7 golden audiences: How Clearbit uses Clearbit for intent-based outreach

For a BDR, any warm lead is better than ice-cold outbound. Here at Clearbit, a new workflow has become the #1 source of meetings booked by our BDR team and replaces much of our cold outbound motion with warm outreach.

Industry shifts, decreased budgets in B2B, and changes in buyer behavior have created the perfect storm that makes it more important than ever to find warm leads in new places — as fewer website visitors are filling out forms (2.35% on average).

Our solution is to find warm accounts in our web traffic by detecting who’s demonstrating intent when they visit specific pages on Clearbit.com — such as the pricing or integrations page. We make it easier for BDRs to navigate high volumes of web traffic by automatically segmenting visitors into 7 golden audiences.

These 7 audiences are divided by intent signals (via pageviews) and also filter for fit, helping BDRs prioritize leads with the highest revenue potential — even if they never submit a form. BDRs can send emails that are relevant and personalized, and shorten outreach time.

We call this approach intent-based outreach.

Turning website visitors into qualified pipeline in 4 steps

Intent-based outreach capitalizes on a web visitor’s existing interest and captures them further down the funnel, which reduces our costs and increases our chances of delivering the right message to the right person at the right company at the right time.

Our intent-based outreach workflow goes through four steps. Let’s walk through the four steps and then what they look like in practice with our 7 golden audiences.

Step 1: Build audiences

We use Clearbit Audiences to define meaningful segments of web traffic for BDRs, plugging in three types of criteria:

• Intent: Webpage visits on Clearbit.com, to distinguish between low and high-intent visitors (data gathered with Clearbit Reveal)
• Fit: Firmographic criteria to filter for accounts that fit your Ideal Customer Profile (data supplied by Clearbit Enrichment)
• Relationship history: Information describing the company’s history with us, such as whether they’re net-new, closed/lost, a churned customer, an open opportunity, etc. (data pulled from SFDC)

Step 2: Identify visitors showing intent

Next, Clearbit Reveal uses IP intelligence capabilities to identify companies visiting Clearbit.com. Based on audience criteria for fit, intent, and relationship history, we determine whether they belong in one of our 7 golden audiences and place them appropriately.

Step 3: Add accounts and contacts to our CRM (if applicable)

If Reveal finds an account visiting our site that matches a golden audience, but isn’t yet in our CRM, Clearbit Capture auto-creates a new account for the company in SFDC. Capture also auto-populates contacts (filtered by role, seniority, and title) from our database that match the de-anonymized company.

Step 4: Activate across channels

BDRs reach out to prospects in the 7 golden audiences with personalized emails, working the high-priority audiences first. If there’s a high account volume, reps can prioritize within an audience using company fit scores. BDRs can even receive alerts in real time (via email, Slack, Salesforce tasks, webhook, etc.). Salesforce dashboards how many leads are in each audience, so everyone knows what needs to be done next.

These are the 7 golden audiences we’ve been using at Clearbit.

7 golden audiences to fuel intent-based outreach

1. Assigned accounts visiting the pricing page

Companies in this audience are already assigned to a specific BDR because they have a high fit score, and have visited the pricing page within a certain timeframe. BDRs work these leads right away.

2. Active winback opportunities

If an opportunity or a customer we’ve lost comes back to Clearbit.com, we alert the BDR who owned that account. This is a chance to see why the account is on the website and to potentially win them back.

3. Assigned accounts visiting any webpage

These are high-fit companies assigned to a BDR that are visiting any Clearbit.com page – not just the pricing page. Accounts in this bucket are important, but lower priority than the high-intent buckets.

4. Unassigned accounts visiting the pricing page

These companies are showing high intent on the website by visiting the pricing page, and aren’t assigned to a rep yet because of their low fit (typically only medium+ fit scores are routed to a specific rep). This is an “up-for-grabs” bucket that reps can explore to find new sources of pipeline after reaching out to their assigned accounts.

