Company Overview
NVIDIA, a global leader in artificial intelligence computing with 30,000 employees, faced unique challenges in its go-to-market approach and has been transforming its marketing strategy to address the complexities of a diverse product portfolio and lengthy enterprise sales cycles.
The company operates a go-to-market strategy that supports a large amount of use cases and workloads. This complexity demands sophisticated data-driven approaches to identify, engage, and convert enterprise customers across multiple stakeholder groups.
Challenge
NVIDIA’s revenue marketing team faced several critical challenges that limited their effectiveness:
Extended Sales Cycles: New customer acquisition typically involved a 2-4 year journey from first engagement to purchase, making traditional marketing funnel metrics ineffective for measuring success. They were focused on leads instead of accounts.
Siloed Organizations: The revenue marketing team was originally structured to support distinct enterprise, developer, and sales functions, creating disconnected views of customer accounts and limiting collaboration. Each had their own idea of best practice and KPIs.
“If you claim to take a holistic approach to client relationships while still having your team work in separate, disconnected groups that only interact with specific parts of your client’s organization, you’re undermining your own efforts,” explained Ari Capogeannis, Head of Revenue Marketing at NVIDIA.
Data Fragmentation: The 30+ year old organization was entrenched in existing processes and technology with multiple Salesforce instances, CDPs, and data lakes.
Limited Intent Data Context: While NVIDIA had a wealth of data, it lacked the necessary context to drive meaningful action. Surging accounts didn’t necessarily indicate sales readiness, creating friction when passed to sales teams.
Complex Buying Groups: Enterprise accounts featured multiple buying centers with overlapping stakeholders in various roles, creating complexity that traditional account-based approaches couldn’t address.
Solution
Recognizing these challenges, NVIDIA embarked on a multi-year journey to transform their approach through data consolidation, enhanced intent data, and improved orchestration:
1. Shifting from Funnel to Account Relationship
NVIDIA abandoned the traditional marketing funnel model in favor of an approach that focused on the holistic account relationship. This required viewing accounts dynamically based on their current relationship status rather than their position in a linear buying journey.
“There is no funnel. There’s an existing account relationship,” Capogeannis explained. “And the personas within that account are in varying stages of engagement, awareness, and delight with us across a myriad of different programs.”
2. Data Ingestion over Platforms
Rather than investing in new standalone platforms, NVIDIA focused on data ingestion and integration. Their own data intelligence platform combines:
- First-party customer data
- Homegrown propensity modeling
- Technographic and firmographic data
- Off-site behavioral data
- Contextualized intent signals
This approach allowed NVIDIA to meet teams where they worked, rather than requiring adoption of new systems. At the large enterprise size, a traditional platform can’t deliver what they need. As Capogeannis put it: “How do I make this seller great at his or her job without them having to log into something new on top of what we already have?”
3. Enhanced Intent Data with Intentsify
NVIDIA partnered with Intentsify to enhance their intent data strategy. Unlike basic topic-based or category-level intent, Intentsify provided:
- Customized intent models aligned to specific campaigns, solutions, and products
- Contextual analysis of data using artificial intelligence
- Integration of campaign data, first-party data, and intent data
This approach delivered more meaningful insights about why accounts were showing intent, enabling NVIDIA to engage appropriately based on where prospects truly were in their journey.
4. Buying Group Orchestration
NVIDIA’s revenue marketing team, working closely with revenue operations, began implementing buying group strategies. This involved:
- Identifying and categorizing key buying roles across accounts
- Tracking contact coverage within target buying groups
- Creating smarter scoring systems for buying group engagement
- Developing personalized experiences for different roles regardless of buying stage
As organizations get larger, there are multiple buying centers and roles involved. Simply sending “surging” accounts to sales without this context is not effective. Instead, the focus has shifted from a traditional marketing-to-sales handoff to providing relevant experiences for the buying group members at different stages of the process.
Results and Future Direction
While NVIDIA’s transformation is ongoing, they’ve made significant progress in their journey to a more sophisticated go-to-market approach:
Data-Driven Account Prioritization: By combining intent data with context, NVIDIA can now better identify which accounts are truly in-market versus those in earlier exploration stages.
Improved Marketing-Sales Alignment: The focus on buying groups and account relationships has helped bridge traditional gaps between marketing and sales by providing a shared view of account status.
Enhanced Early-Stage Engagement: Understanding why accounts show intent allows NVIDIA to create more targeted experiences for practitioners who may influence purchases 2-4 years in the future.
Foundation for AI-Driven Insights: The consolidated data foundation positions NVIDIA for their next evolution — using AI to distill actionable insights from their vast data.
Looking ahead, Capogeannis describes their focus as “orchestration” — bringing together all the pieces they’ve built into a cohesive system that delivers real-time intelligence rather than backward-looking dashboards.
By building this collaborative data foundation, NVIDIA is positioning itself to move beyond traditional marketing metrics and dashboards toward a truly intelligent, dynamic approach to complex B2B relationships.
