Name: The MQL is Dead: Why and How to Focus on Buying Groups
Start: 2023-06-28T16:00:00Z
End: 2023-06-28T16:01:04.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 4.9

Informa TechTarget (Nasdaq: TTGT) informs, influences and connects the world’s technology buyers and sellers, to accelerate growth from R&D to ROI.

With an unparalleled reach of over 220 highly targeted technology-specific websites and over 50 million permissioned first-party audience members, Informa TechTarget has a unique understanding of and insight into the technology market.

Underpinned by those audiences and their data, we offer expert-led, data-driven, and digitally enabled services that deliver significant impact and measurable outcomes to our clients.

• Trusted information that shapes the industry and informs investment

• Intelligence and advice that guides and influences strategy

• Advertising that grows reputation and establishes thought leadership

• Custom content that engages and prompts action

• Intent and demand generation that more precisely targets and converts

Informa TechTarget is headquartered in Boston, MA and has offices in 19 global locations. For more information, visit informatechtarget.com. 

While many demand gen marketers are using intent data to drive better campaign outcomes, it’s been more challenging for partner and channel marketers to incorporate intent into their complex go-to-market (GTM) motions. Partner marketers often lack access and visibility into critical data, have limited to no integration with partner systems and tools, and tend to focus on traditional sales metrics rather than customer intent signals. 

At Informa TechTarget, everything we do is fueled by intent – and with our strategy, content, and demand capabilities, we have a deep understanding of partner marketers. That’s why we invited Informa TechTarget partner marketing leaders Anita Covelli (VP, Portfolio Marketing and Strategic Partnerships) and Rachael Fuller (Product Marketing Manager, Partner Marketing) to help build a roadmap for getting started with intent data in partner marketing. 

During this webinar, Anita and Rachael will discuss: 
- Common use cases for intent data in partner and channel marketing 
- How to evaluate intent providers for partner marketing 
- Practical advice for getting started with a crawl, walk, run approach

The Partner Marketer’s Guide to Intent Data

Traditional digital marketing and sales outreach performance continues to decline: According to Pavilion and Ebsta’s 2024 B2B Sales Benchmarks, sales cycles increased by 16% and win rates declined by 18%. We’ve all heard that AI is a generational technology poised to help us reverse these trends. Of course, the hype is outpacing real progress. AI is cool, but exactly how do you take the first, second and next steps to leverage it effectively within your stack and workflow? 

In this session we’ll dive into how Informa TechTarget is innovating to help marketers and sellers benefit from AI in practical ways. Product experts will demo AI-related innovations at multiple stages of the prospect-to-opportunity lifecycle: How AI helps marketing engage prospects based on their specific needs; how AI helps sellers understand the context and dimension of prospect projects taking shape; and how AI helps craft personalized messaging for marketing promotions and 1-to-1 outbound cadences within tools like SalesLoft and Outreach.

How Intent Data + AI Helps You Market and Sell Better

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, MQLs have been a bedrock concept that most of us in B2B have grown up with. And despite their imperfections, MQLs have provided both a measure and a signal around which a lot of process and automation have been built, so it’s to be expected that “news of their demise” has encountered some resistance. At the same time, the logic of buying groups can’t be ignored. Early results are very attractive to practitioners and management alike. We believe that the right go-forward for most organizations will be to take a hybrid approach, one that leverages classic capabilities but augments them to address new understanding and potential.  

In this session, three Informa TechTarget experts will cover buying groups from three different perspectives: What is attractive about buying groups (and unattractive); what we’re seeing among our clients and partners; and how we’re addressing the transition through feature function in our intent-driven solutions. Join CMO John Steinert, client consultant Mark Tarro, and product lead David Edwards for an up-to-the-minute examination of the considerations you, your team, and your bosses should be looking at closely.

Less Leads. More Revenue. Learning To Love Buying Groups.

