BLOG POST

NTT Americas CMO Michelle Killebrew is not just on a marketing journey, she’s shaping a narrative where marketing is synonymous with revenue impact. She’s investing in cutting-edge areas such as propensity models and buyer intent signals to make sure her team is targeting and engaging the right audiences.

“We are not satisfied with the status quo,” says Killebrew, “We are exploring diverse intent models to seamlessly integrate into our CRM system. It’s about gaining better insights into where and how our clients are engaging, and being proactive, not reactive. We’re not just preparing for conversations; we’re setting the stage for dialogues that matter.”

So far, so good.

Killebrew has developed many hyper-focused demand gen programs that span NTT Americas’ wide range of solutions. It’s a challenge trying to message multiple personas within a specific account. Some solutions are more tactical and so messages need to be aimed at technical people, while others are more transformational and require strategic conversations with the C-suite.

Marketing must work through ways to engage different levels in an account with messages that matter. This has led to a rapid evolution of marketing capabilities, Killebrew says, including the creation of standards for systems, people, processes, messaging and brand recognition across the globe.

“We continue to evolve and reshape how we go to market. For instance, our BDR team reports to me,” she says. “We are really unparalleled in terms of the breadth of our capabilities, which is wonderful.”

Intention-Based Marketing: Leveraging Actionable Intelligence

The CMO Council’s new report Fire Up Your Revenue Generation Engine found nearly two-thirds of lead gen and engagement strategies are underperforming. Here’s an excerpt of the report:

Gathering actionable intelligence about a target B2B account, including individual members of a buying team, to understand demand and deliver the right content to the right person at the right time is really the great ambition of modern forensic marketing.

It also constitutes one of the biggest gaps in our study. Nearly 80% of highly evolved marketers are satisfied with their intention-based marketing, compared to only 17% of lesser evolved marketers. The reason for the gap is that intention-based marketing is hard to do.

READ MORE: Bad Report Card for B2B Marketers

Marketers need to analyze a host of buyer intent signals across multiple channels, from attending an hour-long webinar to visiting a webpage to sitting through a demo, in order to truly qualify leads. The absence of data (e.g., only attending a webinar) also needs to be factored into the equation. It’s all very nuanced and requires rigorous testing.

“The piece that goes with speed is really understanding the intent of the leads,” says Bill Cronin, former chief revenue officer at Xometry. “We’ve learned to ask more questions to get to the seriousness of the buyer, including buyers who may be a year away, through automated follow-up emails. Somebody who responds quickly tends to have greater intent.”

This report is based on a survey of over 170 heads of B2B marketing, sales, revenue, growth, demand gen and campaign execution in Q4 2023. We conducted in-depth interviews with executives from NetLine, Autodesk, T-Mobile, NTT, ABM Consortium, TechTarget, IBM, B2B Marketing, Reachdesk, Momentum ITSMA, and Xometry.

DOWNLOAD: Fire Up Your Revenue Generation Engine