Website engagement can predict buying intent, as engagement is the single biggest predictor of intent. Tracking website behaviors of named accounts through tools like Demandbase allows predicting which accounts are most likely to buy by monitoring engagement levels over time. Following a process of identifying unknown website visitors, tracking named accounts, monitoring engagement levels, setting sales alerts, and customizing the website experience can help optimize predicting and closing sales.

1. Account-Based Buying Signals
How to tell which companies are most likely
to buy based on website activity
Adapted from a presentation from Adam Greco, Senior
Partner at Web Analytics Demystified and Shari Johnston,
Director of Demand Generation Demandbase

2. Account-Based Buying Signals
How to tell which companies are most likely
to buy based on website activity
Adapted from a presentation from Adam Greco, Senior Partner at Web Analytics Demystified
and Shari Johnston, Director of Demand Generation Demandbase
Executive Summary
Takeaways include:
The B2B buyer’s journey has shifted radically over the years,
and smart digital marketers use this to their advantage. • Focusing on the power
B2B companies can use web analytics to predict who will of identity and learning to
buy by learning to read the “digital body language” of web read your target accounts’
digital body language when
visitors, and by pinpointing exactly who those visitors are. they are browsing
Website engagement is the single biggest predictor of buying
intent, making it possible to predict a company’s odds of purchasing • Using website engagement
well before they reach out to your sales team. With the proper as the single biggest
predictor of buying intent.
tools, predicting which customers are most likely to buy is simply Tracking named accounts
a matter of honing in on their website behaviors. We say “simply,” through customizable
but of course there is an iterative nature to the process, as well data that specifically
benefits your sales team,
as a tactical strategy you must first adopt and then customize and by setting alerts when
to your company’s specific needs. Boiled down to its simplest active sales opportunities
elements, honing in on visitor behavior looks something like this: are happening
1. Start tracking who is looking at your website now.
• The Demandbase Cheat
2. Wait a month or two (and keep tracking). Sheet for getting started
3. See who turns into a buyer.
4. Assess which elements of your website
had the biggest impact and which sources
and keywords drove the most buyers.
With this information and over-time analysis, you’ll gain
necessary insights and progressively structure your
website to attract and retain paying customers.
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3. Introduction
In today’s B2B marketing world, there is an overwhelming amount of content available to prospective
buyers from websites, social media, blogs, forums and so forth. Accordingly, buyers are more educated
and sophisticated than ever before. They know how to quickly and easily navigate the Web to find the
information they need, and their journey starts well before they consider engaging
with a sales rep. By the time a prospect contacts you directly, even through
a form, he is deep inside the pipeline of decision-making. But if you
In a complex sale, don’t have the tools to help you analyze these potential customers,
the buyer’s journey they might not even make it to your sales shortlist.
is 70% complete by
A 2011 Demandbase survey showed that company websites
the time he’s ready
were the number one online source of new leads, and research
to engage with a live
from International Data Corporation (IDC), a global provider of
sales person. market intelligence, indicated that customers spend 50% of the
buying cycle looking for or engaging with content. With half of their
Source: SiriusDecisions
time spent this way, it’s vital that you are feeding prospects exactly
what they are looking for. We can’t emphasize the importance of this
enough: targeted content delivery to potential buyers needs to be a focused
marketing strategy for your company.
Given that not a single B2B sale happens without a visit to your website somewhere along the buying
process, it’s crucial to invest in content, because it’s a main source of future revenue. You need to reach
prospects in a proactive way, rather than passively waiting for them to reach out to you. But how do you do
this when 95% of your web site visitors are anonymous?
In the traditional model of meeting customers in person, facial expressions and body language helped
us figure out what interested prospective customers. But in the global digital era, you get that information
from prospects’ digital body language—what they search for, the pages they visit, the links they click on. If
you’re listening in the technological sense, you can hear what your leads are saying with every click.
“Out” the Silent Majority for Better Marketing and Higher Revenue
Most visitors to your B2B website—in fact, about 95%—are anonymous because they haven’t
yet identified themselves through a form submit. One of our customers, a large enterprise
network storage organization, calls these invisible visitors “the silent majority.” Before using
Demandbase, this company had no way of identifying the large number of people browsing their
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4. site. You can’t market to the unknown, so they decided to partner with Demandbase to “out”
the silent majority and identify them by industry, company name and size, and more. They then
built a demand-generation engine to create compelling experiences for the 95% in order to drive
more conversions and, ultimately, more revenue. By microtargeting visitors with personalized
landing pages for key industries, our client saw the following astonishing results:Most visitors
to your B2B website—in fact, about 95%—are anonymous because they haven’t yet identified
themselves through a form submit. One of our customers, a large enterprise network storage
organization, calls these invisible visitors “the silent majority.” Before using Demandbase, this
company had no way of identifying the large number of people browsing their site. You can’t
market to the unknown, so they decided to partner with Demandbase to “out” the silent
majority and identify them by industry, company name and size, and more. They then built a
demand-generation engine to create compelling experiences for the 95% in order to drive more
conversions and, ultimately, more revenue. By microtargeting visitors with personalized landing
pages for key industries, our client saw the following astonishing results:
• 30% lift in product demo play
• 39% lift in downloads
• 83% lift in navigation to their deeper product pages
Website Engagement Is the Single
Biggest Predictor of Buying Intent
Using this sort of
This white paper is predicated on the idea that website engagement predictive analytics
is crucial to predicting the buying intent of prospective accounts
approach, you too can
who are browsing on your site. Let’s dig a little deeper into the
predict your company’s
stats around this:
future revenue based
CI Insights Inc. (formerly Experient), has over 13 years in the on website viewer
business of customer intelligence consulting, conducted a study behavior in the
on engagement scoring with sales predictions, analyzing 400,000 present.
accounts over a 24-month period on how customers engaged with
website pages, email data and attendance at offline events. Out of this
study came one important finding: website engagement with high-value content
increased the likeliness to buy. For example, a prospect that took the time to watch a
product demo video turned out to be four times more likely to buy than one who didn’t.
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5. At Demandbase, we tested this theory by taking a sample of closed accounts from Q3 2012 to see if
website activity really did predict future revenue. We pulled data for a 6-month period prior to the close
date, and in every single case we saw a spike in Web traffic shortly before a purchase was made.
The Power of Identity and Reading Digital Body Language
Before the days of Web marketing, trade shows were often the best way to meet leads. All lead gathering
took place in person. If someone walked up to your booth at a trade show and expressed interest in your
products, you asked them a number of vital questions right off the bat:
1. What’s your name?
2. What company do you work for, and how big is it?
3. What industry are you in?
4. Are you familiar with our products?
5. What problem can we help you solve?
5

