The Insight Collective

“Intent data” might tell you what a buyer did. But does it tell you what they’ll do next? Dale W. Harrison argues that there’s a better way to approach lead scoring – one that connects buyer signals with commercial value. Discover the thinking in the latest B2B Effectiveness episode. #B2BMarketing #IntentData #LeadScoring #B2BEffectiveness

Tom Grunwald, our CFO - doesn't use the killing curse on our marketing budgets unless we use magical thinking. He wants to invest more galleons and there is one metric that can unlock his Gringotts vault. Join Tom & the Dumbledore of B2B, Dale W. Harrison, for our next LinkedIn Live where they will discuss this metric and more. https://lnkd.in/ehqk39bS

Liam Moroney spent six years selling cameras before he ever got into B2B marketing. And what he learned on the shop floor is the same thing most B2B lead scoring gets wrong today. There's always a group of people who show up every single week to play with the gear and never, ever buy it. Ask anyone who's worked a specialty electronics or hobby store – they'll tell you exactly who these people are. There's also a group who only ever ask about price. Turns out that's not a buying signal either – they already know they're getting it cheaper from the big box store down the road. Fast forward 15 years, and Liam's looking at his own company's lead scoring dashboard, staring at accounts who'd read 500 blog posts and never come close to buying. Same pattern. He just hadn't connected the dots yet. Dale W. Harrison calls this out directly: people who engage constantly with your content can be functionally indistinguishable from people who are actually ready to buy. He calls the never-buying group "click monkeys" – and no scoring model, however sophisticated, can tell them apart from a real prospect using digital signals alone. Dale and Liam unpack this in Episode 3 of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners. Watch the full episode here.

A RevOps team once ran a sneaky experiment on their lead scoring model. They pulled a batch of contacts from their database and assigned them lead scores using a random number generator. Then they mixed those randomly-scored leads in with the ones scored by their actual, carefully-built points-based system – and passed both batches over to sales. The result? No difference in close rate. None. Their "sophisticated" scoring model was performing exactly as well as a coin flip. This is a story Dale W. Harrison told on the B2B Effectiveness series – Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners, and it's one of the cleanest illustrations we've come across of why so many MQL scoring models don't actually predict anything. The problem was never the M or the L in MQL. It's the Q – what actually makes a lead "qualified." Check out the full episode here.

Did you know, the Apollo spacesuit was built by a bra company? When NASA needed a spacesuit flexible enough for astronauts to work on the Moon, aerospace companies struggled to solve it. Yet Playtex had already developed the ability to make latex both airtight and flexible – exactly what NASA needed. It’s a great example of something we often miss in B2B: the best opportunity isn’t necessarily the biggest account, the most recognizable name or the one showing the strongest engagement signals. It’s the opportunity where what you sell – and how you sell it – is the strongest fit for what the buyer needs. Dale W. Harrison tells the full story in Episode 5 of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners. Check out the full episode.

Ever wonder why some “qualified” leads go absolutely nowhere, even after ticking every box on the checklist? Here's a story about enterprise procurement that explains a lot. Large companies often already know exactly who they're going to buy from before a formal process even starts. But procurement policy requires five, six, seven competing bids. So someone gets sent out to find other vendors, run them through sales calls, let them believe there's a real opportunity – and never intend to buy from any of them. It's just there to get procurement off their back and approve the deal everyone already agreed to. Every box on the checklist gets ticked. Budget: yes. Authority: yes. Timing: yes. But for the vendor, the deal was never real. This is why frameworks like hashtag#MEDDIC can't save you. You can have budget, authority, and urgency all confirmed, and still lose the deal – because the buyer never intended to buy from you in the first place. Dale W. Harrison unpacks this on the B2B Effectiveness series: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners. Watch the full episode here. Have you ever been the “sacrificial vendor” in a bid process like this?