In the tech world right now, the words "AI-driven" are commonly used, but often with little context. I wanted to share how we're using AI at Honch to achieve impressive results for our clients in prospect identification.
Last year, we launched a social listening feature on our platform. We now monitor over 70,000 UK companies' social media posts, which is typically 1 million+ posts per month containing more than 100 million words of data. Making sense of this vast amount of raw information presented a major challenge. However, we knew this data held valuable clues about which prospects are active buyers for our clients.
The content that companies share publicly on social media each year can, at times, reveal whether they are good prospects or not. But deciphering hundreds of millions of words to identify these is simply too cumbersome for revenue teams.
We've combined two existing AI models to help us efficiently understand this huge dataset:
ChatGPT:
It's well known for understanding human-like text and excelling at natural language processing tasks, making it ideal for interpreting social media posts' sentiment. However, using it alone meant missing context which led to missed opportunities.
BERT:
Bert (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a language processing model strong at understanding nuances through bidirectional reading - like a smart reader that reads text simultaneously left-to-right and right-to-left, comprehending how each word fits into the whole. It's key for identifying subtle signals within posts and pinpointing the most promising B2B prospects.
The Combined Effect:
Combining these two NLP models leverages each's strengths, enhancing relevance for our clients. This includes curating targeted prospect lists and allowing personalized outreach to groups of companies focused on specific areas and initiatives.
So how does this help B2B revenue teams?
Smart Prospect Identification:
Armed with AI-driven insights, we curate lists of top prospects for our clients, highlighting companies focused on and investing in certain areas such as
- International Growth
- Product Launches
- Diversity & Inclusion
- Sustainability Initiatives
- Learning & Development
- New Website Launches
- Charitable Giving
- Flexible Working
- Employee Wellness
Personalised Engagement:
Every B2B marketer and salesperson is looking for greater personalisation right now, but they don’t want to reduce volume completely to achieve this. Honch profiles 1 million+ B2B decision-makers in the UK market, and provides industry-leading data quality on these.
Our specialist Honch Lists allow clients to target groups of companies they know (with confidence) are focused on certain areas and target specific buyers within these with specialist messaging. For example:
- Target 2,000 CFOs and FDs in companies discussing international expansion in Q1 2024
- Target 600 HR Directors and Heads of Learning discussing L&D initiatives in May 2024
- Target 2,700 CMOs in FMCG brands that have launched new products so far this year
So what’s next?
We’re committed to doing exciting things with data that help our clients continually win new business and run high-performing marketing programmes. We’re turning social media noise (and there’s lots of that) into clear signals, helping to unlock new opportunities.
We have further platform enhancements planned after the summer focused on prospect identification, personalisation, and propensity scoring.
Honch is empowering B2B marketers and sales teams at major companies to transform and revitalise their outreach. When data meets intelligence combined with action, success follows.