6. STEP 1: Identify the Unknown
Using Demandbase and standard analytics tools, you can identify the silent majority browsing
your website by company size, industry, name and more. Below is a visual example of how
you can identify one potential customer. Reading the data, you know that this person works
in the high-tech industry for a company (Symantec) that has over 10,000 employees.
Using Demandbase and analytics tools to pinpoint who is on your website and how they are
behaving makes the website—traditionally a marketing tool—much more exciting for your sales
organization because it has real selling potential. Your sales team will learn exactly who is visiting
the site and how often, and receive customizable reports that can be tweaked to their needs:
Armed with this data, you can open up a productive line of communication between sales
and marketing that is often missing in B2B. You can zero in on exactly which companies
are looking at your products, and then act on the information in a proactive way.
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7. STEP 2: Track Named Accounts
Named accounts, often called key accounts, are the accounts your company is most
interested in targeting. Imagine being able to see which named accounts view your key
conversion pages or your most valuable content.
Earlier, we talked about defining the analytics to describe which
accounts are looking at the various pages on your website. Demandbase uses IP
Now, let’s take this a step further and talk about tracking identification to name
visitors who view specific information, especially pricing
information. Tracking in this way provides crucial insight,
accounts. We can
because if a prospect gets as far as your pricing page, classify your traffic by
he is deep inside the funnel, serious about your audience type and provide
product, and possibly ready to reach out to you. enterprise information
on that subset of your
Using Demandbase, you can hone in on your named
accounts, analyze specific pages they are spending
traffic. Once you have this
time on, track which pages lead to success, and make information, it’s easy to
decisions about which landing pages to send people pass it along to your web
to during campaigns. Plus, you can view pathing reports analytics tool.
of how visitors from a particular company (or industry)
navigate your website. All of this data not only helps inform
the sales team, but also helps the marketing team refine and
restructure the website in an effort to make it a more strategic tool.
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8. STEP 3: Track Visitor Engagement
Even more powerful than analyzing which of your pages a particular company looks at is Demandbase’s
ability to assign visitor engagement points. By tracking an account’s engagement score, and combining
that score with the company’s overall analytics, you can begin to gauge which companies are exhibiting
high interest in your products.
Engagement points work this way:
• If an account views a product page, you assign 2 points (for example)
• If they view the pricing page, 25 points
• If they watch a demo video, 50 points
The first step is to name as many website visitors as possible to get that silent majority down to a minority.
Once you’ve identified as many accounts as you can, the second step is to get them to visit your pricing
pages. The third and final step in this process is to look for relationships between named account activity
and sales success.
By analyzing this activity, you can indicate spikes in named account visits or pricing views, and then better
predict future buying behavior. This analysis can also help guide future salesperson hiring strategy and
website flow.
8

