Data Recipes: Linkedin Sales Insights may be Sunsetting, but your GTM Workflow doesn’t have to
November 19, 2024
Powering your GTM strategy with PDL data to target high-impact accounts and identify key decision makers
On December 31st, 2024, Linkedin’s Sales Insights will sunset. We’ve spent the last 6+ months working with clients who needed to find a replacement solution.
During these conversations, we noticed a few common things that customers were struggling with:
1. Scalability & Infrastructure They were looking for a more flexible solution that allowed them to work with this type of insights data in their own data warehouses
2. Linked Person Data Building Buyer Personas in the Linkedin Sales Insights interface was great for understanding headcount rollup, but they weren’t able to easily verify who those specific employees were.
3. Better Headcount Data They sometimes found Linkedin’s headcount rollups to be inaccurate or unreliable due to entity resolution issues and stale self-reported user data. In addition, they were also looking for more granular headcount trends over specific time periods. We’ve built our datasets from the ground up to address some of these challenges (and you can deep dive into our methodology and analysis on headcount accuracy here).
Check out the full GTM recipe below, inspired by our clients transitioning from Linkedin Sales Insights to PDL!
Recipe: Data-Driven GTM
An effective GTM engine is the heart of every successful B2B organization, but building a successful GTM strategy can be challenging and requires a clear understanding of your target market. Finding the right accounts and the key contacts within those accounts is essential but difficult to do at scale.
In this recipe, you’ll find a powerful data-driven approach for building your own high-impact GTM strategy to start unlocking significant revenue-driving opportunities no matter what stage you’re at.
Examples of GTM Workflows
With a focused target account list and a list of key decision makers at each of those accounts, you will be equipped with a powerful set of information that can be applied across nearly all aspects of your GTM strategy:
Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Using your target account list and decision maker contacts, you can run highly personalized and targeted ad campaigns to start driving high quality inbound traffic. (see also Custom Audience Generation Recipe)
Outreach and Prospecting: Using your list of key decision makers, you can build high quality outreach sequences to proactively engage with your highest value prospects.
Product-Led Growth Strategy: Design customized product offerings and packages for your target accounts and key contacts to drive engagement and increase conversions.
Customer Success: Using headcount insights and other account-level information, you can identify which of your existing customers have the most revenue expansion potential or the highest risk for churn
Ongoing Refinement of GTM Strategy: Using PDL’s ongoing data updates, you can track changes across your target accounts and key decision makers to continue to refine and adjust your GTM strategy (for example by looking at headcount trends, conversion rates, and talent movement of key contacts).
Ingredients
PDL Datasets:
Company Dataset (via our Company Search API or Company Data License)
Person Dataset (via our Person Search API or Person Data License)
Inputs: Definitions for your ICP and Decision-Maker Personas
Outputs:
In-depth company records for your target account list
Accurate person records representing key decision makers at your target accounts
Key Fields Used
Company: Headcount (and growth rate), Industry, Revenue, Funding, Location
Person: Job Title, Role, Seniority, Location
Directions
Step 1: Access the Company and Person datasets
Setup your PDL account and access the Company and Person datasets through our Search APIs or bulk data files. For this recipe, we recommend the Company Data License and Person Search API, which allows you to efficiently process company profiles at scale while precisely targeting the key decision makers.
Step 2: Define your target account criteria
Define the specific company-level attributes that represent your ideal customer profile. We recommend considering attributes like: headcount and growth trends, location, industry, revenue, and funding history (see our Company Schema for all the available fields you can use to define your ICP criteria).
💡Chef’s Tip - Need help defining your ICP? Check out this helpful blog post from Lenny’s Newsletter for some great insight and examples to help you start defining your own ICP: How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)
[Optional] Step 3: Build a Custom Persona
If you are interested in headcounts for a specific subset of employees within an organization (such as AI/ML Engineers, Social Media Managers, Product Designers, UX Researchers, Security Developers, etc), use PDL’s Custom Insights Professional Services to build your own custom persona definition.
💡Chef’s Tip - Custom Personas Building a custom persona allows you to access headcount-specific persona information in your company records. This can be very valuable in the next step allowing you to find companies with high concentrations of employees matching your custom persona as well as the associated growth/hiring trends across each company for your personas.
Step 4: Build your target account list
Using your target account criteria from Steps 2 (and Step 3), filter the PDL Company dataset to identify the companies that best match your ICP criteria.
Step 5: Define your key decision maker criteria
Define the specific person-level attributes that represent the most relevant contacts to engage with from these target accounts. We recommend considering attributes like: job title, seniority, role and industry.
Step 6: Identify key decision makers from your target account list
Using your target account list from Step 4 and your criteria from Step 5, search the PDL Person for the individuals best matching your key decision maker profiles across your target accounts. Each person comes comes with up-to-date contact information such as email addresses and phone numbers
Step 7: Integrate into your GTM strategy!
Use your new highly targeted account list and decision-maker profiles to power the various components of your GTM engine, from your Account-Based Marketing strategy to your Product-Led Growth offerings. Use PDL’s ongoing data updates to continuously fuel and iterate on your GTM strategy.
Data Ingredients
For this recipe, you’ll need to have access to PDL’s Company and Person datasets, which allows you to first build your target account list and then identify the key decision makers within those accounts.
PDL Company Dataset
People Data Labs’ Company Dataset is the perfect resource for sourcing target accounts. It contains tens of millions of company profiles from across the world, complete with hundreds of attributes including standard firmographics, funding data, as well as comprehensive headcount breakdowns across roles, seniority, locations and more. This dataset is accessible in a variety of formats, including as an API or a bulk data file.
PDL Person Dataset
People Data Labs’ Person Dataset is an essential complement to the Company Dataset, containing hundreds of millions of person records from across the world. Each person record contains hundreds of informative attributes including contact information, job information, education history, skills, certifications and more. Each person record is tightly integrated with our company records allowing you to easily identify every employee associated with a company (both past and present). This dataset is accessible in a variety of formats including as an API or a bulk data file.
How to build a Custom Persona with PDL’s Custom Insights Professional Services
PDL’s Custom Insights Professional Services allow users to augment PDL company data records with customized headcount breakdowns and insights fields tailored to the specific employee groups and personas you care about. Working with our Technical Services team, you will be able to scope and refine your persona definitions to match your targeted employee demographics. These persona definitions will then be used to generate tailored headcount breakdowns and Insights fields for you, which will be included for each company record in all of your subsequent data deliveries.
📘Example Persona Definition: AI / ML Engineer As an example, if you were interested in tracking the number of AI/ML Engineers across different companies you could define a custom persona using:
Job titles (such as “ML Engineer”, “AI Engineer”, etc)
Job Roles / Sub Role (such as “Engineering”)
Seniority Levels
Geographic Regions (such as “United States”)
How to Access the Person Search API
If you expect to use less than ~8,300 person profiles / month, then we recommend using our self-serve portal to set up an API key and purchase credits for the Person Search API (we offer 100 free credits per month to all users).
For larger volumes, speak with a data consultant who can help you set up an enterprise account with a lower cost per credit or explore Data License options as well.
Still Need Help?
Check out our developer documentation for details on data schemas, stats, code examples and more!
Check out our help desk / reach out to us at support@peopledatalabs.com
Reach out to your customer success representative (Enterprise customers)
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