Marketing
The More You Know: Leads
By Flying Hippo
Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could read the minds of your leads?
If you knew what product they were interested in, what emails they opened and which they ignored, and how often they have visited your website, you could probably close a deal quicker. Well, you can know all of this information and more!
If you’re in sales, you’re probably thinking “pinch me, I’m dreaming.”
It’s not a dream. It’s a very real possibility for your sales team when you integrate Hubspot as your inbound marketing platform. Hubspot allows you to do a slew of awesome inbound-y things, from creating contact lists to landing pages and managing your gated content. It sounds a bit creepy, but you can also watch what your contacts are doing on your website. You can see what pages they have visited, what they’ve downloaded and more.
How is this all possible? It all starts when a visitor becomes an official contact in your database. To become a contact, a visitor must provide their email address in exchange for an offer. This could be as simple as subscribing to your blog, or downloading a piece of gated content. Whatever they interact with, as long as you have their email address, they become a contact. Bingo! Now that they’ve provided their email address, you can watch their every move. Ok, maybe not every move. That’s Sting level of creepy. But, once they become a contact in your database, they are much easier to keep track of.
Lead Scoring
What if there was a way to measure how interested your lead was, like a numerical designation that let you know that someone needed a call right now? You’ll have to pinch yourself again because it’s not a dream.
In Hubspot there is a function called lead scoring. This system allows us to assign a value to each individual contact based on the information they have given you while being engaged with your website, social media, emails and gated pieces. You can either use automatic (predictive) lead scoring by using industry standards to calculate the score, or you could manually set the values that you think are important for your business.
There are a ton of elements that can go into building a lead score. When you build a lead score, you set a numerical value that indicates a hot lead. Let’s say you set your sales level lead at 20. This means that the contact has done the actions that award them value to reach that number.
To get this score, you can set positive and negative attributes. For example, the number of emails opened or clicked, social media clicks, and web page visits could all fall into your positive attributes area that earn each contact a couple points every time they complete that action. Social clicks can show some level of engagement, but clicking a link in an email shows that a contact is even more interested. When we build lead scoring systems, we always take this into account and weight contacts with email clicks to receive more points.
We highly recommend using some sort of marketing automation system for your inbound marketing efforts.
When it comes to your leads, the more you know, the better.
