Full Circle Insights, a marketing and sales performance measurement solutions provider, teamed up with Bombora, a B2B intent data solutions provider, to enable Full Circle ABM users to leverage intent data to identify and track accounts from the detected stage of account activation all the way to closed-won deals.
Full Circle ABM is a martech solution designed to help B2B marketers track account engagement from both digital and non-digital campaigns within an account funnel. The partnership seeks to provide B2B marketers with the ability to measure the impact of their ABM strategy inside their CRM to facilitate tighter collaboration between marketing and sales on account targeting. The integration also seeks to assist marketers in converting untapped buyer demand into predictable revenue using Bombora’s Company Surge intent data. Specific features of the collaboration include the ability to:
- Accurately track campaign attribution and account activation from target account selection to closed/won deals; and
- Measure the buyer’s journey from initial website click to closed sale.
To learn more about the partnership and what it means for the B2B industry, ABM In Action sat down with Bonnie Crater, CEO and President of Full Circle Insights, and Charles Crnoevich, SVP of Partnerships at Bombora.
ABM In Action: What are some of the industry trends that influenced the formation of this partnership?
Bonnie Crater: The pressure is on marketers to actually measure their performance, particularly in times of economic uncertainty. Marketers need to get a handle on what’s working and what’s not so they can adjust the budget. There’s an increasing pressure to truly measure marketing that’s coming from the Board and CEO.
Charles Crnoevich: We’ve also seen a lot of consolidation across the ABM space over the past five or six years, so it’s no longer that Company A creates your ICP while Company B de-anonymizes your website traffic. There are so many platforms that do everything, and the promise of automation is here. But if you don’t know if the system you built is working, you might just be automating spam, which is the last thing anyone wants in this world of “do more with less.” Companies need to work smarter, because if you can’t measure how your ABM is performing, you can’t really optimize or automate toward that goal.
ABMIA: Can you tell us more about how this partnership came to fruition and how it will address those issues?
Crnoevich: Over the past couple years, we’ve grown a lot as a company and an industry around ABM, intent data and newer age technologies. Especially in recent times — with the economic uncertainty — accuracy and proving what’s working is important, and that’s something our customers have challenged us to do better on. They’re like, “Hey, we know this data is valuable and we’re doing our own measurement, but it would help if you could turn it into an always-on system where we can see your data in addition to how our ABM programs are performing.”
Although we were very familiar with Full Circle, we never worked together despite them being a leading attribution company. That’s when we started talking, and the product always made sense. And then once we started working together, we could tell our companies’ cultures fit too.
Crater: People have been doing ABM forever, but from my perspective, there were two factors that innovated the strategy: When Bombora created the opportunity to see intent data by company and when the account funnel was formalized through Forrester’s B2B Revenue Waterfall. Once those two elements came together, we realized we had the opportunity to show marketers what the trends are and how well they’re activating accounts and turning them into pipeline and sales.
ABMIA: Can you elaborate more on the product and the issues it addresses in the B2B industry?
Crater: We introduced a product called Full Circle ABM, which measures account funnel and puts the B2B Revenue Waterfall into software, so you can take all the data and categorize it by the different stages that are prescribed in that waterfall. One of the key stages is target accounts, followed by what actions they’re taking, such as clicking on intent topics and researching solutions, which indicate the first phase of a purchase cycle. Full Circle ABM consumes Bombora’s data to show which accounts are demonstrating intent and where they are in the account funnel.
Crnoevich: If you gave marketers truth serum, they’d all admit that they struggle with ABM measurement because they need to analyze so many different data points. Are accounts visiting their website? Clicking on emails? Attending webinars? Everybody puts a good plan in place, but it’s tough to judge in a granular way. A lot of marketers struggle to sift through all this data, so they want the ability to put this data into Salesforce to see what data points are performing, what’s not and identify areas of improvement.
Crater: This partnership is transformational because the point of ABM is to figure out target markets and the most efficient path to get revenue. This marks the first time you can get true volume, velocity conversion rate and analyze the trends over time to truly understand the impact of your campaigns in a standardized way.
ABMIA: Why is it so essential to provide marketers with full-funnel visibility across all stages of their account’s journey?
Crnoevich: One of the promises of ABM and intent data is sales and marketing alignment. Although it’s become a bit of a buzzword, there’s classically been this notion that marketing handles top-of-funnel and then once it goes to sales, those teams probably aren’t talking to each other and celebrating wins, or even knowing if an account was actually nurtured through the full funnel.
I love salespeople; I’m a salesperson myself, but we’re just not going to be the ones who do the detective work to determine if something’s working. It’s essential to build that alignment, and it’s built by determining if their holistic, multichannel, data-encompassing strategy is doing what they think it is, e.g., touching accounts at the top of the funnel and getting them down to opportunities and closed business.
ABMIA: How do you plan to grow the partnership in the future?
Crater: Bombora’s an important partner for us, because we see them as having very leading technology in account detection. So, we have customers that already run Bombora and new prospects that will run Bombora, so we perceive this as being transformative for marketers trying to measure their accounts funnel.
Crnoevich: We have a good start, but there’s a lot more that can be done. There are always ways to help people find deeper levels of insight within their ABM program. We’d love to get more partners involved, because much more than just ours can be measured in this system. We’re humble enough to know we’re one piece of the pie, because people don’t run ABM campaigns solely on intent data.
Crater: We need to think about it as an ecosystem of lots of companies that are feeding data into these various systems. We’re seeing a lot of innovation in this area, because prior to a company like Bombora, it was hard to collect intent data, and there was no way Full Circle could put it into a nice funnel and the get the metrics needed. We need these types of partnerships to make it all work.
