• by Ray Schultz , April 30, 2018

DataFox has launched a tool to help B2B firms synchronize their lead and account-based marketing (ABM) management and reduce tension between sales and marketing teams.

Inbound IQ enables companies to apply ABM to manage their inbound flow and overcome misalignment of pipeline prioritization and reporting challenges, the firm says.

Its Intelligent Forms feature matches email addresses to legitimate company domains, appending the company data, DataFox adds. This allows marketers to validate inbound submissions, it says, which could facilitate better-targeted emails.

In addition, Inbound IQ consists of these features:

• Lead Enrichment — Relies on the corporate data appends supplied by DataFox, and by data from the firm’s intelligence platform. It drives lead routing and campaign segmentation.
• Lead-To-Company Matching — Connects leads to DataFox companies, helping marketers identify prospects that should be entered as accounts into the CRM.
• MQL by Account Score — Improves MQL quality, combining engagement scores from marketing automation platforms with the firm’s scoring capability, the firm says.  
• Company Signals On CRM Leads — Helps eliminate pre-call research. 
• ABM Execution — Relies on account scoring as a metric to qualify companies for ABM execution campaigns.

“For marketing and sales to be truly aligned, they need to be speaking the same language,” states DataFox co-founder Mike Dorsey. “One of the key handoffs, particularly for inbound marketers, is passing a lead from marketing to sales.”

He adds: “The lead needs to have attributes that sales cares about — namely, detailed account fit characteristics that drive rep behavior.”