Odds are you’re familiar with the concept of personalization. Most B2B tech marketing and sales leaders are heavily focused on personalizing their content, email campaigns and cold outreach in the hopes of improving conversions and increasing revenue. And yet, we’re not talking as much about personalization’s often-forgotten but equally important cousin, relevance.  

In a world noisy with marketing messages and digital content, standing out from the crowd is harder than ever. But what if you could actually leverage wisdom from the crowd (i.e. your buyers) to create content that’s more relevant and engaging? That’s where market intent comes into play - to build better content, you first need better insight. Join Informa TechTarget’s Katie Graybeal and Dominic Ventresca as they dig into the power of market intent and demonstrate how to leverage Market Monitor, Informa TechTarget's market intent tool, to compare content needs by market and industry. They’ll walk through practical use cases for tapping into market insights and behavioral data to engage specific markets and functions, building content for in-market buyers and tailoring messaging for increased resonance.

Content Crowdsourcing: Using Market Intent Signals to Fuel Your Content Strategy

The healthcare industry faces significant changes in 2025, including shifts in Medicare spending, the rise of mHealth, and advanced fraud management. For go-to-market leaders, this raises an urgent question: how can you adapt your strategies to meet the evolving priorities of your buyers?  

Although recognizing how your buyers’ needs are evolving is a great place to start, turning insights into action is what drives real business growth. This is why savvy healthcare marketers and sellers are leveraging intent data to uncover demand and identify untapped opportunities. In this session, Byrony Seifert, SVP, Audience Operations (Informa TechTarget), will reveal key findings from the 2025 Technology Spending Intentions Survey on the latest buying trends and shifts in the healthcare market. She’ll also share actionable tactics for using intent data to engage, educate and convert today’s busy buyers.

From Market Trends to Tactics: Leveraging Intent Data in Healthcare

Many GTM teams dream of building a demand gen approach that yields high quality leads that are ready to be converted into winning opportunities. But this doesn’t happen by chance; it requires an integrated and aligned approach to identifying the right accounts and engaging them with contextually relevant messaging. Many teams struggle to do this effectively, yet Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management and automation, has developed a holistic go-to-market approach that’s paying off in droves. What’s their secret to success? 

Join Christian O’Neill, Senior Customer Success Manager (Informa TechTarget), as he sits down with Alexander Pasch, Digital Marketing Transformation Manager (Schneider Electric), to discuss how Schneider Electric integrates insights from real purchase intent data into their GTM playbooks. They will share actionable strategies for using intent data to design high-impact, contextually relevant brand campaigns, attract active buyers with engaging content, and prioritize leads from the most promising accounts.

11x Better Prospect Engagement: How Schneider Electric Wins More with Intent Data

As B2B marketers, we all want to provide our audience with great content – content that rises above our competitor’s, captures the attention of our buyers and keeps them coming back for more. But even the greatest assets will fail if not distributed to the right people, at the right time, through the right channels. And despite popular belief, email remains a central channel within a team’s content distribution strategy, despite its ever-changing, and often fickle nature. 

In this session, Kate Jacobsen (Informa TechTarget) and Jay Schwedelson, founder of Subjectline.com, GURU Media Hub and Outcome Media will dig deep into the different, and often overlooked, components of a successful email. From taking personalization beyond first names to the basics of how to get more people to open your emails, you'll leave with proven tactics to drive better email performance and boost engagement with your content.

The Anatomy of a Killer Demand Gen Email

As many marketing teams move away from MQL and lead-based demand gen models, the focus has shifted to understanding what drives an account and the unique buying teams within it. Informa TechTarget’s Media Consumption survey data can serve as a helpful guide for marketing and sales leaders looking to better understand how role and function dynamics can affect content creation and outreach.  

