Written by Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua and the author of the recent book Digital Body Language.

Amy was kind enough to ask me to write a post to the B2B Lead audience to answer a question that frequently comes up.  What is the relationship between Demand Generation/Marketing Automation, such as what we provide at Eloqua, and Targeted Contact Discovery, such as ReachForce’s service.

It’s a great question, and the answer touches on a number of areas.

The key relationship is the critical importance of understanding your target audience.  The cost of raw, untargeted data continues to drop.  With various social or data scraping services in the market today, the cost of a raw name, even a name with title information attached, has been reduced to pennies.

However, this has led to a market dynamic where untargeted marketing messages are prevalent, and the ability to precisely target the right buyer with the right message at the right time is the most important differentiator.

Role-based contact discovery is a crucial step in understanding who is a potential buyer of your product or services.  Going beyond title to discover actual functional role allows you to precisely identify the individual who would, when the time is right, progress through a buying cycle and purchase your product or services.

And this is where demand generation, such as the platform we provide at Eloqua, comes in.

The key synergy is that by using a demand generation platform to understand the digital body language of our buyers, we can identify the critical second piece of the equation – where each buyer is in their buying cycle.  By understanding the stages of a buying process for your product or service, and then using scoring to map each potential buyer to the stage of the buying process he or she is at, you can see whether they are at the education and awareness stage, are discovering potential vendors, or are validating a vendor as their final choice.

With a clear understanding of the “who” (based on role-based discovery) and the “how interested” (based on reading their digital body language), targeting the right message to the right person at the right time becomes possible.

However, there is another crucial link.  Even though the differentiated value of understanding role, vs just title, is clear to most marketers, the difference may be lost on the CFO.  Demand generation processes allow you to paint a much clearer picture of the value of one name over another.

With Eloqua, you can rethink your marketing analysis around the full buying funnel.  By taking a top-down view of your marketing analysis, you can begin to get a clear picture of where each buyer is in their buying process.  As you do this, you can begin to push your analysis of the value of a name further down the buying funnel.  Determining, through using lead scoring, which source of names actually turns into Marketing Qualified Leads and revenue opportunities allows you to view the value of the incoming names more clearly.  If a targeted name costs more by a factor of 5, but converts into revenue opportunities at 10X the rate of untargeted names, it is clearly more valuable.  Demand generation allows you to prove that value further down the buying funnel.

A third critical link is in sales understanding.  Sales needs to engage with individual buyers in individual conversations.  The only way to do this is for them to understand the interests of each buyer.  Targeted discovery allows you to provide your sales team with insights into what the potential buyer’s role and major focus areas are, while Eloqua allows you to provide your sales team with insight into their area and level of interest through giving them insights into the buyer’s digital body language.

With these approaches in place, it is even possible to reverse the standard approach of seeking, through targeted lead discovery, folks in the right roles, followed by using lead nurturing to cultivate and generate interest.  Interest may already exist, and can be identified through seeing individuals from ideal target companies anonymously visiting your website. In this case, these companies, where interest has already been seen, can be passed automatically to Reachforce for targeted lead discovery.  This provides you with an immediate win, as you have a person in the right role, at a company that is already showing interest in your product or solution.

Together, targeted lead discovery through Reachforce and demand generation through Eloqua form a powerful combination that allows you to find the right person, at the right company, showing the right level of buying interest.  For your sales team, there can be no better lead than that.