Access to buyer intent data is rapidly becoming a differentiating factor for top sales teams around the world. Roughly 75% of companies say that closing more deals is their top priority. Meanwhile, only 46% of sales reps say they have access to data insights regarding the buyer’s intent. If you want to be on the right side of those statistics, you need to reframe your sales strategy to include the right data points.
Utilizing buyer intent data will tell you about products and services that prospects are presently seeking out online. Online behavior such as what content they consume or engage with can give you clues as to whether they are in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage. That data reduces the collective noise in the market and allows you to proactively tailor your outreach campaign to their current stage, making it more relevant and likely to start a conversation or influence a conversion.
To truly supercharge your sales process with buyer intent data, you’ll want to start at the beginning:
Note: Gathering buyer intent data has never been easier. Sign up for free Leadfeeder's 14-day trial and give it a try.
It All Starts With Content
The first step to gathering the buyer’s intent is having the right content to build an audience. The only way they’re finding your product is with content like ads, blog posts, or emails to guide them there. That content needs to be relevant to your industry and the prospect’s position in the buyer’s journey – meaning you need to have premium content for every stage:
Awareness Stage - Where buyers are identifying opportunities they want to pursue or challenges they want to solve.
Consideration Stage - Where buyers have defined their goals or challenges and have committed to finding solutions.
Decision Stage - Where buyers have chosen their solution and are now searching for specific companies that can fulfill their needs.
Once that content is created, you can then repurpose it across all your channels and outreach methods to see who engages. Remember, the content should be focused on your buyer’s goals or pain points – not your product or brand. Your content can have a call-to-action directing them or a light touch on your brand as a possible solution, but if it’s not helpful or comes across as overly salesly, you’ll push them away.
Capitalize On Website Visitors
If you’re interested in switching software or finding a new vendor, you’re probably going to ask around or – more likely – go straight to Google for a little recon work. Having your website primed for visitors shopping around is critical because 95% of customers choose to buy from providers that offer relevant content at every stage of the buying process.
Capturing buyer intent can be as simple as using lead magnets such as ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, gated content, or free trials. Once you’ve got their email address in exchange for content that identifies their buyer journey, you can rate the lead accordingly and take action.
Another strategy is to leverage a tool like Leadfeeder, which gives you insights into your own first-party intent data i.e. which companies are visiting your website. Via a simple dashboard you can not only see which companies have visited, but also the frequency of their visits, the number of users, which pages they viewed, and how they found you.
Pull Insights From Your Outreach Campaigns
The average cold email campaign gets less than a 1% response rate. It’s quite a sobering statistic, yet it’s not the end of the story – at least it doesn’t have to be. If you’re leveraging the right software, you can still gain valuable insights from how prospects behave upon receiving your email.
For instance, software like Mailshake can track key campaign metrics including email open rates and click monitoring so you can see what subject lines are working and what content is relevant to their current stage in the buyer’s journey. When they do reply, you can trigger automated followup emails that have premade templates designed to further identify their buyer’s intent and assign them a lead score.
These types of tools are excellent for cold outreach but also for newsletters that go out to existing customers, past customers, and previously interested buyers. You can see in real-time when a buyer changes their behavior and begins opening emails to engage with your content.
Leverage Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
To stay ahead of the digital natives, brands in all industries need to be where the consumers are – anytime, anywhere. It’s safe to say that AI, machine learning, and other advanced tech is changing the way marketing works, and naturally, companies are using it to supercharge their sales process. Over the last several years, in particular, the process of anticipating prospective buyers' intent has grown more scientific. AI has the power to make the buying experience more personalized, and the selling experience more straightforward.
One easy solution many companies are pursuing is offering chatbots on their website. Chat solutions like Drift are easy to install, relatively affordable, and start directing traffic and gathering buyer intent right away. You can opt to have your staff chat to give a personal touch or automate the process with a Drift Chatbot, which will welcome all users, ask probing questions to identify what the buyer wants and route the potential lead to your sales team when they’re ready to purchase.
Now that you have the low-down on using buyer intent to kick your sales process into high gear, let’s talk about the last two pieces of the puzzle. First, more often than not, your customers are way ahead of you. 57% of the B2B buyer’s journey is completed before talking to a sales rep. To feel equally prepared, you need to not only understand their position in the buyer’s journey but also have relevant content at your fingertips to help you build a use case and handle sales objections.
Second, with more data at your disposal, your sales team should be spending more time actively selling and less time doing non-selling activities. According to CSO Insights, sellers spend less than one-third of their time actively selling. With the right buyer intent data, you should be able to filter out more noise and focus more of your efforts on moving people through your funnel.
Note: Gathering buyer intent data has never been easier. Sign up for free Leadfeeder's 14-day trial and give it a try.
Sujan Patel is a partner at Ramp Ventures & co-founder Mailshake. He has over 15 years of marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.
Now that you're here
Leadfeeder is a tool that shows you companies that visit your website. Leadfeeder generates new leads, offers insight on your customers and can help you increase your marketing ROI.
If you liked this blog post, you'll probably love Leadfeeder, too.
Sign up
