the guide to

Marketing Intelligence

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

01

introduction

Over the past few decades, marketing has evolved

from a hunch-based and immeasurable practice to
one driven by data, analytics, and software. At the
beginning of the century, Eloqua and Marketo led
the convergence of email marketing, online lead
nurturing, and inbound lead capture to bring the first
marketing automation solutions to market. Thanks
to marketing automation, todays marketers can
test, score, and nurture leads without having to be
engineers. However, todays marketers face new
challenges. Marketers now work with advanced software and myriad channels to identify new prospects
and engage customers. Marketers once again face
technical challenges for which the solutions require
technical knowledge and engineering background. So
whats next? As the volume and complexity of data
available to CMOs and senior marketers grows, which
new technology will help them make data-driven decisions to engage and convert prospects?

ta ble of con te nts

section i:

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

The Explosion of Data
Frustrating and Disparate Platforms

section ii:

the emergence of marketing intelligence

Faulty Processes and Solutions
Helpless Marketers Select Half-Baked Solutions

section iii:

marketing intelligence at a glance

Insight to Matched Records
Detailed Segmentation
New Targets
Redeployment

conclusion

section i

Disparate Platforms and

the Explosion of Data

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

01

The Explosion of Data

In March 2014, Forrester Analyst Laura Ramos
released a report that explores new ways for
B2B marketers to evaluate large quantities of
data to understand customers and identify
new prospects:

Data Science refers to the practice of creating and testing hypotheses that explore new
ways to interpret the world through data. Data
scientists blend their theories from a variety of
scientific fields.

A wealth of insights is available to B2B marketers if they are willing

to dig in. Internet exploration, search, smart device usage, content
browsing, and business community social activity reveals the twists
and turns customers take throughout their lifetime.
The concept is attractive in theory, but idealistic
in practice; most marketing teams dont have the
capability to merge and analyze the increasingly
large amounts of data they now collect. The field
of data science has emerged to help organizations formulate insights from these mountains
of data to better understand prospects and
customers, but data science is still inaccessible
and misunderstood by most marketers.

Some of those fields include statistics,

mathematics, astrophysics, data engineering,
pattern recognition, machine learning, and more.
They use that data to extrapolate unique and
revolutionary insights from large sets of data.
Making sense of big data is a challenge not only
because of its magnitude, but also because of its
complexity. The value of big data doesnt stem
from the volume of data you aggregate, but
rather, from the relationships between the data.

volume

velocity

variety

veracity

Data at rest

Data in motion

Data in many forms

Data in doubt

Terabytes to exabytes of
existing data to process

Streaming data,
milliseconds to seconds
to respond

Structured, unstructured,
text and multimedia

Uncertainty due to data

inconsistentency, and
incompleteness, ambiguous, latency, deception and
model approximations

fig. 1
IBMs data scientists help us understand the 4 dimensions that define big data popularly known in the data science
community as the 4 Vs.

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

02

by 2015 there will be

400,000
data science jobs
but only

140,000

professionals
that are qualified to
fill them

To extract insights from sets of data, data

scientists have to take the volume, velocity,
variety, and veracity of data into account; they
dont just experiment on data, they merge,
organize, clean, and test data as well.

sources
collect
process
decide
fig. 2
Before data scientists and marketers can
extract value from large data sets, data aggregation and engineering teams must merge and
organize data to reflect a uniform format.

A data scientists job starts with the organization

and management of architectures to normalize
disparate data sets. Then they must merge,
de-duplicate, and scrub data for inaccuracies.
Data scientists often refer to data preparation
as data janitorial work, and once its complete,
data scientists then model and experiment to
recognize trends and relationships between
otherwise disparate data.

Finally, data scientists present results in ways

that influence action, such as through data
visualizations or predictive analytics tools.
On their own, none of these steps constitute
data science; data science is the combination of
activities that transforms raw data into actionable insights, and unless youre dealing with
relatively small data sets and unchanging business goals, theres simply too much work for a
single data scientist to effectively formulate
hypotheses from your data.
Some organizations advocate for every
marketing team to hire a data scientist, but this
is neither feasible nor scalable.
The Harvard Business Review crowned Data
Scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century,
but according to a 2013 McKinsey report, The
United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000
to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and
1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills
to understand and make decisions based on the
analysis of big data.
Marketers want to be data-driven, but increasingly find the time-consuming and laborious
work required to scale existing processes has
become untenable in an age of seemingly endless data.

