R&D to ROI: Bridging the Marketing Gap from Product Development to Sales Success

Across the C-suite, business leaders are looking for ways to improve end-to-end team outcomes. The ability to demonstrate a return-on-investment (ROI) is critical. Despite this, only 54 percent feel confident in proving full-funnel ROI. To build this confidence, marketing teams need to return to the foundation on which their go-to-market (GTM) plans are based.

There are key breakpoints impacting GTM activation success. Therefore, improvement can only be made once GTM is examined from beginning to end, starting with the product life cycle. The ability to deeply understand markets, an account’s ideal customer profile (ICP), and the issues and people involved in solution consideration is essential for teams to make better strategic and product decisions.

Maximizing GTM performance involves dependable connections to real needs and preferences end to end, supported in ways that easily fit into current workflows.

Every GTM team needs access to reliable insights that will impact success. Knowledge and anticipation of what’s upstream increases the potential of favorable downstream actions. Beyond classic research techniques and expert analyses, intent data helps teams fuel upstream understanding much more dynamically. Downstream, it fuels critical actions much more precisely. Insights fueled by permissioned first-party data create the potential for aligned needs and focus across all teams. With acute focus, teams will find monumental impact and a decreased divergence that creates a drag on ROI.

Finding What Matters and De-Risking Investment

Permissioned intent data creates a more complete and dynamic insight for use at the market level by product teams, through to the marketing and sales teams when evaluating an ICP. Using this data, legacy research and analysis benefit dramatically in getting to the core of understanding “what matters” at the individual account, buying group, category, and market levels. In the end, when insights are gathered and fully analyzed, teams can put them to better use to effectively de-risk investments and maximize their potential for success.

Better data leads to fewer errors and reduces the risk of negative impacts on ROI as the rollout progresses through the GTM process. It is a key component of de-risking any modern GTM strategy. By aligning teams around the facts that drive productive activation, better data becomes a smart investment to maximize outcomes at every output and touchpoint.

Reach Customers Where They Are, With What They Want

Customers have their own jobs to be done. Ignoring the needs and priorities of customers, or even simply engaging with them at the wrong time or place, fails to advance opportunities to address their needs. Teams will find that digging into audience desires with permissioned intent data uncovers evidence that supports or jeopardizes product development plans.

On average, poor data quality costs organizations $12.9 million, but the reality is that you simply don’t know what you don’t know. Here are a few examples of scenarios in which having the right data could save teams from a failed GTM launch:     

• The existing category is immature. The opportunity being explored hasn’t received any traction in the target market yet.
• The current position of the business is unlikely to gain traction with the product/feature that’s being developed. Audiences may care about the concept, but priorities are misaligned between customers and product development teams.
• Buying team blind spots are exposed. Audiences were incorrectly targeted and only a fraction of those involved would drive the necessary decisions.

First-party data ensures accurate information because it’s derived from observing real people and can only be obtained by purchasing through authorized sources. These real-people audience insights can be leveraged to drive personalized action, critical for accurate and precise targeting.

Customer Personalization and the Consequence of Getting It Wrong

According to McKinsey research, 71 percent of customers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And seventy-six percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Using outdated—or worse, inaccurate—data can have a strong negative impact.

In 2022, Unity Technologies experienced the consequences of bad data. Integrating inaccurate data from a large customer into the algorithm of its ad-targeting tool resulted in inaccurate user profiles and ad placements. This bad data ruined the algorithm and caused a decline in growth, resulting in an estimated revenue loss of $110 million for the company.

Failed GTM strategies inspire a return to best practices, like empowering the alignment of marketing and sales teams. Transparency into the data helps align priorities and create a culture of collaboration and trust, instead of teams working independently toward a common goal. Synergy across these two areas is essential to driving consistent targeting, messaging, and brand voice.

Optimizing GTM with Campaign Impact

Having data-driven, real-time insights available eliminates the guesswork, friction, and noise from the GTM process. Gaps created by controllable and uncontrollable factors like survey methods, ongoing changes in the market, and more can undermine everything from feature decisions to content production, to engagement and conversion, to progress in the opportunity funnel. Not knowing your target market and customers well enough will negatively impact performance and ROI at every point in the GTM. Therefore, significant improvement in GTM performance must be considered holistically. Better insights from better sources of data will drive lasting impact, from R&D to ROI.

Rebecca Kitchens is president at Informa TechTarget, serving as a cross-functional leader, aligning Informa TechTarget’s solution portfolio, operational delivery and corporate strategy efforts to best support customer needs. Overseeing the Brand & Content and Intent & Demand units, Kitchens guides the editorial engagement strategy that powers Informa TechTarget's first-party, permissioned audiences and data capabilities. Rebecca is a veteran within the business; she joined TechTarget in 2002 and has held various sales and management positions.