How to understand your customers’ intent to focus on the right leads
November 26, 2019, written by margaritaMedia owners continue to face new challenges. As the media landscape evolves, client demands change, and new technology enters the fray, it’s fundamental that media owners are able to do two things extremely well.
The first is to harness the power of this new technology and provide advertisers with access to market-leading solutions that help solve the challenges their business faces, assist with growing revenue and offer tangible metrics to measure performance. The second is an ability to sell these solutions.
Even if you do the first aspect well, there’ll be little chance of locking advertisers into the spend cycle with you if your sales team isn’t firing.
1. Qualifying Leads
Marketing and sales need to work in tandem, with prospects only being passed over to the sales team when they are ready. Importantly they need to be qualified through adequate collaboration between the two teams.
This is especially important when sales teams are constrained by head count but have ambitious targets to hit; a very real problem for many media owners.
An agile and streamlined process is essential, with a good lead qualification and scoring model taking in the following elements:
– Explicit criteria is information directly shared by the prospect to illustrate their level of interest
– Implicit criteria is how their level of interest can be deduced from their behaviour
– Demographic scoring is how they match up against your ideal customer
2. Stripped back sales process
Once you’ve qualified your lead and you begin selling to them, the process must be as efficient as possible with the right hands off approach to ensure your sales team can concentrate their time on selling. With a smaller sales team, every second counts. Your team can’t afford to waste time chasing cold leads or taking on unnecessary admin tasks.
Employing the right creative selling techniques is an essential first step to do this.
3. Simple metrics to understand the intent of your prospects
Alongside creative selling techniques, your team simply must understand the leads that are the most engaged and that have the highest chance of converting. Where many sales teams fall down at this stage is by bringing in too many unnecessary sales metrics.
Highly efficient and high-performing teams focus on simple metrics. Specifically they look at analysing the intent of their leads.
The Localstars Sales Automation Engine (SAE) provides you with a stripped back, efficient and straightforward sales process. Initially you have the creative selling techniques to bring your proposition to life for your prospects with essential visualisation. Secondly, you will also be tracking the metrics that matter to help you understand engagement and define the intent of your leads.
You will:Know how many times the proposed ad has been viewed by your prospect
– Understand how long they have spent viewing it
– Be notified when your client is looking at your ad proposal
This gives you the opportunity to rank your prospects in terms of their engagement and begin to target those with the best chance of converting. It’s straightforward and uncomplicated.
4. The difference between interest and intent
At this stage, it’s vital to focus on the difference between interest and intent.
A prospect that is interested may eventually convert, but they aren’t ready yet. For a user that has intent to convert, now is the time to engage with them to get them over the line.
When it comes to viewing your ad proposal, the first couple of views may suggest interest, especially if they are short views. Multiple views for longer durations will imply more of an intent to convert. As will numerous stakeholders from the same advertiser viewing the proposal. These are the leads to focus your energy on.
Additionally, you’ll have insight into the exact time your prospect is viewing their proposed ad, illustrating their intent to engage with it and when they’re ready to talk.
