5 New B2B Persona Research From Salesforce & LinkedIn Study with Mathew Sweezey, Salesforce.com

Summary: When was the last time you looked at the quality and accuracy of your <a href="https://www.b2bleadblog.com/5-reasons-buyer-personas-arent-good-enough/">B2B persona</a> and contact data?<br> Getting the right content to the right people continues to be a challenge in B2B marketing and lead generation.<br> Starting in the fall of 2014, Salesforce started to analyze more than 15 million data points, spanning a four-year period, from two of the largest B2B databases: Data.com and LinkedIn.<br> The goal?<br> To do a detailed audience analysis to help marketers understand how they can improve marketing accuracy.<br> That’s why I interviewed Mathew Sweezey (<a href="https://twitter.com/msweezey">@msweezey</a>). Mathew works with Salesforce and is the Principal of Marketing Insights to talk about the just-released report, <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/form/marketingcloud/conf/b2b-personas-targeting-audiences.jsp">B2B Personas: Targeting Audiences</a>. I wanted to talk with Mat and bring this vital information to B2B marketers.<br> Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication.<br> <br> Mat, can you tell us more about your background?<br> Mathew Sweezey: Yeah, thanks Brian for having me; love being on here. My background’s kind of interesting. I think what’s relevant to this conversation is I was one of the really early employees at a small startup back in the day called Pardot, which is a marketing automation platform. From there, we grew that, sold that to Exact Target which was then acquired by Salesforce.com.<br> Along with that way, I wrote a book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Automation-Dummies-Mathew-Sweezey/dp/1118772229">Marketing Automation for Dummies</a>. I write for lots of different publications, and now I head up the forward-looking marketing ideas and theories as Principal of Marketing Insight at Salesforce.com.<br> What motivated you or inspired you to do this research?<br> To me, these are fundamental marketing questions, and what bothers me is the fact that no one else was trying to ask these questions, or whether they actually knew they should even be asking these questions in the first place.<br> Let me explain.<br> As a marketer, we have metrics. We’re like all right, so we got 10,000 email addresses this year. That would be a metric that we may give to somebody to validate our efforts. But that’s like saying, I’ve got 10. Ten out of how many? That’s the question. It’s not a “what did you get,” it’s a “how effective were you.” So these were effectiveness measures, and without really detailed information into our audiences, and exactly their size, their growth, their churn, we really have no way to answer any of those questions, which should be key fundamental questions that we should be able to answer about our job. That’s what really sparked this.<br> This idea started a couple of years ago.  I wanted to understand the value of email better, and how do we value our email addresses. When you look at about the average number that it costs a B2B business to obtain an email address, that is about $150.<br> And when you then look at the typical size of a B2B email <a href="https://www.b2bleadblog.com/3-steps-for-sales-marketing-productivity/">database</a>, the average size is 50,000 names. That’s what a marketer has. Not their addressable market, let me be clear on that. So if you multiply those two things together, the marketer has a seven and a half million dollar asset under their control, which is their email database. And to be clear, that is the largest asset that a marketer owns, point blank. Now when you then say, that’s the biggest asset, then you start to ask some fundamental questions on how do we evaluate it, how often does it churn – anything like that. And there is no data that we can give you.