While getting inbound leads through your website might be the easy part, assessing whether they are ready for a sales conversation can be trickier.
Mastering this will help you waste less time with poor fit prospects or annoying those who are not yet sales ready.
Before beginning this process, it is important to recognise the stages of your customer journey. This will help with identifying prospects who are ready to buy and those who may need more help or nurturing.
Once you’ve identified a number of good fit leads, you can begin the sales qualification process by taking a look at your prospect’s level of engagement with your website and marketing content.
Email activity
Only 24% of sales emails are opened. Email activity is an important factor of sales readiness, indicated by the number of email opens, click-throughs to schedule a meeting or other call to actions.
Content downloads
The content downloaded may help indicate the pain point your prospect has. For example, if they download a whitepaper on acoustic solutions for education then this may inform the sales conversation.
Reviewing bottom of the funnel offers
Requesting site meetings, product demonstrations, assessing performance and test data might indicate your prospect either needs a helping hand or is ready to buy.
Website activity
When a prospect is returning to a site 4 or 5 times, this should be noted. Returning visits to case studies, reviews and technical calculators may indicate they are in the consideration stage of the process.
Depending on the nature of your business, a salesperson could be dealing with dozens of leads on a weekly basis. If your business is small and doesn’t have many leads, it may be possible to use data from a number of sources and identify sales-ready leads manually.
If you have a team of salespeople or perhaps technical managers, using an automated method of evaluating the sales readiness of your prospects will help them close more deals and shorten your sales cycles.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning points based on how prospects have engaged with your business online. You assign different values to a contact depending on how prospects have engaged with emails, social channels, website activity and content downloaded. Once set-up, this process is then automated.
Research company IDC state sales enablement is as follows:
“The delivery of the right information, to the right person at the right time in the right format, and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.”
Architects, engineers and consultants want the right information at their fingertips 24/7. You’ll want to ensure marketing has the information architects want on your website.
When it comes to delivering the right information at the right time, it is important to identify the stages in the specifier’s journey to understand where your prospect is at. This will help you decide how sales ready a prospect is.
Awareness stage: The specifier identifies a need or challenge and identifies that your business may be able to help.
Consideration stage: The specifier evaluates your solution meets their need, along with due consideration of all the alternative solutions identified in the awareness stage.
Specification stage: Following a thorough technical evaluation, the specifier selects the solution that they feel best meets the project needs and specifies the solution into the project design.
Delivery stage: Once the specification is secured, pricing enquiries will start to arrive, and the specification may get challenged in an attempt to cut costs.
Once this objection is overcome, the order will arrive, and you can deliver the product. Often providing the contractor with technical support and installation guidance. In many cases, the specifiers will still be involved.
It’s important sales and marketing work together to share which construction marketing content is aligned to which stage of the specifier’s journey.
It is estimated that a typical commercial building can require over 5,000 products to construct. Understandably, architects, specifiers and contractors are time poor. Ensure your sales team knows what information has been consumed by them, when and at which stage in the specifier’s journey.
This approach will ensure a more relevant conversation, moving the sales opportunity forward. Helping your sales team to close more deals and waste less time on poor fit leads.
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About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.
They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.
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