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

03

Frustrating and Disparate Platforms

Both data scientists and marketers categorize
data in two large buckets: internal and external.
Internal data includes attributes on leads,
accounts, and activities collected by web forms,
uploaded in static lists, or input by sales reps
and stored in CRMs and marketing automation
systems. External data includes additional
signals about prospects, such as revenues,
headcount, online advertising activity, social
media presence, web technologies, and more.

According to BIZOs survey of over 800 B2B marketing leaders, less than 20 percent believe they
are using data well. And for marketers targeting
SMBs, the data problem is even worse.
Only 8 percent of marketers have a 360-degree
view of their SMB customers. Given the universal
challenges that marketers face today, specific to
big data and customer insight, this is not
necessarily surprising.

Marketing departments with data scientists tend to get

awarded an A by their employees for using data versus their
peers who grade their departments at a C or lower.
source: 2013 the team solution to the data scientist shortage by accenture
External data can offer undeniably valuable
clues about buyer behavior and preferences,
but due to the volume,velocity, and inconsistent
veracity of the data, most marketers simply
ignore external data that they deem themselves
unequipped in skills and tools to manage.

And similar to overall big data issues, while marketers believe they have good access to transactional and customer support data (50 percent),
21 percent admit their customer data is in silos
across the organization, while 39 percent only
have basic contact details without rich profiles or
background information on customers or
markets. (CMO Council)

How effectively does your marketing organization use data?

4%

38%

40%

18%

2%

havent started

are struggling

are on the right path

are doing well

have nailed it

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

04

Gartner Analyst Laura McLellan predicts that by 2017, the marketing department will spend more on technology than the IT department. Given the expansion of the marketing stack, this prediction
isnt even remotely far fetched.

inbound and outbound leads

targets
interested
considering
decision
buyer

segment
Yelp ratings, Facebook, Twitter,
Accepts Credit Cards, Shopping Cart,
500K-1MM
Industry
Decision Maker
Retarget Audience
Credit Score, Health
Revenue, Growing
Using Competitor
like existing customers
Learn to resegment
next prospect

fig. 3
Traditionally, marketers segment prospective buyers based on buying stage. Marketers can use segmentation technology
to predict which prospects will fall into each buying stage. Segmentation opens up the marketing funnel so marketers can
explore how new insights impact each stage of the buying process.

With billions of data points at their fingertips,

marketers often prioritize data thats easily
accessible and ignore data that requires added
investment, time, or processes to access. Because of the complex processes required to fuse
internal and external data, most marketers simply ignore the rich insights available in matching
their internal data with external data.

organizations like Facebook, Google, and Apple

organizations that have internal data science
teams face enormous challenges with keeping
data fresh and usable for marketing segmentation purposes. The complex relationships
between data dont easily map to a sales funnel,
nor do they fit neatly into ownership buckets
within the sales, marketing, and IT departments.

As the second funnel above demonstrates, the

utopian case is infinite segmentation based on
the product, service, customer, and even age
of the lead. However, even top tier engineering

The most forward-thinking marketers have begun

to adopt brand new software and other tools to
enable advanced customer segmentation and
lead generation.

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

05

evolution of the marketing stack

Data Science

Excel

IT

MSQL

Creative Teams

Disconnect Tools

Analyst

IT

Agencies

Homegrown On-Site

marketing intelligence

bi

marketing automation

cloud crm

fig. 4
The marketing stack is constantly evolving. Just as Cloud CRM, Marketing Automation, and Business Intelligence evolved out
of collections of complex tools that solved smaller pieces of a bigger problem, Marketing Intelligence has emerged to streamline the modern marketing workflow.

