When you think about your life in sales, do you ever equate it to something out of a superhero movie? Let’s go one step further and give you the proposition of picking one superpower that would define your character in the world of sales. What would be the most practical superpower that you could use to save the day? My guess is that you certainly wouldn’t want to be the sales version of Aquaman.
As you may have guessed from the heading, our pick for the most practical sales superpower is the ability to read minds, or more precisely, the ability to read our leads’ minds. Thanks to modern sales intelligence this is completely achievable within the dimensions of our very own reality. Those who already use intent-driven sales intelligence tools will agree with me on this one.
To understand this better, let us look at what exactly buying intent entails.
What is Buying Intent?
Behind any sale that has ever been made, there lies some level of passive or active intent demonstrated by buyers towards a product or service before any purchase is made. Gauging the buyer’s intent helps sales teams condense their efforts towards target audiences with a high propensity to buy their product or service within the exact window of opportunity. This helps overcome the “square pegs in round holes” dilemma of resource-intensive manual tasks such as cold calling and qualification calls.
Think about it, on a micro-level your constant interaction with technology means that the technology you use knows you better than those closest to you. On the macro level, the same technological footprints of millions of key decision-makers are being recorded every passing second. Now all that is left to be done is to filter this information into actionable buyer intent data to enhance your business’s functioning.
The filtering of billions of data points into buying intent data is by no means a manually feasible task. However, our article on buying intent will give you a better idea about the different buying intent indicators and how they can be harnessed by any sales or marketing team to achieve unassailable levels of productivity.
There are primarily two kinds of buying intent data:
- Active intent data: This is the intent data of buyers that are actively on the lookout for a solution to their business problem.
- Passive intent data: This is the data of passive buyers—buyers that have a business problem but aren’t yet aware of it, and hence, aren’t looking for solutions yet.
How is Buying Intent Data Collected?
Intent data is primarily detected by the way a user interacts with online content. The more a user interacts with your content, the more likely they are to be a potential customer. There are plenty of third-party vendors that provide this data. They collect this data by aggregating the users’ behavior online from a data-sharing co-op of thousands of B2B websites, media, etc.
Some types of information included in this data are:
- Number of customers
- Types of content consumed
- Page duration
- Bounce rate
- Amount of content interaction
A spike in these data points indicates a higher purchase intent. Salespeople can then rest assured that these leads are of higher purchase intent and target them.
Using Buying Intent to Read Your Leads’ Minds
Now let’s revisit the topic at hand. What would you consider as mind-reading? A simple answer to that would be the ability to recognize and understand the idiosyncrasies, thoughts and behavior of another being in real-time. As a salesperson, how would any of this recognition and understanding aid your cause? Well, it would provide you the ability to predict future behaviors and outcomes that would serve your purpose well.
The performance of a sales team is determined by its ability to reduce the amount of resources, time and effort taken to squeeze out the maximum number of desired sales outcomes. This is exactly where the role of reading minds — predicting behaviors and outcomes comes into play.
You may be wondering why I’m still trying to convince you that reading minds is more than just a pipe dream? Today we have tools that record and distill billions of data points into relevant actionable buying intent data that can be used by sales teams to predict behaviors and outcomes.
The best intent-based sales intelligence tools harness the power of psychographic, technographic, and firmographic segmentation. Further, these segmentation tools help capture and identify actionable buying intent signals such as digital footprints, psychographic insights, buying patterns, company funding and contract renewals.
Take a closer look at each of these buying intent signals and you’ll realize that they will help you read your leads’ minds — accurately predict their behaviors and outcomes without having to ever approach your leads. With a lead’s digital footprints, psychographic data, buying patterns and a variety of other intent signals, you are now also well equipped to design the perfect pitch that addresses exactly what your lead wants to hear to convince them to make that purchase decision.
To understand this better let us look at an example.
Buying Intent Example
Let’s take the stepwise example of a business that sells a subscription-based B2B tool called ABC.
Step 1: Prospecting
The first thing you’ll want to do is incorporate buying intent into your sales efforts. This will help shift the misspent focus prospecting your entire TAM towards high intent buyers that are willing to purchase your tool at this point in time. A few buying intent indicators (as perfected on Slintel’s platform) that can help you filter out unwarranted leads include:
- An expiring subscription to a competitor’s tool.
- Psychographic and technographic intent derived from digital footprints, technology adoption patterns, and customer journeys that indicate a possible need for your product.
- Technology stacks that integrate with your tool.
- Keyword intent that signifies an active interest in similar products or features.
- Firmographic indicators such as acquisitions, funding alerts, or new hires with a demonstrated history of using similar tools.
- Contact information and company profiles that lead you to the right decision-maker with the required authority to influence the purchase decision.
Using these buying intent signals will help you narrow down your sales efforts toward prospects that have a high propensity to make a purchase. It will also spare you the wasted resources and efforts put into cold calling and qualification calls that are too often accompanied by poor yields.
Step 2: Outreach
Now that you’ve narrowed down your prospecting towards high intent decision-makers, you’re going to have to reach out to them. With the contact information and buying intent indicators in your arsenal, you’re now equipped to create that perfect pitch that addresses everything your lead wants to hear. Here’s an example of how you can use buying intent signals to reach out to prospects with hyper-personalized, hyper-effective messaging that will lead to a ton of conversions:
Hey LEAD,
Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on XYZ’s recent funding.
With your company having grown x% in the last year the news comes as no surprise.
We noticed that you use our competitor DEF’s tool and we’re sure it played some role in helping you reach those numbers.
However, the journey that will follow your recent funding is a different ball game altogether that requires double your current growth.
As luck would have it, the expiry of your contract with DEF on MM/DD/YYYY couldn’t have come at a better time.
Apart from the fact that our tool ABC seamlessly integrates with your technology stack that includes TOOL A, TOOL B, AND TOOL C, upgrading to ABC would also help you double your growth rate to the necessary 2x%. This would put your business in an extremely favorable position in the years to come.
Your new hires Mr. AB and Ms. CD have had a good amount of prior experience using our tool and I’m sure they’d love to carry it over into their new roles as ROLE A and ROLE B at XYZ.
We also noticed that you had an issue with DEF’s FEATURE X, SERVICE Y, and PRICING Z, something our tool excels at.
As the Director of Sales at XYZ, we’d love for you to make us a part of your journey ahead.
You can check out our blog on how to approach buyers for a more outreach tips.
Step 3: Retention
Once you’ve utilized buying intent signals to reach out and convince a prospect to book a demo and make the purchase, it doesn’t end there. You’ve got to ensure your clients stay happy and aren’t looking elsewhere for a solution. Buying intent signals will help you retain your customers by ensuring you cater to their exact concerns. This in turn will help you reduce your business’s churn.
Now that we’ve understood how buying intent can transform your entire sales cycle, we have another proposition for you.
Why Slintel?
Expecting your sales team to read minds may make you seem like an absurdly over-demanding employer. This is why we have tools like Slintel to do the mind reading for you and slice the amount of effort, resources and time that goes into your sales processes while simultaneously improving your sales productivity and outcomes.
Buying intent is the new way forward for sales and marketing teams looking to add the cutting-edge that will help them compete with the best. Sales intelligence tools like Slintel will help you with everything from creating hyper-personalized emails and pitches that actually convert to using a variety of insights to help you identify, find, and target high-intent prospects.
With intent-driven sales intelligence tools, you have all the data that you need to close a lot more deals in a lot less time. Its fast-growing adoption means that businesses that don’t follow suit are going to find it hard to compete against competitors that use precision-driven intent-based sales intelligence tools like Slintel; to amass productivity rates that simply can’t be achieved otherwise.
