Ever felt overwhelmed by feeding your CRM with intent data? Do you struggle to harness the full potential of your insights?
If these resonate, something is awaiting your attention. Custom objects in CRMs revolutionize intent storage and activation.
Why use a custom object?
In the realm of GTM Ops (Sales, Marketing, Revenue, and Growth), your CRM is a vast puzzle, where scattered intent data represents missing pieces hindering a comprehensive view. Custom objects emerge as the pivotal missing piece, the connective tissue aligning and assembling these disparate fragments into a coherent picture.
Picture this: Custom objects within your CRM act as tailored containers, designed explicitly to house and organize the diverse intent data. They provide a structured framework, akin to individual compartments within a well-organized toolbox, where each compartment holds specific intent types with account-specific details, multiple contact relations, or various engagement metrics.
By structuring data within these objects, Revenue teams gain the power to play with insights, improve segmentation, lead batching/routing, ABM targeting, accounts scoring, and identifying patterns to activate the pipeline.
Custom objects transform the CRM landscape by leveraging a strategic organization method. They empower teams to unlock the full potential of their data, enabling more precise targeting, personalized interactions, and activation.
Pros for an intent custom object:
- Storage flexibility: Allows for the storage of multiple intent types for the same contact or account, enabling clearer segmentation and differentiation of intentions.
- Easier analysis: Custom object records simplify data manipulation, making it easier to score accounts/contacts, create personalized icebreakers, build contact/company profiles, generate reports, and build dashboards.
- Impact tracking: Facilitates tracking ROI, usage, engagement, and overall impact more accurately.
- Tailored customization: Enables the creation of different custom objects for varied intent types, such as product events or intent data.
- Layout and visualization: personalize layouts and visualizations, enhancing daily user experience and facilitating easier interpretation of data.
- Automation and workflows: Trigger specific events and workflows based on intent, streamlining processes and activation.
Cons of Using a Custom Object for Intent:
- Custom object setup: Requires creating a custom object, which might entail additional effort and expertise.
- Extra cost: Custom object feature into the CRM or database subscription might be an add-on, potentially incurring additional costs.
- Handling object associations: Needs effective handling of relations/associations between different objects to ensure coherence and usability.
The best pratices to use custom objects for intent
The first thing we need to keep in mind is that using the same custom object for too many different intent types won’t deliver the same results.
Custom object implementation demands thoughtful planning and architecture. How data will be activated needs to be taken into consideration to create your custom object accordingly.
The most common architecture is one custom object for product data and another for third-party intent data.
Example of properties for a Product custom object:
- User connexion
- User actions
- User churned
- User subscription
- User billing page
Example of Intent to save in an intent custom object:
- Website visit
- Search (G2)
- Job postings
- Job movements (Job changes + new hires)
- Content (ebook, webinar)
- Community (slack etc)
- Competitor
- Event
- Social selling (like, comment, post)
- Fundraising
Triggers example to use intent data:
Outbound
- Create leads batch for reps intent-based
- Prioritize accounts and contacts to outreach
- Fuel openers to SDRs and BDRs and improve messaging
- Personalized outbound sequences
Marketing
- Targeted accounts and contacts audiences for LinkedIn Ads
- Create intent-based contact lists for event invitation
Ops
- Score accounts
- Track ROI
- Increase deal velocity
Quick side step: if you don’t have the ground data in your CRM, you would need an additional step to clean and enrich your data.
By now, you get the logic, this is the same method if you want to add other custom objects, except that you need to check the relationship between objects and record types to craft the best architecture.
💡 The easiest way, you pick a pre-build custom object like the LoneScale in Salesforce to fast-track the process.
In a rapidly evolving market where prioritizing and personalizing customer interactions is a must-have, leveraging a custom object for intent emerges as a way for businesses to understand, and engage their audience more effectively.
To setup Custom Objects like a pro, we advise you to read:
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