Do you know what your perfect lead looks like? Most people, when asked, know the demographic of the leads that they want to target. They know how much revenue their company generates and how many employees work at their company.
But just because you know who your perfect lead is doesn’t mean that they’re actually ready or willing to buy. By focusing on job titles, industry verticals or budgets rather than on the frustrations that are driving your perfect lead into a purchase, you may be wasting a lot of time. You may even be reaching out to the wrong type of people or approaching the right type of people in the wrong way.
What is making the distinction between lead facts and lead needs important?
Imagine that you’re a software company who produces a specialist product for finance and banking. You’ve just had a lead come through who is a Head of IT (so a definite decision maker) and she works at a boutique investment bank (right in your specialist industry vertical).
She sounds totally perfect, and she would be, but she’s not ready to buy just yet.
Whilst her profile might sound like that of an ideal lead, you have no indication as to her sales readiness. But, by producing and offering content that helps her to address her current pain points, you can help to guide her through the buyer’s journey towards consideration and, ultimately, a decision.
Yet if another lead, also a Head of IT comes to you via your website, downloads two eBooks, joins a webinar and subscribes to your blog, then they are more likely to be a good prospect to get in contact with because his behaviour indicates that he is genuinely interested and considering your products or services. It also means that your content is doing a good job of addressing his pain points and is resonating with him.
How can you monitor your leads more effectively?
An easy way of monitoring which of your leads are engaged and which aren’t is to adapt your lead scoring to include behavioural as well as demographic scores.
Traditionally, when setting up lead scoring, you’d only score contacts based on what demographic boxes they ticked. For example, they’d score higher if they had the right job title, were from the right industry, and were from a company of the right size and turnover. This could mean that you have a high scoring contact who isn’t engaged at all with what you do, their score doesn’t have any bearing on their sales readiness.
Scoring on behaviours as well as demographics will therefore give you a more complete picture on who is engaged and who is not. This will mean that you avoid pestering leads before they are ready to speak to the sales department as well as saving sales people’s time by not giving them contacts who are unlikely to convert.
To get the most out of lead scoring, look at some customer’s journeys and figure out which pieces of content and what offers are converting visitors in to leads and leads into customers. Score the ones that are converting well higher to make sure that its value is reflected in a contact’s final score. This way you can easily monitor those who are more likely to convert because of the influence of these offers.
Also make sure that you score bottom of funnel actions, such as requesting a demo or downloading a trial, higher than your top of funnel content offers so that you can indicate how far leads are in the buyer’s journey.
Agree with the sales department as to the level of engagement that you want leads to reach before they’re passed over to their team. That way, once a lead hits a certain score, they can officially become an SQL and the sales team can be certain that the contact is fully engaged when they pick up the phone to them.
By using lead scoring in this way, you won’t only spot your perfect leads more easily but make your selling process more efficient and more effective.