Nothing kills business like a trashy lead qualification process. And the difference between life and death can be as simple as using the right buying signals.
Buying intent is a fairly broad and abstract term for the wide variety of signals and attributes used to score leads. It is therefore important to learn about the different shapes and sizes it comes in. Especially when you’re putting together a lead qualification process that is expected to constantly churn out customers.
Here are 6 key buying signals that will help you put worthy leads on the map.
6 Buying Signals to Prioritise Your Best Prospects
1. Budgetary Spend
On a macroscopic level, an organization’s budgetary spend within a particular sector can reveal a lot about their buying behavior.
Let’s say a business spent a vast portion of their budget on hiring more sales reps, purchasing sales tools, and conducting sales training sessions. Now, if you’re a business that deals in sales products or services, choosing to target such a company wouldn’t even require finger math. An organization’s budgetary spend in your sector indicates a greater willingness to explore your product’s proposition.
However, a business’s budgetary spend is information that is almost always confidential. Which means obtaining such data can lean towards being near impossible.
The Solution
One good way to do this would be to check out a prospect’s recent job listings related to your domain. Doing so allows you to see what products, services, skills, and tools they are hiring for. This would still be a small part of the big picture, yet a great place to begin.
But to scale this manually will be quite the burden.
There is a solution to make this a lot easier and infinitely more scalable. However, you’ll have to read till the end to find out how.
2. Ecosystem Spend
Zooming into prospects’ ecosystems associated with your product allows you to further appropriate their intent to buy. As opposed to a more macroscopic sectoral budgetary spend, this doubles down as a more granular variable.
Related products, services, tools, skills, and other facets within associated ecosystems can indicate a more concrete intent to buy.
For example, if you sell a sales intelligence tool like Slintel, you’ll want to find prospective businesses that already use other tools within the SaaS sales and/or sales intelligence ecosystems.
Let’s take a business that currently uses a CRM, a sales engagement tool, a conversation intelligence tool, and a few other tools that integrate with your product. Such a business would be a lot more open to consider buying a product like yours considering they already have the ecosystem to integrate your tool.
The Solution
The job listings hack also works for understanding prospects’ ecosystem spends. In addition, you could also scour social platforms and communities. With the right keywords, you can find prospects that have purchased products and services from ecosystems relevant to yours. Again, doing all of this manually can only get you so far.
Now that we have a prospect that spends a big portion of their budget within your product’s sector, and uses quite a few tools in your ecosystem, you sure have a keeper.
Or, do you?
3. Psychographics
Psychographics can be absolutely any attribute pertaining to any employee within the workforce that might signal even a smidge of intent to buy. The key here is keywords. Keywords pertaining to themes, use cases and problems solved by your product can indicate some of the strongest intent to buy.
These could be anything as discreet as locating keywords within an employee’s resume that indicates they’ve used your product, your competitors product, or products within your ecosystem or sector.
Or it could be something as blatant as a post whining about your competitor’s product on a social platform. Now do this for every relevant employee within a prospective business.
The point is that the possibilities with psychographics are seemingly infinite. And infinite and manual don’t quite bode well together.
The Solution
Trying to manually understand the psychographic makeup of an organization’s workforce just to push a lead through can be downright deemed employer harassment. And god forbid if it’s a Monday. And where the hell are you going to find the resumes of such individuals?
There is but one efficient way to do this manually. This involves searching for mentions of your competitors on social platforms. For example, you could jump onto LinkedIn’s search and use appropriate keywords and filters –
Voila, you have found a worthy prospect!
Do bear in mind that this is a hack, not a scalable solution.
But worry not, for there is a scalable solution for almost everything in the roaring 2020s. Yet it’s one that you’ll have to wait for till the end of this blog.
So, now we have a prospect that spends a big portion of their budget within your product’s sector. They also use quite a few tools in your ecosystem. AND now a sizable number of their employees have a clear need for your product and/or have already used a product like yours previously.
Madness, I tell you!
4. Upcoming Contract Renewals
Sounds like blackmagic, doesn’t it?
OF COURSE you can find your competitors’ customers. And of course you can find your competitors’ customers with contracts that are about to expire. All of this so you can slip in just when they’re about to renew, and convince them to switch to your product instead.
Just kidding, you’ll want to get to them at least a good six months before they’re due for renewal. And sometimes even before that.
The Solution
Social searches to the rescue again! There is the off-chance that you can use the right keywords and filters on social search to identify such a prospect. One that is outwardly expressing their need for a change from your competitors’ product.
But there’s an infinitely more powerful ways to do this, for which you’ll have to read till the end. Don’t worry, we’re almost there.
5. Fundings, Mergers and Acquisitions
Believe it or not, but companies that just got funded, acquired or merged have an increased spending power. And that means they might just want to spend all their money on a product like yours!
The Solution
Contrastingly, this one is as simple as typing “recently funded companies” onto your Google search but a thousand times more efficient. Change “funded” to “acquire” or “merged” whenever necessary, and there’s your new outbound prospecting motion.
6. Firmographics
Firmographic indicators help you identify companies within your ICP that may have an inherent need for your product. TAM, financials, and number of employees are a few firmographic indicators that can help you identify passive leads.
For instance, a company within your TAM that had a great year, and is expanding their workforce will likely be a great prospect to target.
The Solution
Look at your existing customer list and build out an ideal buyer persona. You can then seek out all other prospects that fit the persona to see if your product can help them too.
Additionally, you can pick out the ones that are performing particularly well. This can be done using revenue, P&L and other financial indicators that are just a Google-search away.
Now that we went through 6 of the most comprehensive and sophisticated buying signals, here’s your worthy ending.
Automation!
Beep-beep-boop. There’s no two ways about it—the future is here. So if you don’t want to end up selling stone-age style, it’s time you get onboard the RevTech Revolution.
Using a sales intelligence tool like Slintel allows you to automate the entire process of scoring and prioritizing leads against all the aforementioned indicators, and then some. And that’s just scraping the surface of the platform.
But if I were to keep explaining Slintel using words, it wouldn’t do justice. Which is why you need to get yourself on a demo ASAP!