Before Saleforce brought customer relationship

management to the cloud, marketers managed
spreadsheets and homegrown software systems.
Before Content Management solutions likeWordpress made it possible for non-technical
individuals to build websites, marketers had to
outsource web production and online publishing
to expensive external agencies.
Before systems like Marketo and Hubspot were
available, marketers bought email-marketing
tools like MailChimp and developed custom lead
forms with the help of expensive agencies.
The development of every software application
that we use to manage the marketing process

today has been prefaced by expensive, complex,

and inaccessible solutions.
Most recently, weve seen the expansion of
marketing automation. Prior to marketing
automation, the common complaint of senior
marketers was, How do I keep all these tools
operating smoothly? They keep breaking and
theyre a disaster to maintain. Marketing
automation has more or less solved the headaches of managing inbound leads and nurturing
those inbound leads. For the marketer looking
to embrace Marketing Intelligence, were seeing
the same behavior. So whats in the marketing
intelligence toolbox?

As of Q1 2014, there are 947 different marketing technologies

available to marketers. Just two years ago this number was only 350,
and three years ago, as few as 100 technology tools were available to
marketers.
source: chiefmartec.com

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

06

Marketers use 7 data-driven

solutions under the umbrella of
Marketing Intelligence:

Lead Scoring
Segmentation

Marketing Ops

Web Personalization
Analytics

Customer Success

Sales Intelligence

Todays marketers accumulate collections of

technology just to manage data in the same
way marketers managed disparate solutions to
run campaigns before marketing automation
brought campaign management into a single,
reliable, and easy to use cloud-based solution.
Maintaining this assemblage of systems presents
obstacles that most marketers are not equipped
to solve. Many of these solutions require
machine learning, vast amounts of fragmented
external data, and advanced software. Data
science is crucial to marketing departments
grappling with the challenges big data presents.
If hiring a data science team was originally a
marketers solution to building a marketing
intelligence platform internally, they ought to
be prepared to build a top tier recruiting
organization to deal with todays
shortage of qualified data
scientists.
So how can marketers take
advantage of the wealth
of data signals available
to them to segment
markets, find new
prospects, and convert more customers
without becoming data
scientists?
fig. 5
Before its presentable as
actionable insights within a Marketing Intelligence platform, data
goes through a series of complex
processes to aggregate, scrub, organize, merge, and design into user-friendly
applications. Data science is at work
throughout all these processes.

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

07

section ii

The Emergence of
Marketing Intelligence

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

01

Faulty Processes and Solutions

Developing effective marketing intelligence solutions isnt a matter
of fusing disparate solutions into one all-encompassing platform;
rather, its a matter of rethinking the processes we use to find and
convert new customers.
InfoUSA
NetProspex
InfoFree
buy lists

cut

hire quality

segment clean

run campaigns

Dedupe
fig. 6
In an effort to market intelligently, most marketers buy lead lists before segmenting prospects and planning campaigns.
Dismal campaign success rates may not stem from poor quality data, but rather, from a faulty process that should begin with
segmentation, not with lead lists.

This process is unfortunately painful and yields

mediocre results. Typically, marketers point to
data quality as the fault behind ineffective campaigns with dismal conversion rates. However,
because this process relies on so many outside
applications that require so much outsourced
labor, its unclear why certain campaigns succeed
where others fail. Marketers know this is the
case, but consistently tracking and analyzing
results correctly is difficult, and in many cases
impossible. With more access to data and more
channels to reach new audiences than ever

before, marketers spend more money to bombard as many potential prospects as possible
without fine tuning messages or remarketing to
the right prospects.
A number of B2B marketing and sales organizations, such as Groupon or Livingsocial, build
massive teams to gain sales traction and convert
leads. As prospects grow increasingly inundated
with marketing and sales messages, this strategy
delivers decreasing rates of success.

the emergence of marketing intelligence

09

Helpless Marketers Select Half-baked Solutions

Redpoint Ventures partner Scott Raney
advocates the construction of a marketing
intelligence platform that can use data science
to build an enormous model of a companys
past leads to close deal conversion, and [tie]
those deals to all kinds of outside data they can
track down. Then use that model to predict
which incoming leads are most likely to convert,
and thus, where to allocate salespeoples time.
Source

The explosion of data has revolutionized

everything we think we know about our customers, but unless we have the tools to determine
which data matter, we will continue to add more
data to our funnels to increase our chances of
conversion.
The past decade has seen broad adoption of
inbound marketing across the B2B landscape.

