Lead Intelligence

What is Lead Intelligence?

Lead intelligence is the information gathered by a company about a potential client, or a lead, that helps you eventually convert that client into a final sale. In many cases, this information is collected over time from the lead’s visits to a company website, or from filled contact forms, allowing the sales team to better understand the lead before attempting to sell a product or service.

B2B lead intelligence, or business-to-business lead intelligence, requires a particular savvy because the goal is to entice prospective clients into volunteering key information about themselves, their company, and the prospect’s position in that company. In the end, lead intelligence is about identifying your prospect’s most compelling needs and matching that need with your most effective solution.

The Three Stages of Lead Intelligence

There are three stages to discovering qualified B2B leads employed by successful lead-management teams. These three stages are on-site lead intelligence, shared lead intelligence, and post-visit lead intelligence.

1. On-site lead intelligence: On-site lead intelligence refers to the intelligence collected from a lead’s time spent on the company website. This may include the pages your lead has visited, articles that have been read, the amount of time spent on specific pages, or the terms someone searched for on the website. The idea is that after leads interact with specific content and shows interest in a particular product, those leads become qualified leads. A qualified lead could represent a likely sale, especially when a sales team understands the nature of their leads’ interest before initiating first contact.
2. Shared lead intelligence: Shared lead intelligence is qualified lead intelligence that leads volunteer while on a website, such as personal information entered into a contact form, or company contact information offered in exchange for free content (like an ebook). The most important part of shared lead intelligence is to ensure the questions on contact forms are extremely useful and concise. B2B companies need to ask questions that will be most helpful in making a sale. The answers to contact form questions can be the key to better understanding a lead and, in turn, selling a product.
3. Post-visit lead intelligence: Post-visit lead intelligence is information gleaned from social media websites that can give vital clues to the personality and expectations of leads and their companies. Using this information, sales teams may be able to start informal conversations about shared interests to gain trust before talking about a product or service. Post-visit lead intelligence will usually take a good amount of time to put together, but it is invaluable as qualifying lead intelligence.

 

Lead intelligence solutions are not universal; however, the three stages above provide a solid groundwork of usable information that is much more likely to result in a finished sale than only using one of the three stages, or possibly not using any lead intelligence systems at all.

Top Ways to Nurture Leads with Lead Intelligence

Lead intelligence companies, in order to guide leads into a sales funnel, use lead intelligence tools. Most of these tools are fairly basic, but they need to be employed and require consistent tracking to make any lasting impact on lead quality.

The first is automated intelligence tactics on a company website. Websites should have smart automated features that give sales teams all of the information talked about earlier in the first stage of lead intelligence. If lead intelligence reports from your own website cannot tell you who is spending time on your site and where they are spending it, you need to get some software that can. This will be discussed more in a subsequent post on website intelligence.

The next tool is valuable, high-quality content. Having good content on a website will not only give initial leads something to pique their interests when they first click on your site, but good content will also provide resources that a sales team can use to keep leads interested in a product during the nurturing process. Perhaps, using on-site lead intelligence, a team member could suggest other articles that would interest a lead based on what he or she is viewing.

Another seemingly obvious way to nurture leads is to post contact information in an easily accessible place on your website. It might also be beneficial to add personal facts about the company or employees that would make a lead feel more comfortable contacting you.

Email marketing is also a worthy lead nurturing effort. Lead intelligence analyst services and lead generation services such as Eloqua can help to target the right leads to email for best results. Be sure to use email marketing to nurture those leads that you have collected from shared lead intelligence. They are the ones who have already expressed interest in your products.

Managing Leads

After all this effort toward lead intelligence and nurturing leads, it is essential not to let any of that information get lost between the marketing and sales teams. A few easy ways to manage leads and keep track of amassed information are:

• Using spread sheets, shared documents, or paperwork for lead intelligence reporting,
• Keeping detailed records of the three stages of lead intelligence for each lead,
• Managing team relations to make sure teams have open communication to receive more information if needed.

 

If this all sounds like too much work for your company to keep track of, consider hiring a sales lead tracking team or B2B lead intelligence companies that can carry the burden for you.

Sprint Marketing Boosts Your Lead Intelligence and Increases Web Leads. Contact a Sprint Marketing Expert About Your Own Free Leads Analysis

Sprint Marketing is experienced in lead intelligence tracking and data collection, providing you with an unprecedented combination of sales intelligence, website intelligence and campaign intelligence to give you the marketing intelligence you need. Contact a Sprint Marketing expert about your own free leads analysis to see how we can improve your lead intelligence.