Anyone who's ever gotten a sales email or call full of typical sales jargon knows exactly how much of a turnoff that can be.
Not only do prospects not respond to questions if those questions are wildly generic, but they also don't really want to meet reps face to face — 88% aren't interested, according to HubSpot. And without a face-to-face meeting, reps aren't likely to get information that helps them create relevant questions and provide relevant content to their prospects.
What can your reps do?
Get familiar with their prospect through lead intelligence.
What is Lead Intelligence and How Can Reps Use It?
Think of lead intelligence as digital body language. In outside sales, reps who do get in-person meetings could gauge interest via analysis of buying signals. If the prospect had a calculator at their fingertips, you might feel comfortable getting down and dirty with numbers, for instance. Reading digital body language is the inside sales version of sitting across the table from someone and responding to their actions and environment — in other words, their signals.
There are two primary arenas for viewing this language: The "lead scoring" view in Salesforce or the "lead intelligence" view in HubSpot. Both provide useful data, but HubSpot offers an excellent UI.
Using Salesforce, viewing lead intelligence is doable, but not so friendly. If you're using Visualforce, your reps can view enrollment in workflows. But it's important to consider how good your website is at keeping track of these things and relaying the information to the sales rep accurately. If a pageview shows up in the contact record, will your salesperson really be able to gain insight? Can they understand what the prospect was doing? Strict naming conventions can help.
In HubSpot, you can nicely see all of the contact history because your CRM is fully integrated with your marketing tools. You could learn, based on the page your prospect landed on, what challenges they might be facing. For example, if the first page they hit is titled "What is Inbound Sales?" that's a good tip off your prospect might be experiencing an Inbound sales challenge.
Knowing this information allows your reps to follow the buyer's journey and consider, prior to the call, the content type that will further that journey. (If the prospect's first action is bottom of the funnel, your reps will want to map to the decision stage and queue up info about the most relevant solution, product or service your company provides.)
Going into the discovery call, your reps will have already made some great discoveries and will be prepared to ask the right questions. A careful read of digital body language gives your reps an advantage as they enter that conversation.
It's like observing a person from far away and being able to tell exactly what they're interested in, before attempting to break the ice.
Though some reps still read and prep for a while before speaking with a prospect, reading lead intelligence in HubSpot allows them to move more quickly to create a personal, helpful experience that will result in a higher win rate. Marketing can still be involved, too: it's important that they're providing additional content that will help discover what that prospect wants to engage with.
Doing all of this without HubSpot, though, can be a significant challenge. The distinct "digital body language" advantage comes from the fact that your website, blog, calls-to-action, forms and the visitor's contact record are housed on the same platform. Everything is there for your reps to view, or even watch in real-time, whenever they need to. Interactions with blog posts, landing pages, emails, site pages, presentation decks you send along — all of it sits right there in the contact record.
Bottom line? Reading digital body language is a must in the world of inside sales. And doing so in a meaningful, actionable way requires an integrated, full-funnel platform.
Tag(s):
Sales