As higher volumes of partially qualified leads enter the

funnel, marketers depend increasingly on technology that
ensures only the leads most likely to convert into paying
customers trickle down the funnel.
The ability to identify which KPIs best affect
your historical success rate so you can prioritize
current leads has manifested into predictive
lead scoring. Predictive lead scoring goes a long
way towards constructing an intelligent marketing platform, but the problem isnt just about
salespeople researching and calling the wrong
leads. We dont just need to make the sales and
marketing funnel more efficient; we need to
rethink the way we enter and sort the data that
enters the funnel.

Inbound leads, however, dont enter the funnel

pre-qualified and ready to convert. High quantities of inbound leads tend to bloat the top of the
funnel, and lead scoring and external data become crucial to the movement of leads through
the funnel. A bottleneck emerges between lead
acquisition and conversion. As higher volumes
of partially qualified leads enter the funnel, marketers depend increasingly on technology that
ensures only the leads most likely to convert
into paying customers trickle down the funnel.

B2B CMOs need to think about big data, not as a data

quality and technology problem but as the way to transition
their teams from list managers and campaign number
crunchers to custodians of customer insight.
- forrester research
the emergence of marketing intelligence

10

To fully reduce the pains of modern marketing and build an intelligent solution,
marketers must find a platform that:

Matches external data to existing leads and customer records

Offers an abundance of methods for segmenting records
Provides new leads in top performing segments
Identifies old segments and old leads that need to be re-engaged
Offers sales reps insights to win more business, which increases overall
marketing ROI
Is productized so any marketer can use it

the guide to marketing intelligence | understanding what is important for true marketing intelligence 08

Where predictive lead scoring identifies which

prospects in your CRM and marketing automation may convert, this model only applies to
warm leads and inbound leads. In addition to
Predictive Lead Scoring, marketers still need to
buy lists and supplement their best inbound with
external data. Predictive Lead Scoring doesnt
allow marketers to break the flawed process, it
only aids a portion of the concern: the bottleneck between lead acquisition and conversion.

old funnel

new funnel

Without these components, its difficult to know

which pieces of your marketing process perform
and which do not. Gartner shows that to manage
a truly predictive marketing process, marketers
need to answer not only which warm leads will
convert, but also in which segments their
message will resonate best.
What would the solution that answers What will
happen? and How can we make it happen? look
like? In the next section, well go through the
ideal platform that makes marketing intelligence
possible.

fig. 7
The old marketing funnel is bloated with unqualified leads
that slowly trickle through the bottleneck of scoring and
nurturing. The new funnel is enriched with qualified leads at
every stage of the buying cycle.

the emergence of marketing intelligence

11

section iii

Marketing Intelligence
at a Glance

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

01

Marketing Intelligence Platforms

Marketing intelligence is the layer connected to other platforms like
CRM, Marketing Automation, and Web Content Management Systems
that leverages data and machine learning to deliver insights on customers and market opportunities, and reduces operational overhead.
CRM
Marketing Automation
Marketing Intelligence

lead scoring
Infer, Fliptop,
Lattice Engines

segmentation

marketing ops
NetProspex

Radius, 6Sense

web personalization
Marketo,
Demandbase

predictive analytics
Tableau, IBM

sales intelligence
InsideView, C9,
InsideSales

Marketing Intelligence is comprised of seven main functions. While a num-

customer success
Gainsight, Bluenose,
Totango

ber of players in the B2B marketing space have developed core competencies around one of these seven capabilities, theres no single platform that
delivers an effective solution for all seven areas of marketing intelligence.

A Marketing Intelligence platform does four things:

Insight into matched customer records

Detailed Segmentation
New Targets/Leads
Redeployment to stale leads and segments
marketing intelligence at a glance

13

Insight into Matched Records

Effective Marketing Intelligence provides
detailed cohort analysis based on past success.
Rather than requiring marketers to import new
data into their CRM systems, a Marketing Intelligence platform will link to your CRM system,
analyze the data, and reveal deep insights and
patterns based on past success and failure. Marketing Intelligence can surface data signals that
impact your entire dataset of customer account
status, but its even more powerful when applied
to specific cohorts.

With Marketing Intelligence, you can pinpoint

which insights most impact each cohort. A
Marketing Intelligence platform can surface insights as detailed as, my best performing customer segment is businesses between $500k
and $1MM in revenue that are active on Twitter
and maintain a shopping cart on their website
through PayPal. Gleaning this level knowledge
allows marketers to focus on the segments
most likely convert into customers.

