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It's no secret that the sales landscape has changed dramatically in recent years.
With the advent of social media and the widespread use of smartphones, people are inundated with information from all directions.
As a result, buyers are more discerning than ever before about who they do business with.
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In this blog post, we'll discuss how intent data is changing everything for the better and how you can take advantage of it to increase your sales success!
Although it's not ideal for most marketers and sales professionals, it's great for truly excellent marketers and top-performing salespeople since they're aware of intent data.
We'll start by discussing the typical problems we encounter with salespeople. Then we'll look at how intent data might help you save money while still growing your business.
Common Sales Prospecting Blunders
When sales reps, BDRs, and SDRs look for new prospects, it's rarely a smooth ride. There are numerous little issues that might balloon into costly mistakes if left unaddressed.
Focus on precise prospects at the bottom of the funnel to speed up transaction cycles. These people know they have an issue and are actively seeking a solution.
We want to assist you to avoid these traps and prospect more effectively by focusing on these bottom of the funnel prospects. Here are a handful of the most frequent blunders that may end up costing you a lot of money and time.
1. Outreach to Spam Recipients
Spamming a wide range of people with generic, mass emails does not work, yet we see salespeople and agencies making this error on a daily basis.
Cold outreach, sales prospecting, and content development should be targeted to a specific ideal customer profile (ICP) for each smaller group.
Making an effort to understand your market and customize your communications can make all the difference between earning a good ROI and wasting time and money.
2. Inadequate Alignment of the Pain-Solution
Cold outreach and outbound lead generation tactics must be tailored to the pains of your ICP's members.
There should be no pain for your prospects if you're selling a solution to a problem that they face.
Finding a pain point can be challenging, especially for sales professionals and start-ups who many times overlook this step completely. Taking the time to really learn about your clients' pain points will pay off in terms of increased conversions.
3. Unqualified Leads
Trying to go after top-of-funnel leads by conducting cold outreach is a time-consuming and laborious process.
What is Intent Data?
This leads us to contact data for prospects who fulfil your ideal client profile (ICP) criteria and have shown indications that they are in-market (or at least qualified) for your products or services.
There are a variety of types of intent data, ranging from more basic data to data indicating a prospect is at the bottom of the funnel.
Basic Intent Data
Intention data from this source generally involves more publicly accessible information about your prospect that indicates some level of competence for your product. This might include:
- Growth in revenue
- Financement précédent
- Hiring for open positions
- What technologies and applications are they employing?
- There have been a number of senior management changes.
Many, many more are available.
You can see this isn’t proof that your prospect is 100% in the market for your offer, but it shows signals that they are more likely to be in-market, or at least interested in the competitive advantage you’re offering.
Basic intent data can be filtered for on several databases like LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
In-Market Intent Data
When it comes to privacy and data collection, we're still in the early days of the internet.
When you think about it, the internet is still a wild west when it comes to privacy and data gathering.
In-market intent data is information gathered by several display ad services, software, browser extensions, and other technologies that track a user's online journey.
The aim of tracking this trip is to see whether the user has an interest in or intends to buy a specific product or service. This information can be obtained from either 1st or 3rd party sources:
Behavioral Advertising from a User's or Third-party Website
Visitors who have completed a form registered for a webinar, or requested a demo are known to you.
They are "known" to you since they revealed their information. This is by far the most significant data in terms of determining whether or not a prospect is at the bottom of the funnel and willing to learn more and engage on a sales call.
Behavioral Information from a Third Party
Customers who come from other websites that you don't own, but which appear to be relevant (for example, specific articles on Forbes or other authority business sites).
They are identified and their contact information is offered by data brokers via the
3rd Party Behavioral Detection
Visitors who have filled out a form on the same site and provided their contact information are known as "form submitters."
They become known to the website owner in this scenario, and marketers buy that information.
As a result, you can see that this data may be quite valuable for utilizing in outbound campaigns and across y
our entire marketing efforts.