Join us as Senior Director of Data and Market Insights, Corey DeFreese, and VP of Product Innovation, Research and Insights, Katie Graybeal, illuminate the path with actionable tips for marketing and sales leaders looking to break through. They’ll cover:  

-The latest insights on how job level, function and other factors should influence how you look to engage buyers throughout the buy cycle.  
-Ways Marketing can enrich content to better bridge the buyer-seller divide. 
-A behind-the-scenes look at how tech buyers actually conduct research and how you can leverage the resulting data and insights to reach your objectives.

Decision-Making Dynamics: Roles, Buying Teams and the Tech Purchase Process

Part of what makes creating great content so challenging for marketers is the need to continuously engage and excite buyers. Finding new story ideas within the confines of a market, topic or product can feel near impossible – and failed attempts often result in decreased engagement. Similarly, journalists are constantly on the hunt for their next story or angle within the confines of their beat. What if there was a way to shift our thinking from merely creating to discovering compelling stories, much like a journalist does? 

In this episode of B2B Content Brilliance, Fiona O’Connor (Sr. Manager, Informa TechTarget) sits down with Bridget Botelho (Editorial Director, News Department, Informa TechTarget) to learn more about a journalist’s approach to finding stories and how B2B marketers can adopt a similar mindset to elevate their content, drive more engagement and convert buyers.

Think Like a Journalist: Finding Great Story Ideas

Every time we communicate with prospective buyers, we’re making promises, consciously or unconsciously. Get them right, and you’ll grow buyer trust and brand affinity. Get them wrong, and you risk losing confidence and consideration. If your content isn’t delivering on your marketing goals, there’s a good chance that you’re either missing the mark on what your target audience is seeking or your content isn’t coming from a source that they trust.

In this webinar, Susan Smith (Sr. Director, Product Marketing, TechTarget) and Dave Gruber (Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group) will build on the research-proven “customer promise” concept (discussed in our Creating a Memorable Marketing Message that Lasts webinar), and provide actionable steps on how to improve your content and messaging. They’ll share proven near-term content options to bolster any tech marketing program, strategic approaches for developing promises that will resonate with target audiences, and a “good, better, best” framework you can put to work immediately to better understand and engage buyers, and build buyer trust in your customer promise.

Good, Better, Best: How to Deliver Great Content Marketing Outcomes

According to a Forrester survey, 85% of marketers using intent data see results. However, as their demand engine grows, so can the potential challenges evolve and change. Whether it's struggling to reach the right audience, delivering content that resonates, or boosting brand visibility, these roadblocks can hinder ROI and slow growth if not addressed. With 2025 approaching, now is the time to tackle these challenges and fine-tune your demand generation strategy for the new year. 

Join Kristin Prosowski, VP of Products (TechTarget), as she reveals the key aspects of demand generation strategy that shouldn't be overlooked, whether you’re building for 2025 or beyond.  Get the tools you need to solve the day-to-day marketing challenges you are seeing now and head into the new year with a foundational GTM strategy that combines TechTarget’s content, intent, and audience offerings to drive real demand.

Assembling Your Demand Gen Toolbox for 2025

Whether it's struggling to reach the right audience, delivering content that resonates, or boosting brand visibility, these roadblocks can hinder ROI and slow growth if not addressed. Watch this interview with T-Mobile Marketing leaders as they discuss how they're tackling these challenges and fine-tuning their demand generation strategy for the new year.  

Featuring:
  - Ben Bradley, Sr. Director of Customer Success (Informa TechTarget)
  - Jessica Mallick, Sr. Segment Marketing Manager (T-Mobile)
  - Madeleine Bertch, Segment Marketing Manager (T-Mobile)

How T-Mobile Assembled Their Demand Gen Toolbox for 2025

“Quality might not always be the right answer, but it’s always the right question.” As B2B buyers’ hunger for video content continues to grow, many marketing teams are looking for better ways to fuel their video content engine – and, often, the search for quality is a driving force. Yet there are other factors to consider in the quest to create video content that meets your objectives, whether you’re creating video in house or looking for a partner to fill the gaps.