9. STEP 4: Set Alerts Segment Website Behavior
for Sales for Named Accounts
Here’s an example of how you can customize
Demandbase’s visitor engagement metric allows for
web analytics data to the exact specs required
customization of the web analytics tool to alert sales
by a sales representative. Susan, the sales rep,
whenever a named account surpasses a particular
can quickly view a list of her targeted named
threshold—for instance, when a certain number of
accounts and see which paths those accounts
customer engagement points are reached.
are taking and how often they are visiting the
When someone expresses interest in your product,
site. Sales reps appreciate this type of no-
a faster reaction means a higher probability of sales
nonsense, segmented information.
success. In fact, Salesforce.com research showed
that minutes make a huge difference. This type of
proactive sales behavior showcases your company
as intelligent, progressive and driven—attributes
that customers find impressive and professional.
9

10. STEP 5: Make Your Website as Relevant and
Customized as Possible to Each Visitor
You can’t easily build a custom website targeted to each unique person or industry that visits you online.
But by using Demandbase with other advanced online marketing and testing tools, such as Test and Target
by Adobe, you can create rules around what content is displayed on your home page, depending on who
is looking at it. For instance, a visitor from the high-tech industry will see a case study related to their field,
while a visitor from a healthcare company will instead see a healthcare case study. In this way, you take
streamlined advantage of your time with visitors. At Demandbase, we found that conversion rates were
higher when we used rules to help personalize our website to each unique visitor. Before personalizing in
this way, we had a high bounce rate on our homepage; after, our bounce rate decreased substantially.
STEP 6: Proactively Initiate Chat
Sessions with Named Accounts
One of the most effective things that our customer Salesforce.com did
was integrate Demandbase with proactive chat. Getting a prospect
to complete a form is great, but eventually a real conversation
must be had in order to close business. Most chat vendors
have a rule hierarchy, so, for example, if a prospect is on
“A form completion
the website for over five minutes, a chat box pops up. is interesting, but not
Salesforce began by opting for a chat box to pop up nearly as interesting as
when a visitor hit the pricing page. Over time, based identifying the company
on their analytics, they refined their model, creating that looked at 32 pages
intelligent pop-up chat timing for named accounts but didn’t convert yet.”
displaying particular behaviors, and have been able
to greatly increase their conversion rate as a result. — Jason Stewart, B2B Marketer and
Marketing Technologist at Demandbase
Setting up pop-up chat rules requires a deft hand. Too
much of a “push” to talk will turn off customers. The trick, as
Salesforce.com learned, is to place pop-up chat opportunities at
just the right time for that particular customer.
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11. Web Analytics Demandbase Cheat Sheet:
Demystified: B2B What A Marketer Needs
to Get Started
Recommendations
1. Research to understand what
Looking into the future of B2B marketing through is triggering your buyers’ intents.
website content, we’ve learned a few lessons:
2. Create a list of tools that
will help you optimize to
• Don’t give up on the silent majority: the buyer behavior.
unknown 95% of your website visitors
• Don’t wait until it’s too late to figure
3. Understand which types
of accounts you should monitor.
out which companies are interested in
your products 4. Hone in and engage your target
• Listen to your prospects’ digital audience, customizing your
body language tactics as you collect more data.
• Use all of the information at your 5. Integrate with analytics tools.
disposal to help close sales
6. Create sales alerts.
7. Test and target landing pages.
8. Keep an eye on the future,
“Your website is a lead-churning constantly revising and refining
machine, and you want to be over time.
constantly optimizing it.”
While B2B marketing priorities have stayed
— Adam Greco, the same, marketing tactics have changed a
Web Analytics Demystified great deal. By learning to read digital body
language and to “out” your silent majority
of web visitors, you can better predict who
will buy and proactively reach out to them,
instead of waiting for them to come to you.
11

12. Demandbase is the first real-time targeting
and personalization platform for B2B,
transforming the effectiveness of marketing
programs and Marketing’s ability to impact
revenue. While personalization tools have long
existed for B2C, until now, none were geared
specifically to enable B2B marketers to make
online interactions more effective, delivering
the right message at the right time.
Without the use of cookies, Demandbase’s
Real-time Identification service bridges the
gap between known and anonymous web
visitors by identifying and segmenting the
companies visiting a website, and providing
detailed, targetable business attributes in
real-time. Demandbase integrates with other
sales and marketing tech­ ologies to deliver
n
unique intelligence about web visitors, and
better attract, convert and retain the right
customers. Enterprise leaders and high-growth
companies alike use Demandbase to drive
better marketing performance.
Founded in 2006 and used by more than
1,000 companies, Demandbase is
headquartered in San Francisco, California
and funded by Adobe Systems (NASDAQ:
ADBE), Altos Ventures, Sigma Partners,
and Sutter Hill Ventures.
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13. San Francisco Headquarters
Demandbase, Inc. Facebook facebook.com/DemandbaseMarketing
301 Howard Street, Suite 1800 Twitter twitter.com/demandbase
San Francisco,CA 94105 YouTube youtube.com/demandbasemarketing
info@demandbase.com Blog demandblog.demandbase.com/
415.683.2660
Demandbase Support
415.683.2660
support@demandbase.com
© 2012 Demandbase, Inc. All rights reserved.