How to Obtain Intention Data
There are many ways to get intent data, depending on the type of data you need and your revenue goals.
Going after basic intent data isn’t that difficult and can be done with any of the most popular lead generation tools on the market, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
How to Get Basic Intent Data with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Click the “Account Filters” link in LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
- Look for indicators of buyer interest, such as Technology Used, Company Expansion, Department Growth, and other things.
- Use the top menu's filters to locate firms with Recent Funding or who have had Senior Leadership Changes once you've compiled your list.
- Select all of the firms and choose "View Employees" from the drop-down menu.
Use the Lead Filters to narrow down the roles and individuals you'll need to contact within those businesses to only those that are relevant.
You can now use the buyer persona to identify prospects that match your product or service, and you may send tailored communications to determine their interest.
How to Identify Website Visitors
This is a great approach to go, especially if you use strong top and middle of the funnel marketing.
You may gather demand by tracking website visitors, particularly those that have visited multiple times or have visited specific key pages (such as your pricing page or an important blog post).
You can immediately implement numerous “identity resolution” and “visitor identification” software with a simple Google search.
How to Get In-Market Intent Data
There are several businesses providing in-market intent data on the market today. Selecting one to work with will be determined by your budget and the sectors you're targeting.
Once again, a simple Google search will turn up numerous suppliers of "in-market data" and "buyer intent data," all of which may provide this information at different costs and with distinctive features.
Using Intents to Drive Sales with Intent Data
Once you have your contact data with buying intent signals, it’s time to put it to good use.
1. Create customized emails and messages to connect with leads.
In general, cold emails and LinkedIn connection requests are rather "cold." The prospects haven't shown any interest in what you have to offer, so you're contacting them out of the blue.
Intent data helps your cold outreach become a lot more “warmer.”
You already know that these people use technology similar to yours, are being thrust into a new role at the company, or have actually been looking into your product or service. Some of the advantages of using intent data in your outreach:
- Shorter sales cycles
- More quality leads
- It's simpler to develop relevant messages.
- It's simpler to know what sort of material to encourage them with.
- Opens up bandwidth for more top and mid-funnel activities
You may also use lists of people who have expressed a particular level of interest to segment your outreach.
This will ensure that your efforts are more relevant and successful than ever before. To reach out to your prospects at the ideal time on the right channel, we propose utilizing a multi-channel strategy that includes cold email and LinkedIn.
2. Custom Audiences and Targeted Advertising
The transition that Apple and other major technology firms are making toward privacy (as shown by their iOS 15 upgrades), is wreaking havoc on the online advertising market.
There are now more data lacunae than ever, and ad platform targeting is becoming less precise and more expensive.
You may take away the guessing game from the ads platform by gathering intent data, which allows you to give them a highly relevant, in-market dataset to start serving advertisements to.
Then, by using lookalike audiences, you may extend your initial sample beyond your seed set to increase your ad campaign's exposure.
It's very simple to maximize the effectiveness of your online advertising by optimizing these four variables:
3. Personalize your website experience
Intents are a very useful tool for customizing the experience of your website or landing pages to the type of audience that is visiting.
This can be quite beneficial. If an IP address is linked to a company with more than 100 employees, you may wish to change your call-to-action (CTA) to something like "contact our sales team" instead of "sign up now."
You already know they're a large business; therefore, you're ready to welcome them from day one and accommodate their needs right away.
Personalizing your website experience with intent data can improve conversions, but more significantly, it may adapt the encounter to the sort of consumer you're interacting with, which gives a great first impression and might help you seal the deal faster.
There are numerous methods to customize your website experience; do some research and test, test, test!
Conclusion
Intent data is a crucial component of the future of marketing and sales, yet many marketers and salespeople are ignoring it.
If you can harness the power of intent data, you'll be able to zoom past your rivals, fill the bottom of the funnel with "ready-to-buy" leads, and expand your business on a regular basis and quickly.
