesforce: Salesforce integration is a plug-and-play tool that looks into your CRM data and, based on buyer intent signals, sets workflows and automations for you to prioritize better. With this enhancement, you can access licensed content, G2 references, custom reports, landing pages,  reviews, and testimonials, and even send sales enablement to buyers. 
  

• G2 + Slack: G2 +  Slack lets you receive peer review notifications, activity notifications, and intent signal opt-ins directly in Slack. This helps you shortlist accounts, moderate product reviews, and eliminate any sense of discrepancy on your platforms.
• G2 + Chili Piper: The Chili Piper integration allows you to set inbound routers, connect widgets to calendars to sync appointments, and create meeting rooms to qualify and convert buyers directly from G2.
  

Build bases and sell wisely.

Modern B2B journeys are complex. Identifying target accounts with the best sales and market intelligence tools would keep you above your competitors. Paid marketing campaigns would only last so long, but education and empowerment in sales can go a long way.  Unless you don’t dive deep into the nitty-gritty of the B2B sea, you won’t catch any fish.

Over 90M software users visit G2, making it the world’s largest marketplace. Discover the best intel into your customer journey with G2 Buyer Intent and identify high-revenue accounts to optimize marketing and sales investments