LeanData Engagement Q&A with Sr. Product Manager, Aman Singh

We are excited to announce the launch of our newest Analytics solution, LeanData Engagement! We anticipate many questions from our community about the product, and how it delivers unique value to the ABM tech stack. To kick off the discussion, Aman Singh, Sr. Product Manager at LeanData, is here to provide answers to some of the common questions we’ve heard so far, and insight into why we developed Engagement. Aman has been deeply involved in the development of the new product and every discussion with customers and analysts about why this is an important solution for account-based marketing.

Q: What is LeanData Engagement?

• Engagement is a new Analytics product by LeanData that enables teams to view engagement data along the entire account journey. Every marketing and sales activity, for every lead and contact, can now be associated with Accounts directly in the CRM. This enables marketers and sales teams to see how engaged an entire account is and who is engaged on that account. It is a standalone managed application on the Salesforce AppExchange, built upon LeanData Matching, the leading Lead-to-Account matching technology. The product includes new Data Objects, Visualizations, and a number of Reports & Dashboards along with other features, enabling account-level visibility of sales tasks, sales activities.

Q: Why was Engagement developed?

• Our team had spoken to many marketing operations professionals, both within our customer base and outside, and heard a very common challenge: it’s very difficult to see account level engagement. Marketing teams often had to either adopt an entirely new platform, or pull data from multiple sources and analyze with Excel and other tools. They found it too time-consuming to answer these specific questions:

           * “Which accounts are engaged?”
           * “How deeply are the accounts engaged?”
           * “Is an account in need of sales follow-up?”

• We built Engagement so that marketing could immediately answer those questions, without losing time to repetitive analysis, and so that they could improve their collaboration with sales teams.

Q: How were customer needs identified?

• Customer needs were identified through thorough customer and market research which led to a beta program with several customers that were already familiar with the LeanData platform. With our beta program participants, we refined our list of questions to answer, features to include, and the experience to deliver within the application. We battle tested everything we developed within Engagement, eliminating features that added unnecessary complexity, and further developing areas that delivered the most value.

Q: What makes engagement insights helpful for marketing teams?

• Marketing teams spend hundreds-of-thousands of dollars on programs. If the right accounts or buyers are not interacting with those programs, then a lot of money is wasted and they need to know immediately. On the other hand, if the right accounts and people are interacting, then marketing is doing something right and they should also know immediately. This information enables them to quickly stop or adjust activities, or coordinate with sales on follow-up or further enabling buyers on a more personal level. Engagement insight helps marketers determine if the right people are engaged with their efforts - if their programs are working - long before attribution data can be used to optimize their spending. By also seeing sales engagement, Marketing can understand which target accounts they need to better collaborate with the sales team on. They can nudge sales to follow-up with highly engaged buyers, they can improve middle- of-the-funnel marketing tools that make sales engagements more effective, or begin proactive discussions with sales about whether or not they are driving engagement with the right accounts and buyers. It opens the door to better collaboration, rather than mystery and defensive conversations.

Q: What makes engagement insights helpful for sales teams?

• Sales teams typically want to know that they are being supported by Marketing, and how marketing is supporting them. This isn’t to babysit Marketing - it’s so that they can better understand which accounts might be ready for a Sales conversation, understand which information their buyers have been interested in, or to collaborate and inform marketing about target accounts that could use more support. Sharing engagement insights enables them to be on the same page with the marketing team on how the account is engaged. They can see which campaigns have driven engagement in the account, and see which buyers engaged with specific marketing efforts. This helps them gauge account interest and better manage their relationship with the account, while benefiting from a more collaborative relationship with the marketing team. With marketing using engagement insight, sales also gains the downstream benefits of higher-quality leads and qualified accounts, as well as immediate notification of highly-engaged buyers that interacted with a recent campaign. They can follow-up more quickly with the right people in the account.

Q: How is LeanData Engagement different from other engagement products?

• LeanData Engagement is an analytics tool built upon LeanData Matching - the leading software for Lead-to-Account Matching. Users can be confident that every single activity for Leads and Contacts (or Campaign Members) related to an Account, is taken into consideration and can be reported at the account-level. If you are using engagement tools to interact with customers or prospects, the data from those tools can be pushed into Salesforce as activities, LeanData Matching will link the activity to your related accounts, and LeanData Engagement will make each interaction visible in the correct account for analysis.
• LeanData Engagement doesn’t require the use of a separate, entirely new platform with additional tools to adopt or learn. You can provide access to account-level engagement insights without all the extras. Existing platforms that are being used with Marketing Automation Tools and Salesforce can certainly continue to be used in conjunction with LeanData Engagement, pushing any relevant data into Salesforce for better team alignment. The beauty of LeanData is that it sits securely, right within your Salesforce instance, enabling multiple teams to easily access and align on data and insights. Data silos are being eliminated this way, rather than created and further maintained.
• Other engagement analytics tools in the market come with a scoring methodology built into their metrics. That turns the tool into a black box, and marketing typically has to explain or defend the scoring methodology to Sales, in order to agree on lead prioritization. While scoring can help with prioritization, it also leads to disagreements and friction between teams. We wanted to create a metric that was straightforward, easy to understand, and that both teams could use to guide their activities. 

Q: What types of activities are recorded as an Engagement?

• Anything within your Salesforce instance that is recorded as a Task, Event - an activity in Salesforce - can be recorded as an Engagement. That means that any data pushed into Salesforce, from marketing automation tools or sales engagement tools, can be recorded as an engagement. Because LeanData allows for customization, you can push as much data into Salesforce as you like, and select which exact activities you would like to record as successful engagements. For example, you may decide that campaign members who register for a webinar are not engaged, but the actual attendees are engaged.

If you have any other burning questions that you would like answered by our team, please submit them to the conversation here!