Measurements For High-Intent Leads

How To Find High-Intent Leads

Lead scoring is a methodology used by marketing and sales teams to determine how likely a lead is to buy. The process assigns a score to your leads that share the leads' buying intention. The higher the score, the more likely they'll buy.

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How To Determine Intent

Intent is a buzzword these days. There are many software platforms out there that can assist you with measuring intent and all sorts of models you can follow that will help you to know when to pass a Contact to your Development Team or Sales Executives.

For simplicity, this process is a very simple-to-follow way of grading and scoring your Contacts so that you can understand, based on their engagements, if there is intent to buy, if they are just researching, or worse, just being entertained by the content you are providing.

Introducing Grading & Scoring

The best approach to ensure you're able to understand what content is moving the needle is introducing a grading and scoring model that measures each engagement a prospect takes along the buyer's journey.

• Grading System: The Grading System is used to grade the current prospect/account that is engaging and how well they match your ideal customer profile. Starting with an F, you increase the grade of the prospect as they match certain criteria such as revenue, employee account, geographical location, job function, are they a user, decision maker, or executive
• Scoring System: The Scoring System is used to calculate the interactions of the current prospect to understand intent, where are they researching, problem-aware, considering buying, or interested in you specifically. Starting with a 0, you increase their score as they engage content, form submission 15 points, demo requests 100, free trials 150, webinar attendance 25, etc

Once you have these two variables, you then create a matching system that if a certain grade and score meet, you then push them to your development team to see if there is true intent to buy, just a fan of your content, or someone who isn't ready to buy.

The Problem With This Process

The problem with this system that most people have is that marketing always seems to be behind on pipeline generation, so they end up going away with this system altogether and treat each prospect as marketing qualified, send to the development to sales qualify and regardless of their intent seem to find themselves being asked to demo the platform, these days, most ignore the calls or simply just say no I am not interested at this time.

From that point, it's a blame game of marketing sending over junk leads from the sales side and marketing combatting saying the sales team just isn't very good at sales.

Alleviating The Problem

The only way to alleviate this problem is by introducing the grading and scoring model. Yes, you'll probably see a reduction in the amount of pipeline being converted into marketing qualified but the leads that are passed over should have a much higher rate of closing.

This also allows you to keep your sales and development team nimble because they aren't handling a lot of junk leads that have no intent to buy. It's for this same reason, we are currently seeing an influx in intent tools in the market.

Taking this one step further, once you start to get more engagements and customers, you can research who your ideal customer profile is and become highly selective on who you are creating content marketing for and advertising towards.

This should allow a cleaner audience on your website that will drive better quality leads with higher intent.

Automating The Process

Most CRM platforms like SalesForce and HubSpot have built-in lead models, I recommend using LeanData if you have the budget. LeanData gives you the ability to manage your leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities within SalesForce and HubSpot.

Furthermore, this tool also allows you to send push notifications to Slack, email, and CRM platform tasks for team members as leads and opportunities are created and move through the journey.

When High-Intentions Aren't Happening

This stage serves as a warning stage. Most times, when organizations are trying to drive a surplus of qualified leads to sales, they focus primarily on driving massive traffic to the website from numerous sources and call this success when their website traffic grows significantly because the saying always goes, more is better right?

Just like having a lot of social media followers, you want to focus on quality, not quantity. Having a lot of website traffic from Contacts that have no interest in buying your software should be the type of marketing activity that should be eliminated to save on costs.

The way you can tell if you have the wrong traffic is by segmenting out your Contacts in the database by those who are Customers and finding the common patterns amongst them.

Then do the same for Contacts that aren't Customers and see if you see the same patterns, if not, find the Sources for the Contacts that don't match those who are Customers and if you're spending money on these Sources, stop.

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Converting Your Marketing Qualified Leads

Once the Prospect has shown intent to buy, the next step is having your Development Team qualify to ensure that the Prospect matches your ideal customer profile and is ready to make a purchase. This step is about protecting your Sales Team.

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