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Cloud Ascent and more ways of leveraging intent to identify high propensity prospects for your marketing and sales

Friday, January 10, 2025
Reading time: 7 minutes

The world is rapidly changing, a fact that applies to commercial organizations as much as it does to consumers. Technology is driving shifts in the market. As part of that, it’s reshaping the way many businesses sell – and buy.

In this article, we explore how Microsoft Partners delivering Business Applications for SMBs can effectively find and convert customers in an era when business transformation is reaching warp speed.

Account-based marketing (ABM) combined with buying intent is a formula that works wonders for many technology vendors

Defined as ‘a strategic marketing approach jointly implemented by sales and marketing, which focusses on your most important prospect and customer accounts’, ABM is not new but remains one of the best and most efficient ways to target high-value businesses that have the most potential to purchase.

Nor is ABM effective only for vendors targeting big business: SMBs respond well, too. This seems intuitive, because individual buyers are just like consumers. Don’t we all value the tailored, personalized approach to communication that ABM offers?

Seeing ABM as ‘the best bits of sales marketing’ can help you to understand this technique and hone your strategy by combining:

  • Purchase intent monitoring
  • Personalization of digital communications
  • Content to nurture prospects

But, the question that is on nearly every sales rep’s mind is: how do you find out which prospects on your ABM lists are ready (or getting ready) to buy?

While until recently the purchase intent used to be a solely a B2C domain, today all major third-party data providers offer the B2B buying intent signal capture and offer the lists of companies who are actively looking for digital solutions like yours online, in real time.

And – emerging AI-powered technology is making big improvements to vendors’ understanding of buying intent. By pinpointing real-time purchase signals and capturing the data you can act fast to engage your ABM accounts that are in the mindset to buy solutions you offer.

The improvements it brings to customer insight, marketing strategy and sales outreach justifies our investment of time, resource and budget in ABM powered by the buying intent capture. When the ‘cold’ outreach comes right after the prospect demonstrated interest in the product via Goole search or exploring related content online, the relationship between you and your prospects suddenly becomes ‘warmer’ from the very first touchpoint.

Keeping on top with continual audience research

It’s well understood that today’s rapid AI advancement is changing the technology solution, such as ERP, buyers’ needs on a daily – if not hourly – basis. Any company that is yet to get on board with using AI business tools, will soon get left behind by the competition. In the US alone, a total of 70% of SMBs alone already used or planned to use AI by the end of 2023.

In light of this, if your organization isn’t aware of the latest AI needs that heavily influence your perspective buyers’ decision-making when it comes to acquiring solutions such as ERP, you risk losing your prospect due to not reciprocating their AI needs enough not reassuring them that the solutions you sell are fully future-ready. Therefore, developments in AI functionality require constant monitoring and actively communicated to your perspective buyers in any pre-sales or post-sales engagements.

Perhaps your resource is limited and you don’t have the heft of a team of Forrester researchers or Gartner analysts at your disposal – but there are ways to ensure your buying audience that you’re on top of changing AI trends and therefore ready to advise them about the technology solutions they need. Commit to becoming an early AI adopter yourself and walk the talk as early as you can. Monitor the places where your buyers spend time discovering the latest tech trends, from online forums and podcasts to webinars and conferences.

And don’t forget that Microsoft is at the forefront of delivering groundbreaking AI tools. Across industries, its Copilot AI platform is transforming the way organizations handle tedious tasks, freeing up users to complete more high-value work. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Copilot’s capabilities. If you haven’t yet, read all about it here.

Capture buying intent with Microsoft CloudAscent

So, how else can you strengthen your approach to capturing your prospects’ buying intent signals? The short answer is: by capturing the devised intent data provided to you (and personalized for you) by Microsoft within the Cloud Ascent data tool.

As a background, PwC research finds that more than 3 in 4 (78%) organizations have already moved some or even all of their operations to the cloud. How they work internally and how they serve external audiences is being remolded as a result. And now, with the rise of AI, business needs are changing faster than ever. This represents a huge opportunity for Microsoft Partners that service companies aiming to complete their journey from on-perm to cloud.

Microsoft’s Cloud Ascent data tool is driven by AI, machine learning and customer intelligence. The technology uses internal and external Microsoft data – drawn from company domains, blogs and social posts, technical forums, subscriptions and transactions – to help businesses target customers and prospects in the SMB target market.

The data is fed into a machine learning model to hone sales and marketing approaches to help your business target prospects and potential growth customers. Each one of your targets is assigned a ‘score’ which reveals how hot a prospect they are for you. You can identify their online behaviour and buying signals, and propensity to buy Microsoft cloud products.

The benefits of receiving this insight are obvious: the ‘market scoping’ work is done for you, right down to a ranking of the best SMBs to go after. There’s even the opportunity in CloudAscent to access and use sales and marketing campaign materials, to help you to drive engagement and close more deals.

Alongside providing real-time buying signals CloudAscent also offers the chance to build and assess monthly customer propensity reports. This can help you understand which of your targets are ‘reaching the checkout’ so you can tailor sales and marketing efforts to them accordingly.

There’s no time to stand still or treat sales and marketing like business as usual. Find out more about buying intent here, and discover more about CloudAscent via Microsoft’s online Partner training.

The Companial Center of Excellence for Go-to-Market (CoE for GTM) empowers Companial partners to accelerate customer acquisition by enhancing sales and marketing effectiveness through tailored go-to-market activities. Delivered in partnership with Microsoft, the CoE focuses on driving new customer adds for Business Applications-based products and supporting partners in the Microsoft Business Applications (BA) and Copilot space.

Ready to supercharge your sales and marketing efforts? Explore the full range of GTM CoE services on the GTM CoE Knowledge Hub.

Not a Companial Member yet? Discover how membership can benefit your business by exploring our Membership options.

Olga Generalova
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