Not every lead you generate comes to you “ready to buy.” Some leads will never buy your products or services. According to some studies, only 25% of new leads could be considered sales-ready (I think that may be high), and upwards of 25% will probably never buy from your business.
That leaves approximately 50% of your leads who may buy from you at some point but are not ready to buy right now. Our challenge in dealing with this 50% is two-fold:
- How do we stay “top of mind” so they will remember us when they are ready to buy, and
- How do we know when it is appropriate to move from a marketing conversation to a sales conversation?
For professional service providers, achieving and maintaining top-of-mind status typically involves sharing relevant, timely information with prospective customers on a consistent basis. Electronic newsletters are a common way to “stay in touch” these days. Still, phone calls, handwritten notes, whitepapers, and recorded webinars are all great ways to deliver relevant information while establishing yourself as an expert and building Know, Like, and Trust.
Detecting when to shift from a marketing conversation to a sales conversation can be a little trickier. With today’s emphasis on digital media, marketing conversations typically do not take place face-to-face, making it difficult to gauge a prospect’s level of interest. Therefore, many professional service firms just wait for the prospect to initiate a sales conversation.
As I mentioned in, What Type of Salesperson Is Your Website?, some marketing automation tools allow us to detect our prospects’ “digital body language”, providing us clues about the sales readiness of a particular prospect.
Before spending money on marketing automation software, it is important to define the criteria you will use to determine when a prospect is ready for a sales conversation. Software vendors usually refer to this as “lead scoring.” The basic idea behind lead scoring is you assign values to your prospects’ attributes and behaviors. You then adjust your end of the conversation to match the prospect’s level of interest and where they are in their particular buying process.
If you have different people fulfilling the sales and marketing roles in your business, one of the best ways to ensure they are aligned on the same goals is to have them work together to define what constitutes a sales-ready lead.
When working on your lead scoring scheme, you should take the following three broad categories of criteria into account:
1. Demographic Data: Geographic location, company size, industry, position in organization, etc.
2. Lead Source Data: Where did the lead come from – web search, tradeshow, referral, advertisement, etc.? What questions or search terms led them to you? What business problem are they trying to solve?
3. Behavioral Data: Knowledge of whether they visited your website or read your content marketing materials. Different actions should carry different scores – visiting your pricing page should receive a higher score than a visit to the careers page.
Once you collect this sort of intelligence, you can use it to determine a prospect’s area of interest (which pages they visited) as well as their level of interest (did they visit an area multiple times, download related resources, or return to the site more than once?).
Use what you learn to adjust your communications to the appropriate level. If someone’s behavior indicates they are in research mode, you may want to send them a whitepaper or case study. A repeat visitor who has consumed most of your marketing content may appreciate a phone call to answer any remaining questions that are preventing them from moving forward.
Like all marketing tactics, lead scoring and automation success depends on having a sound marketing strategy. If you are unsure if you are ready for marketing automation, reach out and ask about our Growth Engine Map.
