We recently held an engaging webinar with AWS covering sales and marketing use cases made possible with People Data Labs’ solutions on AWS Data Exchange.

In this discussion, Harry Lin, a former ABC and Disney executive and Business Development Lead at AWS Data Exchange, asked our very own Ben Eisenberg, Director of Product and Web at PDL, a series of thought-provoking questions around just some of the many use cases in sales and marketing made possible with PDL data. 

We highlighted some of our favorite takeaways. But, if you are interested in using data to better your sales and marketing strategy or tools with data, we highly recommend you watch the webinar.

What Does PDL Do for Companies in Sales and Marketing?

As Ben stated in the webinar, “We build data to help product teams and teams within large enterprises harness data reliably and consistently.” 

People Data Labs is a B2B data provider that mainly focuses on person and company data, which our datasets center around. We have over 3 billion records representing over a billion people in our identity graph. We have data on over 18 million companies with standard firmographic attributes as well as products like our company insights data, which is rolled-up aggregations and inferences from our person data to understand employment dynamics at any company.

We source our data from our data union, an opt-in co-op network of our partners, customers, etc. that we amalgamate, standardize, merge, and validate in order to enable our customers to build cutting-edge products with confidence. 

B2B data is extremely important in sales and marketing because it revolves around target audiences (who, what, where, etc.). We power many popular platforms in audience and lead generation, lead scoring, and lead enrichment. We also power a lot of internal business operations for companies that prefer to experiment with data in-house with their own revenue operations teams. 

We notice 2 trends with B2B data use in sales and marketing strategies today where PDL can really help:

Consolidation for a Complex Business Environment

In this increasingly remote world, the lines are blurring more and more between what a business employee is and what a person is as a human being. It’s imperative that personas are consolidated.

People are agents of change, and the data about them must remain fresh for it to be actionable. To enable this, multiple data sources need to be combined together, contextualized, and cleaned to create a single source of truth. A data source’s ability to update B2B information (where they are working, what their title is, how their role in the labor force has changed, intent data, market/company trends etc.) will determine the success of the innovators and businesses using that information.

Today, we are setting a lot of data-driven companies attempting to be end-to-end solutions solving all aspects of the funnel. As companies get more specialized in their specific field, there’s a tendency to consolidate/merge companies to create all-in-one solutions, and B2B data is following the same trend. With so many tools being created, there is demand to centralize tech stacks within companies around tools that can “do it all” in order to reduce operational complexity.

Increasing Personalization in the Wake of the “Death of the Cookie”

The death of the 3rd party cookie really changes the dynamic in which companies personalize their marketing and advertising. A lot of alternative data is being used to make various efforts of personalization more effective. 

In the theme of consolidation, we’ve seen a lot of movement into the intent space. The easier it is to identify what someone is interested in, the better you can perform as a sales and marketing platform. Traditionally, this was done via tracking people’s activity across multiple sites via the 3rd party cookie. As that goes away, finding alternatives to personalize the user experience is the key that many businesses are focusing on. 

One objective on the PDL roadmap is a solution to resolve IPs back to the business information, and identifying people at that company that would be likely interested in an offer. For example, if someone at an IP is browsing your company’s website, figuring out which company they are coming from and boosting that company in your outbound focus is a very powerful intent signal. 

With the recent trends of inflation and uncertainty, customers will have more demand for personalized messaging and content to win their purchase. Data is the key to understanding your target audiences in a way that engages them and exceeds their expectations.

Again, if you found this article interesting, we highly recommend you watch the webinar to uncover more insights on using data to empower sales and marketing teams, and how PDL addresses the trends and challenges highlighted here and more.