5. Unassigned accounts visiting any webpage

This is another “up for grabs” list with accounts that have low fit scores and show less intent than those visiting the pricing page.

6. ICP account that’s not in SFDC visiting the pricing page

If there’s a high-fit, high-intent company visiting Clearbit.com and they’re not in our CRM yet, Clearbit Capture auto-creates new accounts in Salesforce and finds related contacts for that company.

When a company is not yet in SFDC, that means we’ve never interacted with them or our team has never added them to our database. This can happen for a number of reasons, but one scenario is that a startup grows up and suddenly meets our fit criteria for employee size and revenue.

Clearbit detects this change and automatically places it into an audience as soon as it qualifies — which might be faster than if we’d left it to the startup to fill out a form.

7. ICP account that’s not in SFDC visiting any webpage

This is another list of Clearbit Capture-created records in Salesforce that show lower intent than accounts on the pricing page.

Adjusting audiences to your needs

The 7 golden audiences aren’t fixed — they are outputs of a framework to create meaningful segments of visitors and help BDRs with outreach.

We can adjust, add, and delete audiences based on changes in company focus and new information we learn more about intent signaling. For example, we might find out that integrations page visits are as strong of intent signals as pricing page visits are. We can just add that URL to our audience criteria.

If Hubspot integrations become a top company priority, we can create a shortcut for BDRs by creating an audience of visitors who consume our Hubspot content and have a Hubspot tech tag. And so on.

You can adapt this framework to your own business goals:

• New Business: Automatically identify and capture net new accounts.
• Upsells: Send product-specific messages to customers after they visit product pages.
• Renewals: Know which customers are visiting downgrade or cancel pages, and kick off triage.
• Re-engagement: Identify and reach out to lost or churned customers who are re-engaging with you.
• Buying Committee Assessment: See how many people from one account are visiting your site.

Activating our 7 golden audiences: BDR outreach

Once audiences have been identified, it’s time to activate. BDRs act quickly and get higher response rates using sales alerts, Salesforce dashboards, and tailored messaging.

Alerts

Reps receive sales alerts when a high-priority visitor is on the site. Alerts contain a preview of company metadata and recent pageviews for context.

One of our BDRs, Sam Weiss, used an intent-based outreach workflow with alerts that helped him generate 15 sales accepted opportunities (SAOs) from anonymous web traffic – in under a month.

Salesforce dashboards

Dashboards show all seven audiences and how many accounts are in each one. BDRs use this to see what’s up next for them, and BDR managers get a bird’s-eye view of which segments still need outreach across their team.

Tailored emails

BDRs can personalize outreach emails by checking recent pageviews for clues about what is most important to the visitor.

For audiences that have visited the pricing page, a BDR might ask how they can help figure out the right plan. For closed-lost opportunities, BDRs can look at account history notes and send a message asking what’s new since they last spoke six months ago.

Our BDRs also use some slightly more generic email sequences that personalize based on firmographic and technographic attributes. For example: “I noticed you use Marketo. Here’s how we work with Marketo forms.”

Here’s an example email our BDRs use for companies that may be interested in Clearbit Reveal.

This intent-based approach has been a huge win for our team, with high open rates and a big boost in quota attainment.

Capturing demand — even if it’s anonymous

While macroeconomic and buyer changes are making it more difficult for sales and marketing teams to hit their numbers, intent-based outreach helps them capture more demand with less cold emailing.

When we supply our BDRs with warm accounts, we significantly increase their success. We find those warm accounts in website visits, and because Clearbit.com has so many visitors, we segment them into 7 golden audiences to help BDRs prioritize.

Audiences can be refined, added, and removed to match our business focus — and yours. Use this framework to help your BDRs direct their time, and watch the meetings roll in.

For more information on how to build an end-to-end intent-based marketing strategy that drives qualified pipeline, check out our newest playbook.