ABM @ Scale: Meet Lattice Atlas
August 15, 2018This is part 2 of a 2 part blog series. In this post I describe how Lattice Atlas, our latest release, enables marketers to successfully scale their ABM programs. In Part 1, VP of Product Marketing Nipul Chokshi highlights reasons why marketers are challenged with scaling their ABM programs and how that hinders their ability to drive impact.
At Lattice, we are obsessed with helping marketers realize the promise of delivering personalized experiences and growing relationships at scale. We thrive on solving the biggest customer challenges in an unconventional and radically simple manner by leveraging cutting edge AI technologies. Today, we are continuing this mission by launching Lattice Atlas, the industry’s first customer data platform for ABM at scale.
As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, marketers are struggling to scale their ABM programs to focus on more accounts, more segments, more product lines, etc. The challenges they face center around getting customer data and insights in a unified way.
Let me give you a simple example. One of our customers wanted to create an ABM program to acquire net new customers that looked like their existing customer base (“lookalikes”). This seemingly straightforward program requires a highly manual effort using ad-hoc tools and workflows supported by a large ops team. Why? Well, let’s take a look the long list of tasks they have to do:
- Aggregate data from four sources – target accounts from CRM, marketing campaign responses from MAP, website engagements from their website analytics platform and 3rd party intent data. In more complex environments, the data sources can be as high as twenty!
- Run the data-set through an AI platform to identify and segment lookalike audiences based on their existing customer profile.
- Socialize the audiences with the business teams to get their buy-in.
- Ensure they have “right sized” the audiences to optimize capacity/budget constraints along with their campaign objectives.
- Ensure any opt-outs (to meet GDPR/compliance requirements) are removed, as well as anyone that’s already in a sales cycle.
- Load the audiences in their various campaign execution platforms (LinkedIn, email SDR channels, etc.).
- Set up campaigns in each of the channels with the right content and other parameters. Content needs to be consistent for all audiences.
- Aggregate the engagement across the different channels (using spreadsheets) to report on the effectiveness of the ABM program, then rinse and repeat from step one.
All this work to support one narrow ABM program for one solution. Imagine the level of effort required if they wanted to run separate programs for various stages of the buyer’s journey or if they wanted to run programs based on customer lifecycle stage across each of their product lines. It is almost impossible to do so with the fragmented data and disparate applications glued together with ad-hoc tools and processes.
So, unless we wanted our customers to limit their ABM efforts to a small scale, we needed to innovate – at a massive scale. We realized that our customers needed a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that unifies all data, enables AI-driven audience creation as well as omnichannel activation & personalization all in one centralized place, and provides enterprise-grade marketing governance. That’s how Lattice Atlas was born. This next generation AI-platform helps marketers scale their ABM programs by removing four major bottlenecks.
Unified Customer Data
Lattice Atlas is architected on open platform principles and the data model is designed to aggregate a wide variety of data, enabling customers to create 360-view of their prospects and customers. It has a standardized data ingestion interface to import 1st-party data from internal systems quickly & easily. In line with our tradition of building everything to scale from day one, the platform is designed to process billions of signals everyday.
Our patent-pending Adaptive Match technology then does the hard job of resolving identities, matching the 1st-party data to 3rd-party data in Lattice Data Cloud with over 20,000 curated insights and automating the data unification. This automated process dramatically reduces the time and effort needed to create a 360-view, eliminating the first bottleneck to enabling ABM at scale.
AI-Driven Audiences
Radical simplicity is in our DNA. We decided to build Lattice Atlas with the goal of enabling marketing teams to build highly targeted audiences with simple point and click in a matter of minutes – not days, or weeks. With self-service modeling and automated rescoring embedded in the platform, every account and every contact is automatically rescored as the new signals are detected, creating AI-driven insights for the next best actions and personalized engagements every step of the journey.
The product experience is designed to let the marketing teams do what-if analyses on the fly, define criteria for the next best actions and “right size” the audiences with just a few clicks. For the always-on campaigns, marketers can define the criteria once and the platform creates the audiences for them automatically and keeps it up to date, enabling personalized engagements at scale. The platform also lets marketers manage brand reputation by assigning engagement thresholds and removing targets that may have reached marketing fatigue.
The AI-driven insights and simple marketer-friendly way to create and manage targeted audiences remove the second bottleneck in enabling ABM at scale.
Omnichannel Activation and Personalization
According to McKinsey, the average B2B customer engages with 6 channels prior to purchase. So how do we support these disparate channels? Well, we opened the Lattice Atlas to integrate with all of them. The platform has real-time REST APIs so our customers can pull audiences and recommendations in any channel in real-time and enable programmatic personalization at scale. We are also investing heavily in building out-of-the-box apps for the most common channels so that customers can scale their ABM programs quickly and easily.
Enabling marketing teams to programmatically deliver the right message at the right time via the right channel eliminates the third bottleneck facing marketers.
“Informatica knows that creating an interactive and personalized buyer’s journey is critical for the success of account-centric programs,” said Steven Shapiro, VP of Digital and the Buyer’s Journey at Informatica. “We’d seen previous success with Lattice and knew that the Lattice Atlas platform would create the personalized experiences we needed across all channels. Our vision is to use Lattice as the AI brain that powers all next-best-actions.”
Enterprise-Grade Governance
Lattice has been the pioneer when it comes to meeting the security needs of our customers. Lattice Atlas continues to carry the baton forward with new data governance capabilities. With GDPR on the horizon, we knew that ABM programs couldn’t get off the ground unless there was an automated and simple way to remove the opt-outs. That’s why we built a self-service interface for marketing teams to remove opted out accounts and contacts from their campaigns. This centralized system to manage inclusions and exclusions globally, for specific channels and/or for specific campaigns makes it easier than ever for driving privacy-compliant ABM programs at scale, and eliminating the fourth and final bottleneck facing scalable ABM programs.
Lattice Atlas was a natural evolution of our platform. Since day 1, our approach has focused on being deeply integrated with each execution application and managing all data under one platform. Because of this, we not only capture the largest amount of data, but also all that relevant metadata that describes it. Lattice Atlas is built on our understanding of these applications and their data to create the first CDP for enabling ABM at scale.
The first application debuting on the platform is Playmaker, which delivers prescriptive recommendations to sales teams adopting play-based selling. Our customers sell many solutions across many audiences. Playmaker lets them quickly identify top products to sell across all audiences and programmatically deliver those recommendations to the sales teams. It also has built-in interactive dashboard to track the engagements (or lack of it) and its impact on the pipeline, enabling out-of-the-box visibility into play ROI measurements and the ways to improve it.
Lattice Atlas is currently in private beta and is expected to be generally available in Q4. This release marks the next big leap in Lattice’s evolution as a marketing AI company. This is just the beginning, so stay tuned for more exciting updates.