Join Susan Smith and Jeff Kunken (Informa TechTarget) and BrightTALK's Greg Johnson as they discuss how video quality and content goals intersect and what you need to know to choose the right video services. They’ll tap into decades of combined experience to share how to set the right objectives for your video content and set your team up for success. Plus, they’ll break down different types of video services and budgeting strategies, how a good vendor compares to a true partner, and when to engage them.

The Quality Question: Vendors, Partners and Understanding Your Video Objectives

Join Mark Beccue, principal analyst for AI at Enterprise Strategy Group, for a unique conversation with Enterprise Strategy Group market experts as they discuss how generative AI (GenAI) is impacting the markets they cover. Mark will share some insights from his new study, The State of the Generative AI Market: Widespread Transformation Continues, to address how GenAI is moving into a phase of rapid market adoption. Then you’ll hear from four leading analysts on what their research and discussions with technology providers suggest about how GenAI will impact the evolution of networking, network security, data management and data security technologies and markets.

How GenAI Will Impact Your Markets, Buyers and Solutions

An intent platform is not only about setting up and exporting accounts and names, but also about understanding the data and learning how to build awareness and brand within the community.  In this video listen to the advice of Ginger Swann, Senior Marketing Manager, Upland Interfax and Ellie Mancini, Manager, Customer Success at TechTarget, on how creating a holistic approach in your intent campaign is so very important.   Ellie and Ginger review the importance of taking steps that create wins and building within the organization to achieve success.

Introducing Intent: Building Success from Day 1

Getting started with any intent data tool can be beyond overwhelming and intimidating.  There is so much information that it is impossible to know where to start.  Watch Ginger Swann, Senior Marketing Manager at Upland Interfax talk about how working with the TechTarget Customer Success team helped her and the team guide their way through the first 18-months in Priority Engine from integrations to robust understanding of their product.

Introducing Intent: TechTarget's Customer Success Gets You Started

If you want an intent tool to be effective for your team than it is so very important to make it easily accessible.  In this video we hear from Ginger Swann, Senior Marketing Manager, Upland Interfax and Ellie Mancini, Manager, Customer Success at TechTarget, on how to build up the sales team, communicate internally, and utilize data in the best way possible.  Watch as they cover why quality checks and asking for feedback are important factors in creating intent data success.

Introducing Intent: How to Approach an Effective Sales Rollout

When it comes to B2B video content production, design and marketing folks often throw around the saying, “perfection is the enemy of progress.” But when we think about visual content, great execution goes hand-in-hand with success. Creators must then find a way to balance quality with scale, amidst the pressures of limited time and budget.  

In this webinar, join Fiona O’Connor (Sr. Manager, TechTarget) and Ben Hillman (Executive Producer, Paddle) as they discuss the realities of B2B video production and what it takes to create great videos. Discover how Ben and his team at Paddle build high-quality content to attract and engage their target audience, so you can bring these tactics into your own video program to generate real ROI, no matter your budget.

Perfection vs. Scale: Achieving Balance in B2B Video Production

Historically, classic demand gen approaches, like marketing qualified leads (MQLS) and BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) have been at the center of how marketing organizations evaluate their effectiveness. Yet as buyers have changed – both in the number of purchasing decision makers and buying journeys overall – these approaches have not evolved to match the needs of the current B2B landscape. The result? Marketing and sales teams are leaving money on the table.

In this session, Terry Flaherty, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester will discuss where these classic demand gen approaches fail and why they may be limiting your teams’ actual revenue potential. You’ll hear recommendations on what changes in thinking need to be made with Marketing organizations and how teams can begin to implement those changes.

The MQL is Dead: Why and How to Focus on Buying Groups

Content Marketing

Demand Generation

B2B Marketing

Marketing Analytics

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Buyer Journey

Digital Transformation

Forrester

Intent Data

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The MQL is Dead: Why and How to Focus on Buying Groups

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