From Signals to Sales: How Anteriad Uses AI and Intent Data to Drive 32X ROI | Anna Nielsen

Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:01.543) Welcome back to the Winner's Circle. am here today with Anna Nielsen. She is the VP of Product at InteriEd and she is a multiple award winner. I think you guys won for Stratis Awards before and you've won for Sammy this year. So congratulations on the win. Give us a little bit of introduction of InteriEd and a little bit of introduction about you, Anna. Anna Nielsen (00:14.254) Yeah. Anna Nielsen (00:20.696) Yeah, thanks for us. We're very excited about our wins both on the Stratus Award and on the SAMI Award this year. I'm Anna Nielsen. the VP of product at Interiad. So I'm driving our strategy and our execution of that strategy for our Interiad Marketing Cloud Platform. Interiad is a B2B data and marketing company. What we're really trying to do is enable B2B marketers. Can I start that over? Sorry. Okay. Let me get to it in minutes. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:55.869) Sure. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:59.987) Why don't we just start fresh from the beginning? And I would just say, answer short, we're gonna get into all of it. just say we're here for ABM or whatever, go through that a little bit. And then we'll get into all of it. So just take it easy and we'll start over. All right. Anna Nielsen (01:10.904) Okay. Okay, keep it shorter. Anna Nielsen (01:24.974) Okay, sounds good. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (01:30.097) Welcome to the Winner's Circle, everybody. I'm here with Anna Nielsen. She is VP of Product Marketing and Product, excuse me, for Interiad. Interiad is a very cool platform. They've won a Stratis Award for Cloud Computing and now a Sammy Award for Marketing and Sales and Marketing. So it has a little bit to do with the cloud and a little bit to do with sales and marketing. Anna, welcome to the show. Please give us a little bit of background about Interiad and a little bit of background about you. Anna Nielsen (01:37.102) He Anna Nielsen (01:55.727) Hi everyone, I'm Anna Nielsen, I'm VP of product for Interiad. I run our strategy and lead our strategy and execution of that strategy for our Interiad marketing cloud platform. Interiad is a B2B focused marketing services and data company. We're helping marketers activate audiences and orchestrate campaigns across all of your major media platforms. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (02:26.426) Yeah, it's I I know a little bit about your platform from obviously I've been in I've been in b2b marketing for a while and We were talking earlier that you guys seem to be one of the very few who connects all the dots from You know from the entire life cycle of getting that kind of prospect Kind of identified all the way through into you know the CRM and analytics and all the stuff to get them into those two are tools that sales wants to use marketing wants to use and down into deal closure and think So you guys have really connected all of that not only in terms of tools, but people So give us a little bit of an overview of like kind of that customer experience Anna Nielsen (03:07.022) So our customers are really coming to us for the quality of data to back up those campaigns that we then are offering them the option to either, know, here's the data, here's the audience, go run the campaign. You've got a team internally that knows how to run and orchestrate campaigns across all of your marketing channels. Or you know what, we'll do that for you. We will... help you generate leads, qualify those leads, and go ahead and do some branding with some programmatic advertising as well. And then we're using our interior marketing platform to orchestrate all of that and to give our customers a window into that orchestration. And then out the back end, the reporting of that out of the end of the campaign, a sort of account level view of what were your engagements across all of your different channels. for a given account that you're marketing to. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (04:07.11) Yeah, and for anybody who's been off the world of marketing for a while, we've moved on from CRM, which is kind of that database of contacts that we all are kind of used to, to the kind of this new term, ABM, which is account-based marketing. So especially in enterprise accounts, which I spent most of my careers, you're trying to get into Coca-Cola, and there's lots of ways to get into Coca-Cola, right? You can get into Coca-Cola locally, nationally, through a partner. So you guys are kind of tracking that. Anna Nielsen (04:15.49) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (04:27.886) Mm-hmm. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (04:37.064) you know, all the way across that account. Anna Nielsen (04:39.938) Yeah. So a big trend, you will, in B2B marketing that has been talked about for a long time, but we're just now starting to see more and more traction against this in the industry is this concept of account-based marketing, which has been around a little longer. You want to market to the account, but also this concept of the buying group. And that's this idea that you're not just marketing to an account, you're marketing to people at an account and any more. the decisions to make a purchase out of business are getting more and more complex. So, you we're seeing anywhere, I've seen numbers all over the place, but anywhere from five to upwards of 15 people can influence or make the decision to actually purchase a product. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:27.664) Yeah, that's, I'm thinking about, you know, working and, you know, kind of B2B marketing even, you know, there were at least five people on every kind of major decision, anything over, you know, a certain dollar value, you know, especially on the technology front and what you guys are doing, it's, you know, you're touching so many pieces of the business. It's really got to be reassuring for your customers to know that kind of you got them covered in case one of those angles falls down. I mean, I've built out channels like you're talking about, and it's, Anna Nielsen (05:37.688) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (05:52.354) Yeah. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:57.631) It's a, it's a month-long, year-long type of endeavor to get it going correctly. Anna Nielsen (06:03.499) Yeah, we've seen a lot of marketers talked to a lot of marketers where this concept of marketing to everyone in that group, it exists. They know they should be doing it, but this execution of it is difficult and cumbersome and too much of an uphill battle to really get to. So now, you know, with new technology, we're starting to see that actually be adopted because the technology that AI exists now to be able to identify who are those individuals in a given account and how do we reach them? How do we reach them at the right time with the right message? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (06:45.094) Yeah, well, and you guys have focused a lot on that. I think you won some awards for that. Walk us through that because this is the new kind of language that we're talking about inside of ABM and inside of those people is intent, right? We're trying, the AI is now predicting your intent and kind of, you know, whether you're kind of in the market for whatever product service offering that is out there, right? Anna Nielsen (06:48.299) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (07:00.621) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (07:12.075) Yeah, at Interior, we have a specialized B2B focused intent feed. We're processing somewhere in the neighborhood of about 50 billion intent signals a week. And then we can layer that onto our rich firmographic data to tell you who is in market, who is likely making a purchase decision, and help you prioritize, help our customers prioritize those accounts accordingly so that you're not spending time when a buying cycle might be 18 months, you're not spending time in the wrong part of that buying cycle, time and money on that account. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:49.595) No, and this is better for everyone. I keep talking to people that are doing solutions like yours where this is better for everybody because you're not gonna, as a consumer, if you're on the other end of that, you're not getting annoyed with messages and calls and contact points and ads or whatever when you're not in market. If you do not have budget, you are not in market. Maybe we're getting there and we're building a strategy, but that's a different message than the Anna Nielsen (08:00.716) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (08:10.721) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Anna Nielsen (08:18.538) Mm-hmm. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (08:19.608) intense so it's really interesting to see this come about and I want to back up because you said the number quickly which was 50 billion signals a week so and I imagine that's growing as more data becomes available Anna Nielsen (08:24.447) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (08:36.237) That's growing as we add countries, as we add topics. sitting around, I think, 11,000 topics right now, adding more, you know, typically on a quarterly basis. So that's a growing number and we've got all kinds of processes running in the background to recognize trends among those signals, because not all signals are going to be created equal. So, you know, we're looking at what trends in a signal indicate that that intent is growing and maybe nearing a place where you would want to engage that account that is showing intent on your product category on maybe even your product specifically versus what is just noise. You know, the past couple of years, there's been a lot of noise and AI as an intent topic. Everyone's researching AI. So how do we distill down? who's actually in market for some kind of AI solution. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (09:39.312) Yeah, and you guys have been doing this, you know, kind of using AI from the beginning of it. So it's, you've kind of gestated all of this data and kind of processed it. I imagine as you scaled, it was just building upon it. So you've got this rich depth of knowledge now too, where you see the patterns. Anna Nielsen (09:47.287) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (09:56.558) Yeah, we see the patterns, we look at not just the strength and the number of signals, the recency of that signal, and directionally, how is that changing for a given account. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:13.148) So for sales and marketing people, this is Nirvana, right? Anna Nielsen (10:17.025) Yeah. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:17.554) It's, well, it gives you priority, right? For a salesperson, I now have prioritization on my funnel, you know, regardless of where you are in that sales process, whether you're in the beginning, middle, or end of it, you know, if you're trading hands. And from a marketer, you know, you're not bothering people when they don't want to be bothered, and maybe you're, you know, you're sending more educational content, and more, you know, that type of stuff. And you can really kind of dial in those audiences to kind of build long-term value for those relationships. Anna Nielsen (10:20.525) Exactly. Anna Nielsen (10:43.261) And for a marketer, you're seeing much greater return on investment from these campaigns that are run with intent data combined with perhaps some of your data from your CRM or from your MAP, from your marketing platform to really layer that data together and understand which of the accounts that I'm already talking to, maybe should I be engaging? Which of the accounts that I haven't talked to in six months might be good to go reengage right now and you're able to see a much higher ROI and ultimately much higher conversion there because of that. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (11:22.962) Oh yeah, and as a management layer, you're now layering in intent data with kind of that prediction model of whatever CRM system you're using and the stages of the sales cycle of now you've got them to this stage, you're at a 50 % likelihood. Now with intent data, you're really able to kind of dial that in. would imagine even more in sales, the management team, CEOs gotta love this going like, how much of it is real? Anna Nielsen (11:32.181) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (11:48.028) I think that how much of it for real speaks for itself when you're delivering those closed one accounts, those closed one opportunities. And as a marketer, when you're hitting a better return on investment, you're showing that your dollars are being spent wisely, efficiently, and you're not wasting perhaps budget. or effort on accounts that maybe aren't in market right now or aren't as high of value. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (12:20.402) Yeah, I know. You guys are really in an interesting space because all of this is getting very AI and very automated and very smart very, very quickly. You guys have been around for more than a few years now doing this in a very smart way. You've always been described as kind of AI driven. What does that mean as the product marketing person, as the product manager of this cloud? What does that mean to you? Anna Nielsen (12:45.494) So we've been very cognizant of using AI where it matters. We don't want to be just slapping in AI features for AI sake in a platform. I think we've all seen plenty of that in the market with all kinds of different platforms where everything has to be AI now. So we're just going to slap AI on it and call it AI. we've been looking at what areas does AI actually move the needle. Some of that's gonna be, we talked about those buying groups. Just identifying the right people at an account is a cumbersome task. And now we're able to layer AI in there to look at a target account or look at categorically sort of a target type of business. Maybe I'm targeting medium sized businesses with. over 10 million in revenue and say at these businesses, these are the typical people that as a marketer I want to reach because they're going to be making the decision about this product that I'm selling. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:54.385) Yeah, well, and not to mention, I would imagine that that AI engine is also helping you kind of get the data junk out. Anna Nielsen (14:03.754) Yeah, it's... Russ Fordyce 🏆 (14:06.31) The people don't realize, as marketers, it's always funny because the conversation goes something like the sales says we need more leads, marketing says okay, and then we buy a list and we give them leads and they're all bad according to sales, right? And so what happens is those 20 % of any list you ever bought was bad immediately because people move and die and change jobs and change roles and change names and so just that stuff alone. Anna Nielsen (14:20.565) Right. Anna Nielsen (14:29.121) Yeah. Peace. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (14:36.134) talk about moving industries, industry knowledge, layering in that depth of knowledge really gets kind of interesting into that persona level targeting that you're talking about. Anna Nielsen (14:47.432) Yeah, there's AI processes that are running in our background to clean that data. There's also manual processes running in that background or running back there to really make sure that those contacts that we have, those people, the individuals that we're actually marketing to, be it through a demand generation campaign, through a programmatic campaign, are actually valid. So that's, you know, that quality is a big part of who we are at Interior Ed. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (15:24.038) You you guys, this product is kind of disrupting a lot of big icons in the market. You know, you've got Microsoft and ServiceNow and Salesforce in there and HubSpot and everybody else. How do you build those product capabilities, those enterprise-level product capabilities in such a nimble kind of way? Anna Nielsen (15:35.744) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (15:44.845) Now, because we are marketing services, maybe not at our core, but because we are marketing services and we take a service-based approach, that means that we are able to customize based on what is that customer looking for and how do we align to what they're doing internally. if they are doing anything internally or with other partners that they're using. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:16.678) Yeah, in my experience, it's always been one of those things of you pick a platform, one's really easy for you to manage, but then you've got to manage it. And the other's impossible to manage, and you've got to pay somebody to manage it. And it's great to see kind of that mix of both and to have a service layer on top. Anna Nielsen (16:23.606) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (16:28.167) Yeah. Anna Nielsen (16:33.228) Yeah, so we don't shy away from giving our customers access to the platform, but we also have a customer success team sitting there with them developing the strategy out of that platform. So the customer really gets the insight and enter of Marketing Cloud into what is their campaign doing at any given hour of the day. What intent topics do they have? They can go in, play with data and understand what does a potential audience look like. But when it comes to executing those managed services, we've got a team of campaign managers for each of those managed services, as well as a team of customer success representatives that are tying that all together to make the overall strategy work for our customers. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:26.64) Yeah, you've got to have somebody running point. You absolutely do. Now, you mentioned a bunch of client kind of successes and seeing the successes in deals one. Walk us through a couple of, you know, not names, but, know, kind of ones where you're like, that's a good one. Anna Nielsen (17:28.876) Yes, you do. Anna Nielsen (17:41.654) Mm-hmm. Yeah. So we had one large enterprise client that I can think of or that I'd single out, I guess, who they were dealing with a challenge that a lot of B2B marketers face. So they had a large amount of data, but their models that they had built internally, they weren't converting. people were just sort of tuning out their emails, their demand generation efforts and all of their marketing campaigns. So we went in and took, you know, what they had built layered our intent data and our analytics on top of that. And from there, we were able to say which accounts are actively researching those solutions, even if maybe they haven't interacted with you in, you know, six months in a year, maybe they haven't come to your website, maybe they haven't. taken and opened any of your emails or interacted with you in a way that you've recognized. We've recognized elsewhere that they are looking for your solution. Now would be a good time to go reengage them. And that customer with that effort of just layering that intent data on top and using it to analyze their accounts was able to see a 32X return on investment. And I think 75 % of those opportunities that came out of that. or new business for them. So those are for a marketer, that's a big deal. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:11.004) There we go. 32 X ROI, that's pretty good. And what was the other stat? Sorry, say it again. Anna Nielsen (19:16.651) Yeah, 75 % of those opportunities that came out of that were net new business. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:23.516) So all new business. So 30 % 30 times new business. Anna Nielsen (19:29.003) So that's it. know, that's those leads aren't bad leads anymore, you know, because you hit them at the right time and you focused on the right leads, the right accounts. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:33.903) No, I... Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:38.899) I see it in our business. We do a lot of email marketing and we see people who don't click for years, don't open for years and then all of sudden reengage. We know it's part, sometimes it's tools and stuff that are sending bad signals. But it happens with all of us, right? We get interested in something, we go away for a while and we come back because it's in the back of our brain or whatever. And sometimes those billboards along the highway work, you Anna Nielsen (19:42.485) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (19:49.545) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (20:01.469) Yeah, or you don't have budget and now you do. Mm-hmm. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:07.632) or those shower moments we have where we're like, Anna Nielsen (20:10.847) Yeah, exactly. Really what we're trying to get to is telling our customers, these are the people that are in market right now and this is how you should engage them. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:22.354) Yeah, that's super smart. So 2026, I guess 2025 was kind of the year of AI, I would call it for everybody else. You guys have been in it a long time. What's on the 2026 roadmap? Anna Nielsen (20:29.257) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (20:35.883) I hate to say it, but more AI. So, we're looking at how does AI make optimizations to workflows, both internally for those managed service teams and for our customers. And then we're looking at how does AI make that campaign execution even more intelligent. So, what I was talking about with identifying the right people at an account, you know, how do I know that at a specific account or categorically at an account that I want to target a director of marketing versus a VP of marketing versus the CMO, which one of those three is the decision maker and using AI to be more intelligent about that. And then further out, you know, using AI as the next step to determine what's the right message for that person. so that you can really personalize marketing to a greater degree than you really ever have been able to. We've seen these personalization tactics and engines and concepts around for a while. I remember back in my days as a marketing practitioner seeing platforms that could take a programmatic ad and tailor that based on maybe someone's location or some different pieces of metadata like that. We're looking at how do we use AI and take that to another level and having conversations about that and about what areas does, like I said, what areas does AI make sense and move the needles versus what areas is it just the AI hype that we see everywhere. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (22:28.24) Yeah, it's gonna be so interesting because there's so many different places we can kind of almost put little AI, I call them agents, but little AI agents or a little program to say, go do this one specific thing. it's really gonna change the way all these tools work and how we're messaged for sure. Anna Nielsen (22:36.735) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (22:41.61) Yeah. Anna Nielsen (22:45.993) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (22:51.445) It's going to help marketers select the right piece of content of their library, even how do you match that library of all that content that you've delivered to the right person to see that. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (23:05.563) Yeah. And you guys won for kind of this insight analytics and I know it's all kind of AI driven. The other thing I think you guys, you know, one of the claims was a hundred percent reduction in reporting turnaround times, which I know coming, coming out of that world was always something you struggled with because it was somebody's job to pull reports usually. And that person, God help them, you know, cause it was, you know, if you're end of month, you're like, it's like tax man every day. And so you guys have kind of changed the model. Anna Nielsen (23:09.813) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (23:24.052) Yeah. Anna Nielsen (23:28.691) No. Anna Nielsen (23:33.788) Mm-hmm. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (23:36.58) of kind of almost putting reporting first. Anna Nielsen (23:39.851) We've we take an approach of what reporting does the client need and how are we providing that? We have a plan for how to provide that. I guess you could say we're also taking the approach of the report shouldn't be pulled on a campaign by campaign specific basis. That report needs to give you insight into all of your marketing activities because hitting the director of sales with three programmatic ads doesn't matter if you didn't also hit someone else on his team with an email perhaps. That's maybe not the best example. it's that cross campaign report and that engagement tracking of how did you engage the account across all of your activities. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (24:37.37) Yeah, I remember hearing the story of Google doing this in the early days with proximity. know, dad would search for a kayak and then the other people in the house would start getting ads for kayaks. Right. It's like, it's so weird. I got ads for kayaks. Well, yeah, you're in the same place using the same Internet connection, you know, and somebody searching for kayaks. So they're spewing for kayaks. And it's more than that. Right. We're we're now looking for the right buyers. Anna Nielsen (24:43.678) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (24:52.264) Mm-hmm. Draw a line. Anna Nielsen (25:00.628) Yep. Anna Nielsen (25:04.103) Yeah. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (25:07.324) spewing for kayaks. I did a presentation once to explain how kind of cookie targeting worked to the masses and I called it, why does that pair of shoes follow you around? You know, because the kayak or the pair of shoes follows you around and so we're getting way better than that now. Anna Nielsen (25:07.402) I'm sorry. Anna Nielsen (25:15.923) Okay. Anna Nielsen (25:20.81) We're getting better than that. Your kayak story, I guess, goes even wider where, especially in concentrated neighborhoods, IP addresses will rotate. So now my neighbor searched for something and I'm getting, you know, I'm getting ads for it. So we're starting to get more intelligent. How do we target the right person? You yeah, you're still, you are still gonna get some noise if you're on the same IP. We also look at, you know, what business do you belong to? And that's where, you know, that's where a lot of this data comes in is to sort of triangulate who is the right person to be targeting and make sure that we are accurately targeting that person. especially in... the day and age of hybrid and remote work, how are we targeting that person and not their spouse, not their three year old on a tablet, you know? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (26:25.786) Well, the interesting thing, the kayak example is not a bad one because if you think about it in that household, know, the husband and wife or spouses would usually talk about a purchase like that. Your neighbor might have something to say about you in a kayak. it's, you know, it's, it's, you know, you're buying influence around, you know, personal products is kind of, you know, in your home. So it's, it's not. Yeah. Hey dad, I want to kayak. that's funny. So yeah, it's, it is interesting. Yeah. Where, where the, as your buyer group, as you put it. Anna Nielsen (26:33.246) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (26:43.378) Yeah, and the influence matters too, you know. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (26:55.7) get it. Anna Nielsen (26:55.772) Yeah, for some household purchases, there's a buying group or a buying committee too. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (27:02.466) yeah, yeah. Well, Anna, this has been a pleasure talking with you and getting the kind of the update on where we are in the ABM, CRM, B2B world. Let's throw some more acronyms at it see if they stick. But yeah, it's really been a pleasure talking with you and getting that update and congratulations on all the success and wins that you guys are having. Anna Nielsen (27:07.433) Hehe. Anna Nielsen (27:16.766) Mm-hmm. Anna Nielsen (27:24.222) Yeah, thanks for us. We've worked hard for them. like I said, it's validation that what we're doing matters to our customers and is making a difference for those customers. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (27:38.129) Yeah, at end of the day, customer needs to find value. So congratulations to you guys. Thank you. Anna Nielsen (27:41.589) Mm-hmm. Great. Thanks, Russ.