This detailed B2B marketing guide suggests that technology aided prospecting programs have a single goal - delivering interested, qualified leads to sales in real time. The guide provides a series of steps needed to ensure success in developing effective lead scoring, appropriate, engaging content for each step in the sales cycle and proven techniques for creating and optimizing B2B lead nurturing programs.
Importantly, the guide suggests that there are a number of creative ways to learn about your leads through the behaviors they demonstrate. The main component for this evaluation is likely to be a corporate website, and assigning importance to specific pages. Some pages will be more important than others in gauging leads - an example of this is the career or employment page on a website - visitors to this page are unlikely to be potential customers.
Another page view issue to address is a single-page visit vs. a multi-page visit. Leads that make the effort to visit more than one page are either showing you their interest is more than fleeting, or they're showing you they can't find what they're looking for. This said, it's worth increasing the lead's score for a multi-page visit.
Related to this is the need to rate web page importance - the pages of your website play differing roles in the buying process. Obviously, leads who spend time on the solution and product pages of your website have a higher degree of buying interest than those who visit your "About Us" page.
Drip nurturing assets should also be ranked higher than other pages. This is because when this content is accessed and viewed, it's further proof of the lead's interest and engagement with your company. If it's at all possible to increase the lead's score when they view a group of content related to the same issue, this could make the difference between knowing just how interested a lead is in time to beat your competitors into the sales conversation. A lead who has viewed a combination of educational articles, solution briefs and customer stories all related to solving the same problem has provided a lot of information about themselves.
Over time, you'll gain the intelligence to learn which pages leads visit during differing stages of their buying process. Marketers can also learn which content is effective as well as which content is missing the mark. When you rate the importance of your web pages, group them by priority for your first iteration of scoring. Product, solution and customer stories rate more highly than company pages, for example. This exercise of rating the importance of your web pages may also pinpoint gaps in your content that could be addressed for greater lead engagement.
In this context, Prospectvision's services provide a direct adjunct - directly addressing the realization that while visitor reporting provided statistics on how and when a website was used, there was nothing available to give any indication of who these visitors were and what they were interested in. The unique Behavioral Inference Engine (BIE) offered by Prospectvision provides a powerful service for sales and marketing managers alike - delivering its customers with a new list of leads every week by analyzing the behavior of visitors to their websites.
The guide concludes by suggesting that marketing automation plays an important role as the infrastructure that enables your nurturing program execution. Lead Scoring working in synch with content that drives buying process progression and empowered sales handoffs will prove that marketing plays an increasingly valuable role in contributing to downstream revenues.
Even better, by proactively improving technology aided prospecting programs over time in response to lead behaviors, the results will continue to improve. The better the quality of the leads transitioned into sales activities, the more willing salespeople will be to accept marketing's help. That alignment of resources can make a huge impact on a company's ability to acquire new customers and sell more to the customers they already have.
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