To make a sale, we are required to explore our prospects pain; to find said pain, our prospects are drawn into a maze of complex questions. An effective sales professional arms themselves with this information, looking to accurately tailor their offering to the needs of a certain prospect. If this information is captured, recorded and implemented effectively it can become an incredibly powerful asset, with many applications throughout an entire business.

But… what if we could gain a better understanding and capture more information about our leads or prospects that extends beyond traditional questioning featured during the sales process?

Every marketing activity represents a question directed towards your audience. Marketing emails, Linkedin posts, Facebook ads constantly ask the general question: “Are you interested in what we have displayed”.

Each open, click, comment, share or enquiry delivers important information regarding the journey of your lead or prospect. It provides indications around the topic of their interests, the length and extent of their engagement and likelihood of conversion.

Many businesses continue to fuel the sales and marketing divide, by restricting the flow of useful information gained throughout the customer journey. This occurs for a range of reasons including a lack of infrastructure or awareness.

Justify Marketing Expenditure

The fundamental reason for spending money on marketing is to gain more in return.

The concept of capturing data and using it to provide a higher quality customer journey adds substantial value to the activities conducted by marketing personnel. Therefore, marketing efforts can be measured through more than client acquisition, but also the information gained on leads and prospects.

No, data is not quite literally money, but when used in the right way, it represents one of the most effective means of improving the bottom line in your organisation. Buyer behaviours are changing swiftly across many industries, requiring organisations to react. Tracking buyer behaviour during their journey does more than just indicate their interests but also can be used to predict the behaviours of future clients.

Automate, Automate… Don’t Automate

While designing a customer journey, there are certain touch points we want a lead or prospect to discover at specific times. Often the points we ‘think’ a prospect should visit, are not the same as what they do.

Marketing strategy and planning is great at establishing a baseline, yet capturing hard data on your user’s experience is where conversion rates extend beyond what was thought as previously possible. Once an understanding of this ‘ideal journey’ is developed the process can be automated to some extent, saving further time and money.

There are no bigger believers in marketing automaton than us, however many businesses take it too far leading to a scattergun approach of irrelevant content.

Be careful with this one.

Don’t be a Creep...

Although understanding the movements of each lead and prospect is powerful, this information must be applied delicately.

Many businesses using this approach fall victim to the “Bull in a China Shop” mentality, where salespeople come armed with this newfound information and hunt down prospects based on their actions, behaviours and engagement in a rather aggressive fashion.

Our experience at Solvi Solutions has denoted the importance of a softer approach. The indications of interest provide a benefit for both yourself and the prospect.

The buyer benefits from, increased specificity, increased relevance, the reduced time investment in the sales process and a generally better experience.

Using Data Moving forward...

Data and information about your leads and prospects can be valuable in many contexts and applications. However, implementing such systems without disrupting the effectiveness of current processes can be rather daunting.

Most modern CRMs feature the flexibility needed to act as a common platform, used to capture and record lead and prospect actions as they make their way through the customer journey.

If you have any further questions on how you can capture and utilise such information within your existing sales and marketing infrastructure, content Solvi Solutions for a chat.

So what next?

The use of technology in sales continues to sit in an upward trend. Sales professionals can witness a range of benefits after employing such processes. Firstly, significant time savings can occur allowing employees to focus on what really matters. Secondly, improved personalisation and content relevancy lead to significantly higher conversion rates. Finally, the provision of this data act to EMPOWER your sales and marketing personnel to make informed decisions based on facts… not speculation.

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