Mapping Your Entire Buying Universe
Unlock Efficiency with Precision Targeting at Scale
What if, instead of wide-blast marketing, you knew precisely who you were targeting, down to the individual? Not ‘kind of’ by profile, but their exact name, role, and company? How would it change your sales and marketing strategy? This isn’t just a dream but a reality for some companies. This article covers how two companies did this, the benefits they’re reaping, the challenges that still exist and how this approach can supercharge AI impact.
The Power of Knowing Your Buyers
Last week I had fascinating conversations with two marketing leaders who have achieved this enviable position; they have been able to completely map their universe of buyers and contacts within those organizations. Both lead marketing for vertical SaaS products, one in real estate and one in healthcare. Unlike horizontal SaaS products with vast, diverse audiences, these companies serve niche markets with a finite number of potential buyers - hundreds in one case, thousands in the other (context matters).
Over time, they've meticulously mapped not just their target companies but also the specific individuals within those organizations who influence or make purchasing decisions. The results? A marketing approach that's laser-focused, highly efficient, and remarkably effective.
Why Map Your Buyer Universe?
1. Reduce Marketing Waste
Traditional marketing often involves significant waste - broad targeting, time-consuming contact research, and ineffective lead scoring that leads to sales time wasted. By mapping their entire buyer universe, these companies have dramatically reduced these inefficiencies.
2. Accelerate Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
With a pre-mapped buyer universe, companies can quickly engage all relevant contacts within a prospect organization as soon as interest is shown, supercharging marketing and sales efforts.
3. Improve Sales Efficiency
Sales teams benefit from having a clear, comprehensive view of all potential buyers and contacts from the outset, enabling more effective multi-threading and eliminating time spent on unqualified leads. In a universe where many deals take 6+ months and 10+ contacts to close, better and faster knowledge of the buying committee is invaluable.
4. Measure and Achieve Better ROI
These tactics and this data allow these companies to measure marketing's impact on business outcomes, going beyond micro-marketing metrics to track influence on new ARR, retained ARR, and total cost of ownership.
Many companies have partially mapped a select group of strategic or enterprise accounts or start mapping more holistically once an opportunity is hot. But if you map BEFORE a prospect engages, you can more quickly and effectively surround all the right people to accelerate deals.
Case Study #1: How She Did It
One CMO off-handedly mentioned she’d mapped her entire buying universe and thus approached marketing differently over dinner. I was amazed and inspired. I scheduled time to get details on her journey:
Scale: She initiated the project after the company surpassed $200M in revenue, ensuring she had enough traction with and definition of the right audience and enough resources to do it right.
Cross-Functional Alignment: She secured buy-in from the CRO, CFO, and CEO, recognizing that this wasn't just a marketing initiative but a change to the way the entire company collected, used, and tracked prospect and customer data.
Audience Definition: The CMO invested time in precisely defining their ideal customer profile in great detail - the cornerstone of any marketing, but especially of this project.
Incubated in Marketing, Scaled in IT: The project started in marketing and later transitioned to a central data team in IT to serve all departments, scale, and create proper security and governance.
Data Sources: The company supplemented its own data with purchased data but also found a lot of relevant public data. This combination brought down overall mapping costs.
Technology: A central database was created to holistically integrate all sources and sync with marketing, sales, and customer support systems. (The tech wasn’t as innovative as the vision, the process changes, and the follow-through!)
Tenure and Duration: It took over 3 years(!!) to get it all mapped in one place with a holistic view that could feed all aspects of the sales and marketing targeting, territories, and more. The CMO’s long tenure allowed her to set the vision, build the tech, realize the vision, optimize it, and reap the value. Many CMOs don’t get this luxury of time - but the payoff for her has been substantial.
"Having our universe mapped makes us incredibly efficient," the CMO told me. "We KNOW what's working, so we can target better, we can make smarter advertising buys, we can map marketing activities all the way through to revenue. We can invest more boldly because we know we're reaching the right people."
