Written by Trent Whatcott, VP of Marketing at Primary Intelligence

Buyer feedback is a crucial source of sales intelligence that helps you reach your customers and win more deals.

When I was young, my family would make the long torturous drive from our home in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex to a small town in Alabama called Linden to visit my grandparents. I couldn’t wait to see them, but the drive seemed to take forever. 

We would eventually cross the Tombigbee River, over the Rooster Bridge, through Demopolis, and then on to Linden. 

The bridge was old and rickety, and my mom felt sheer terror crossing over it. She was elated when Alabama DOT built the new Rooster Bridge in 1980, and the old Rooster Bridge fell into the river, courtesy of some dynamite. 

Later, I learned that the Rooster Bridge played a significant role in connecting the divide between San Diego and Savannah on I-80. It was the shortest, straightest, and only year-round overland highway from coast-to-coast at the time – the most direct path. 

 

Now, as a B2B marketer, I find myself constantly building “Rooster Bridges”. As the people of the time needed the Rooster Bridge to reach the opposite coast, we marketers need to build our own bridges that connect our message to our customers. The Rooster Bridge was made of wood and steel, and each part had a specific purpose. Our bridges in marketing comprise of various types of sales and marketing intelligence data that bring us closer to our customers.  

As we build our bridges, we can think of each data source as a foundational pillar, holding up the path to help us reach our customers. You’ll want to use both primary and secondary data sources to build your bridge. 

Primary data pillars include signals directly from your buyers: 

  • Call to Action Results: Information submitted by a customer in response to your call to action that helps you understand next steps in the buyer’s journey. 
  • Buyer Behavior: Information around how your buyer interacts with your content and organization 
  • Buyer Intent Signals: Information around a buyer’s shopping or browsing activity 

Secondary data pillars include other relevant criteria you need to know about your prospects:  

  • Contact Demographics: Information about a specific person that helps you identify the buyer’s role, influence, and needs. 
  • Company Demographics: Information about an organization that helps you determine business needs, potential budget, and product/market fit. 
  • Sales Rep Activities: Information from sales rep communications including calls and emails that helps you understand what’s going on from the perspective of sales. 

Secondary data sources are most used in B2B organizations, and they can help move us to the other side of the river where our customer resides. We can cross from pillar to pillar and get closer to our customers, but they don’t always take us all the way. 

Primary data sources get us much closer to our buyers. They tell us what our buyers are doing and when to engage with them. 

However, there is one primary data source that bridges the remaining gap between our sales and marketing efforts and our buyers – buyer feedback. 

 

buyer feedback and sales intelligence bridge infographic

 

Buyer Feedback is the information gathered through Win-Loss Analysis to help you understand your buyer’s perspective of your product, sales experience, and brand.  

When you collect buyer feedback at scale, you can get a complete picture into: 

  • What really matters to your buyers, today, when making a purchase decision 
  • How your buyers perceive your competitors and what competitors are doing to adapt 
  • Why opportunities are won, lost, or result in a no decision. 

Buyer feedback is first-hand, irrefutable data directly from the voice of your customer.  

When we study past deals and apply those findings to our processes, messaging, and buying experience, we optimize the buyer’s journey and make it all the way across our Rooster Bridge. 

Primary Intelligence helps you tap into your buyer feedback at scale with the only fully automated platform on the market. And with 20+ years of experience, we have the expertise and methodologies to gather the highest quality, unbiased buyer feedback for your sales reps. 

Ready to learn more? Schedule a call with a member of our team today.