Enhancing Business Development Outcomes with Curate's Strategic Insights

Bay MarketForce (BMF) is a team of experts specializing in B2B lead generation, data enrichment, digital marketing, and account-based marketing services for organizations of all sizes. Typically, BMF services supplement a business by functioning as an outbound sales development team and providing intelligence about leads and opportunities for the sales teams.

Many of BayMarketForce’s clients sell to local governments, so BMF needs to predict what opportunities could be coming down the pipeline to help position clients for success. To do this, BayMarketForce relies on Curate’s powerful local government monitoring solution to drive efficiencies and prove the value of its services to clients.

Bay MarketForce’s ABM Strategy to Winning More Opportunities

To execute an effective account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, BMF starts with a specific list of prospects so they can focus their activity where they will have a greater chance of success. The company leverages Curate to get this intent data and alerts that pinpoint where opportunities may be emerging in local governments across the United States.

“Instead of having to focus on 15,000 accounts all at once, you can use Curate and the meeting notes and the intent data to help prioritize your outreach,” says Bryan Held, sales and marketing services director at Bay MarketForce. “I don't know if there's anything else like it. I've heard of sales teams doing this in the past where they would go manually read board meeting minutes, nobody has time for that anymore.”

The sales and marketing teams at BMF will watch all emerging opportunities, follow up on them until a dollar amount is either won or lost, and then track the campaigns back to revenue. In this process, Curate has helped BMF generate better outcomes. “Our best measure is that we've improved our output [of winning business for clients] since we started using it,” says Held. “We are establishing key business relationships earlier in the buying process than ever before.”

A Targeted & Proactive Approach

It comes down to prioritizing accounts in the larger industry segment and shrinking that down even further. For example, a local government or school district may not be in a buying pattern right now, but if they've mentioned it, it’s a signal that the account is a good fit. Curate’s intel helps the BMF marketing and sales team narrow the audience to actual buyers, helping clients prepare to take action when the time is right.

One of the biggest client requests for Bay MarketForce is “Get us in the door before the RFP hits.” While most businesses still rely on responding to RFPs, establishing relationships ahead of time helps clients drive or help write the RFP, which could greatly increase a company’s odds of winning it.

“We use Curate to identify purchasing opportunities for our outbound campaigns,” says Held. “It lets you reduce your manpower and be more relevant in your outreach, which comes into play when we're using our outbound campaigns. The SDRs take this intent data and then use it to prioritize their outreach.”

A Holistic Approach

Bay MarketForce also tracks opportunities on behalf of its clients in Salesforce and insights found in Curate get added to the account’s information. This intelligence helps BMF assign a heat level based on how close an account is to having a need. “We score them hot, warm, and cold based on the information we have and that's really how we prioritize our outreach,” says Held. While Curate isn’t the sole source of information (Bay MarketForce uses Bond tools and Dodge), Curate provides earlier intelligence than all the other tools.

Intelligence to Boost Client Success

Curate also helps Bay MarketForce deliver lead sheets. “We'll watch the data, package it as an opportunity, and then do a white glove handoff to the client’s sales team,” explains Held. “It's a summary of the account with the right contacts and contact information and a contextualized summary of the opportunity.”

While Bay MarketForce maintains an extensive database of opportunities in its core marketplace – comprised of local government and K-12 — there are often information gaps Curate can fill, helping provide actionable information to its clients. For example, stakeholder contact information as well as keyword signals and the context around an opportunity.

With Curate, Bay MarketForce helps surface new opportunities unknown to its clients. One example is a manufacturer that sells to municipalities in water-heavy areas with rivers and lakes. These municipalities will talk about when they need to review their inventory or bring up how many of a specific product they would need to buy but there’s no seasonality to it; the timing varies by municipality. What Curate does is identify when these keywords or this type of intent does show up and allows a manufacturer — by way of Bay MarketForce — to be specific about who they reach out to with their marketing rather than just trying to cast a wide net and blast every municipality.

“The government market is huge for them and they've identified some good new opportunities out of the Curate data,” says Held. “Even when a sales team knows about an opportunity, the information that comes from Curate is typically new. Maybe they knew about it a year ago, but at the time they [the sales team] said ‘they're not ready yet.’ When this new information bubbles up, they may now say ‘It sounds like they're starting to get ready to take some action on this project.’” This is when sales want to reach back out and these insights serve as updates to sales about where a locality is in the buying process.

Curate’s Contribution to Success

Curate has also brought scalability for Bay MarketForce. “We don’t have to add another person to get the same outcome,” says Held. “We can add intent data on top opportunities and produce better results for our clients. And I'm sure every marketing agency client has been asking their agencies to do more even if the budget doesn't go up.”

By leveraging Curate's insights and capabilities Bay MarketForce can provide more strategic and targeted outbound and lead delivery business development services, ultimately leading to improved outcomes for its clients.

Every day there are new conversations, challenges, and initiatives in local government that evolve into opportunities for businesses. Curate automatically finds these insights and brings them to your attention — so you can act before your competition is ever aware of them. This is why companies rely on Curate’s powerful, award-winning technology as their source for buyer intent signals and market intelligence, which automatically uncovers emerging opportunities that would otherwise be buried in the local government discussions of more than 12,000+ counties and municipalities, and 4,000+ school districts.