For the last couple of months, we’ve talked about how to use Fit, Intent, Recency, and Engagement — we call it FIRE — as a way to find prospects quickly and easily. We recently honored ten data-driven marketers with our inaugural FIRE Marketer Awards — see the winners.
FIRE helps surface prospects who actually are a good fit for your company and are fairly likely to buy. You’ll know when they started their initial research and whether they’ve interacted with your company and all your great content.
If you haven’t lit a FIRE at your own company, here are five good reasons why you need to do so.
1. ABM is crucial for growth, and FIRE is crucial for ABM.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is the new sales growth strategy more companies are turning to, especially when dealing with long sales cycles that may involve educating several decision makers at a single company, or if the sales process will take many months.
Knowing which accounts you should target means identifying qualified leads faster and focusing your team’s energy and skills where they’re more likely to pay off. Compare that to the “call as many people as you can in a day and hope you catch them on the right day” strategy that many sales teams employ right now.
With ABM, you know which prospects are a good fit, are interested, and have a better chance of connecting with and ultimately closing.
The best way to find those accounts? With FIRE data, which converts our four critical elements into a clear picture of your next best customer.
2. FIRE drives business results by aligning your marketers, SDRs, and sales reps.
Marketing and sales teams often have different goals: the marketing team wants to bring in leads, the sales team wants to close sales. Those two goals don’t always align. The marketing team may bring in leads that aren’t a good fit or don’t have strong intent, the sales team may not necessarily have the tools and information necessary to close the sales.
With our FIRE methodology, you can unite and simplify everyone’s goals, helping both teams to prioritize both your inbound and outbound marketing efforts, finding those leads that are a good fit, are surging on intent right now, and have recently engaged with you and your content.
This way, your marketers can build a high quality list of qualified accounts, your sales development reps (SDRs) can book meetings based on those behavioral signals, and your sales reps can turn more of those meetings into actual deals.
3. Your marketing team will generate more leads.
When marketers have the right kind of data, it’s almost like they have an unfair advantage. It’s like an amateur athlete receiving professional-level coaching: everyone is playing the same game, but the coached athlete is going to be so much better than everyone else.
FIRE is like professional coaching. It’s data-driven insights into a prospective client’s fit and intent: you can know how much a customer wants your product or solution, and how likely they are to buy it. You can also know when the prospect started searching, which gives you some insight into their urgency. And you can see when those prospects have started reading your materials, watching your webinars, and engaging with your company.
This way, you’re faster off the ball, you get an early read on the client, and you’re more likely to make the right moves.
Related: How to Set Lead Generation on FIRE.
4. Your sales team will close more deals.
No more wasting time trying to close deals with customers who don’t actually need the product, aren’t that interested, or are nearing the end of their buying cycle. By eliminating prospects in these groups, your sales team won’t waste their time on these low-potential prospects — no phone calls to uninterested leads, no meetings with companies that aren’t a good fit. This newly-found time lets them focus on the better prospects.
They’ll be able to spend more time on customers who are more likely to close, which means they’ll close more deals while expending less energy. They may get fewer leads, but they’ll close more of them, which also means a higher closing percentage — closing 10 out of 20 versus 10 out of 100 can make a big difference to a closing rate. And closing 10 a week versus 10 a month means closing more deals in a shorter amount of time.
5. You can use FIRE without bloating your tech stack.
We designed FIRE to work within your existing technology solutions. Whatever CRM you’re using, whatever your data sources, FIRE can be integrated with your existing stack.
Image: FIRE Dashboard within Salesforce CRM
At EverString, we use our own FIRE dashboard within Salesforce CRM, which attains Fit data from our EverString Audience Platform (EAP), Intent and Recency data from EAP via our integration with Bombora, and Engagement from our integration with Engagio and Marketo.
Using FIRE’s four elements, we can sort and prioritize the best accounts quickly and easily. You’ll know which leads need your immediate attention, which ones are a high-but-not-top priority, which ones you can wait on, and which ones you can ignore.
Every marketer, SDR, and sales rep can use this data, which will bring their goals and processes closer together, which will ultimately expand your sales funnel, and move customers from prospect to sale much faster and easier. And best of all, you don’t need a lot of new technology or software to make it all work. It will work with the technology and systems you’ve got in place, which makes it a breeze to implement.
Learn how we built a platinum ABM stack at EverString.