Paint with a broad brush: the current state of GTM analytics
Across the board, B2B companies plan their go-to-market strategy around a list of target accounts, otherwise known as segments. Regardless of whether these segments are vague, specific, broad, or focused, they’re at the heart of nearly every single go-to-market effort:
- How can we acquire our first 20 customers in this new vertical?
- How can we penetrate North America with our existing verticals?
- How can we upsell or cross-sell to existing mid-market and enterprise customers?
- How can we capture demand amongst EU-based fintech SMEs with over 100 employees?
Despite the way we typically think about GTM, however, our tooling has continued to remain lacking. Even the most popular analytics solutions (Looking at you, Google Analytics 👀) still report GTM KPIs at a channel-level, rather than at a segment-level. Sure, tools like GA4 can say a lot about your overall website performance — but how are your GTM efforts influencing your target accounts in particular?
How does that LinkedIn ad, search campaign, website copy, blog article, thought-leadership post, newsletter, or webinar impact the niche audience you actually care about? Are the right accounts…
- Viewing your LinkedIn ads?
- Clicking on your search ads?
- Driving up website traffic?
- Responding to your emails?
- Submitting demo forms?
You may find such questions difficult to answer with run of the mill analytics and CRM tools because manually parsing aggregated data, across multiple channels by individual segments is, well, a tedious, time-consuming chore. It also tends to be free of nuance or granularity — resulting in hazy paintings with a broad brush. Additionally, while most analytics tools do a decent job of reporting high-level metrics (traffic, clicks, impressions, etc), they struggle to unify the buying journey in its entirety across:
- Cross-channel engagement
- Meetings booked
- SQL/opportunity conversions
- Pipeline value
- Win rate
- Sales cycle length
- Revenue sourced
The result? Marketers and sales folk are left with a heap of channel data, generic reports, and no real understanding of whether their efforts reached and resonated with the right audience.
Introducing Segment Insights By Factors
Establishing the segments you care about is the first step to GTM success. However, in our conversation with several B2B teams, we’ve learned that achieving granular insight into how these segments are performing is a real challenge. This is where Factors steps in to provide a robust and intuitive approach to GTM analytics with Segment Insights.
What is Segment Insights?
Segment insights is our latest product feature to help businesses measure, compare and improve segment performance for a targeted group of accounts.
What can I do with Segment Insights?
There are several use-cases powered by Segment Insights. Here, we highlight a few.
1. Segment-level measurement
It’s one thing to track generic website and campaign KPIs — but Factors helps you measure those same metrics (and more) specific to the segment of accounts you care about. This way, you eliminate irrelevant data and zero in on pertinent engagement across website, LinkedIn, G2 and more to answer burning questions such as:
- How many (and which) accounts in this segment are showing disproportionate buying intent?
- How are accounts in this segment converting to MQL/SQL/Opportunity/etc? Is this improving?
- How many (and which) accounts from this cohort or segment have viewed LinkedIn ads?
- How many (and which) accounts from this cohort or segment visited G2 and then your website?
- How have these KPIs trended over time? How do they compare from last quarter?
- What is the health of this particular segment? How does it compare to overall health average?
And the best part? If none of the several pre-built KPIs fit what you’re looking for, you always have the option to design custom KPIs for bespoke analysis of a particular segment.
2. Segment-level comparison
Data-driven marketing teams are often keen to compare metrics across cohorts to better understand which efforts and touchpoints resonate with whom. For example, you may want to compare business metrics between:
- Segments of two different industry verticals (Eg: SaaS SMEs vs SaaS Mid-market)
- Segment of accounts that attended a flagship event vs segment of account that did not
- Segment of accounts that visited a paid landing page vs segment of accounts that did not
On the other hand, you might also choose to perform an A/B test: altering a single variable (budgets, creatives, etc) from otherwise identical segments (eg: US-based software SMEs) to better gauge resonance and optimize GTM efforts.
3. ROI-boosting lift analysis
It’s not exactly news that spending money on ads, SEO, events, and other B2B marketing activity results in increased website activity. This, in itself, doesn’t really mean much. What B2B marketers really care about is how their efforts influence their target accounts. This is where lift analysis comes in:
Say you have an ABM account list. You’re targeting these accounts with ads, emails, calls, and other tactics. But which combination of tactics work best? How are your ABM efforts influencing pipeline? And where should you reallocate budgets to improve ROI? To have a better sense of this, leverage Factors by creating two similar segments: one that receives ABM treatment and the other doesn’t. Once set up, you’ll have visibility into the impact of ABM on win rates, sales velocity, ACV, and much, much more. For instance, the first segment might show higher conversions rates and deal sizes despite the second segment showing more top of the funnel website engagement. Ultimately, learnings from this kind of analysis will result in deeper insights to prove and improve marketing impact.
4. Organizational alignment
Marketing, sales, and revenue leaders typically prioritize segments over channels — where the deals are coming from don’t matter as much as the quality of those deals. Accordingly, Segment Insights facilitates a similar perspective, enabling marketing teams to analyze data and make strategic decisions based on their target market, not just clicks and impressions. This fosters organizational alignment between GTM teams and leadership.
The bottom line is this: with Factors, you needn’t limit yourself to broad analytics across website engagement and marketing campaigns, and sales touchpoints. Instead, leverage Segment Insights to achieve a deeper, relevant understanding of the target accounts you actually care about. Learn more about Segment Insights over a chat with our product experts today!
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