New data signals often reveal more

about your prospects than traditional
firmographics. Matching your CRM
data to an external database can
reveal which signals are most likely to
predict purchase behavior.

Old Record: Email, Phone, Address,

City, State, Postal Code
New Record: Primary Contact,
Secondary Contact , Primary
Industry, Facebook, Twitter,
Online Reviews, Website

marketing intelligence at a glance

14

Detailed Segmentation
Once youve identified which segments convert
the best, you can discover new segments that
go beyond your current success history. This is
a crucial component of planning go to market
strategies for new product launches or new
sales territories. For instance, if you know that
you perform well with businesses that maintain
Facebook pages, you can focus on segments that

are likely to contain high concentrations of Facebook friendly businesses, as opposed to guessing which industries are most likely to convert.
Testing new industries or attributes that overlap
with existing successful segments allows marketers to expand reach without wasting dollars
on prospects that dont make sense.

Segmentation allows you to:

Build a customer-centric organization

Expand established markets
Find niches to compete with bigger companies
Identify specific wants and needs of groups
Re-position existing products
Determine best marketing mix for campaigns
Inform content marketing topics

disparate platforms
the explosion
data
marketingand
intelligence
at a of
glance

01
15

Lead Acquisition
After identifying your best segments and recommending new markets, a Marketing Intelligence platform can provide new leads. Most
lead generation programs are built around the
practice of uploading new leads into the top of
the funnel either through inbound channels
or static lead lists which can result in tons of
duplicate data entering your CRM or marketing
automation system. A Marketing Intelligence
solution is designed to simplify the lead acqui-

sition process so you can find new leads that

resemble specific segments. Marketing Intelligence essentially renders the practice of static
lead list acquisition completely obsolete. If your
Marketing Intelligence platform already knows
which leads are in your CRM and which types of
leads perform well, it can provide a new set of
leads that are guaranteed net new; youll never
enter duplicate data again.

A well-constructed lead list can lower cost-per-lead by 60%.

source: brian carroll, b2b lead roundtable blog

marketing intelligence at a glance

16

Redeployment
Timing is often the single most influential factor
in any B2B buying decision, and for todays
informed marketers, may be the biggest contributing factor to a growing collection of endlessly
open accounts.

A Marketing Intelligence platform identifies

which opportunities that are queued for re-nurture programs are actually perfect potential
customers within top performing segments.
Why invest in new data and new leads when
hidden opportunities are already in your CRM?

We had opportunities that were highly qualified to buy Salesforce, and

they might have come through the sales process four or five times over a
two year period before buying.
gregfiorindo, vp sales, radius, formerly salesforce.com

marketing intelligence at a glance

17

conclusion

The era of Marketing Intelligence is upon us. The

nexus of data, recommended segments, abundant
segmentation options, and integration with CRMs
allows marketers to be truly thoughtful about the
ways they communicate with customers. The question ultimately is not, how will all these disparate
solutions fit together with large quantities of data,
but rather, how can I take advantage of an end-to-end
solution to engage with my best segments and my
best prospects.

All of this (data, technology, and channels) makes marketing enormously complex and confusing and difficult to manage, which also
makes it that much more of a competitive weapon. Most companies
will screw it up, but those that nail it can create massively outsized
advantages for themselves. - Pat Grady, Partner at Sequoia Capital

About Us
Radius is the marketing platform that empowers
B2B marketers with data and insights to reach
the right customers. Unlike fragmented data
providers and consultative lead scoring solutions,
Radius provides vertically-integrated software
that incorporates billions of business data points,
predictive analytics, and seamless integration into
CRMs and marketing automation solutions.
With deep roots in data science, our predictive
marketing software is built on the Radius Index,
the most comprehensive living-and-breathing
data source of U.S. businesses. Our machine-generated insights and intuitive user interface allows
marketers to better understand their customers,
find more look-a-likes, identify the top opportunities in their CRM, and track & measure success.

radius.com

114 Sansome St. STE 1000

San Francisco, CA 94104
info@radius.com
@radius

disparate platforms and the explosion of data

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