This mapping project also allowed the CMO to experiment more widely with her marketing technology stack. She didn’t need to pay for the normal discovery aspects and could more easily track what was really working best.
Case Study #2: How Significantly it Changes Marketing
The second marketing leader (Claire Bevin of Cedar Health) reinforced how different her strategy could be with this unique advantage:
ROI: We never waste resources on prospects that aren't a fit. AND we can spend more time perfecting messaging vs reaching the right people.
Expeirences: We invest a lot more in events, gifting, and in-person experiences since we’re targeting a very select group of people we know are high-value.
Deeper Relationships: In this model, the selling motion changes - reps don't need to go in so hot trying to qualify. Even if the timing is off, it's a long game, so sales can focus on building rapport and understanding pain points. This is a more pleasant way to sell - and buy. There's this attitude of, "We're here to help, and we'll be here whenever you're ready."
Following Contacts: We keep a close eye on when folks are changing jobs/companies. This is a great time for an outreach campaign to say congrats and reintroduce the team/solution. And - as a strange side effect - we also get a strong pulse on who's hiring and can refer those we know are looking.
Mapping friendships: Once you've mapped the individuals, you can also map their relationships - i.e. who vacations together, or who worked together before. Our Advisory Board has helped us build a referral network to tap into friendships.
“Once you've mapped your vendor universe, you start to better understand and become part of your community. You become a connector, a thought partner - instead of a nagging vendor.”
The Challenges of Universe Mapping
While the idea of having a discrete (and mapped) set of prospects sounds appealing, it only solves part of the equation. First, you have to know the right targets (mapped!), and then you have to build awareness and engage effectively at the right moment. Even after mapping, there’s a ton of work. Most notably:
Storytelling - How do you tell a differentiated, engaging story to these companies and contacts in new and interesting ways?
Privacy Compliance - Knowing who your prospects are doesn't exempt you from privacy laws, spamming laws, and opt-in requirements. How do you reach out to them responsibly?
Deal Size - To achieve big growth with a smaller (mappable) universe of buyers, you need big deals. Big deals take a lot of time, engagement with many contacts, and great features to support big, complex clients.
Attribution - In this model, "lead source" becomes irrelevant, and the traditional MQL to SQL handoff isn't necessary. Deals aren’t inbound or outbound - they are allbound. You need a different attribution model to track influenced contribution, and alignment on that model by the whole exec team.
Data Work is Never Done - Keeping your mapped universe up-to-date is a constant effort as companies and roles change. Data work is hard.
The AI Connection
AI promises to revolutionize marketing and sales. But behind the promise of AI magic is a requirement of amazing data. AI applied to our targeting, account mapping, territory management, sales predictions, and more are only as good as the data on which it’s trained. And, as many marketers have learned over the years, “look-alike” audiences and publisher’s targeting is never as effective as first-party data. If we really KNOW who we are going after, we can be more effective at reaching the right people, more effectively, for less money. As intent data has taught us - we can get better at pushing harder when someone is actually showing signals of being ‘in-market’ to get better results. If we could map all of our prospects and buying contacts accurately, we could massively improve our effectiveness and efficiency today - and lay the foundation for more effective help from AI tomorrow.
Conclusion
Almost every marketer I know is already trying to define their ideal customer, map contacts, see intent, and surround prospects. Marketers are making huge investments in quality data for better tracking, attribution, targeting, and AI. The general “how to” here is not particularly innovative (I almost killed this blog). But what IS innovative is the commitment to MAPPING IT ALL. I had never considered it possible. True, you need the right market, the right cross-functional commitment, and the right multi-year fortitude. But the concept of getting to a full and complete set of first-party data is a dream. It would be amazing to escape ineffective ad-targeting and inefficient and slow territory planning, contact mapping and surround ABM. Most of us don’t have the ‘luxury’ of an audience narrow enough to map completely - but even the IDEA inspired me. How about you?
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.