If you are reading this blog, you have hopefully already set up your ideal customer profile. It’s important to know the most fundamental attributes someone needs to have to be successful as your customer before taking steps to measure their sales readiness, which is what we cover in this blog article.
If you haven’t done that much, you can’t determine sales readiness! Don’t worry; we have you covered every step of the way. Learn how to create an ideal customer profile before you start diving into sales readiness.
Now that you have your ideal customer profile ready to go, or you just want to jump ahead and learn about how to measure sales readiness in your online leads (it is okay, we don’t judge), you are in the right place.
In this blog article, we will break down what sales readiness is and how to measure it. This will, in turn, help you understand which kind of leads you have and help you prioritize them.
What Does It Mean To ‘Measure Sales Readiness’?
Sales readiness, for online leads, is a measurement for how your prospects demonstrate that they’re ready, or not, to talk to sales. If you have a good way of measuring sales readiness, you will have more clarity and confidence in knowing who can be a good fit for your product or service and whether or not they are ready to speak to a sales rep.
Consider this: Someone appears to qualify as an excellent prospect for your service or product: they are in your area, have a problem that you can solve, possess the proper budget and have decision making power to do business with you. Sounds great, right? However, just because they seem like the perfect fit, they may very well not want to talk to a sales rep. This is where measuring sales readiness comes handy.
To measure sales readiness, it will take a combined effort between sales and marketing. As a team, you must determine the actions prospects take that correlate with purchasing your product or service. As much as possible, you should be leveraging data to assess and measure these actions.
Actions That Show Sales Readiness
The first step in measuring sales readiness for online leads is determining all of the different actions someone can take that portray their level of readiness. These actions can differ from company to company, but the landscape of digital marketing tends to keep these pretty similar across companies and industries.
We suggest breaking it out into broader categories, then outlining all of the actions someone can take in each group. Use the following breakdown as a starting point.
Interactions on your website
Prospects can interact with your website in a lot of different ways. Their behavior can tell you how interested they are in your product or service as well as how ready they are to purchase.
In terms of website interactions, you should be looking for actions like:
- Content downloads (eBooks, Guides, Case Studies, etc.)
- Number of page views
- Specific page views (Are they looking at your pricing page, or looking at your ‘About us’ page?)
- Forms submitted
- Live chats initiated
- Products added to cart
- Total times on your website
- Other activities
Email Engagement
If you are working on closing new deals, you are probably sending both marketing and sales emails. Measuring the interactions of these emails can be incredibly telling as far as how ready someone is to speak with sales.
Consider the following email interactions when measuring sales readiness:
- Email Opens
- Email Clicks
- Email Replies
- Did they skim or read the email?
- Unsubscribes/SPAM
- Other Activities
Social Media Engagement
If your company is active on social media, you can easily monitor specific social media metrics to determine the level of sales readiness for a prospect.
Here are some social media metrics to look at:
- Do they follow you on multiple channels?
- How often are people sharing your content?
- Likes
- Comments
- Direct Messages
- Other Activities
Event Attendance (Online and Offline)
If you hold events online like webinars, or you host meet-ups or attend industry shows you can measure certain activities during these events to help determine the sales readiness of a prospect.
Consider some event metrics to measure this:
- Register
- Attend
- Engage
- Other Activities
Prioritizing Actions
Now you have all of the activities that someone can take to portray their level of sales readiness, but not all activities are created equal. It is imperative to break these activities out based on their value to your sales team. This way, if someone shows the behavior of a high-value prospect, you know to reach out to them as soon as possible. However, if they are portraying the behavior of a prospect that is not ready to speak with sales, you know not to call them right away.
One way to break these activities and behaviors into different groups is the following:
- Hand Raisers - these people want to talk to sales
- Actively Investigating Your Product - these people are interested but may not be ready to speak to sales
- Passively Interested in Your Product - these people know who you are and what you offer but have shown no signs of looking to purchase
- Not Interested - these people have shown clear signs that they do not want to buy your product or service and you should not be contacting them
You may ask, “How do I know what is high value or not?” Great question! The truth is, it differs from company to company. Only your sales and marketing teams know what is most important for your company.
Here are examples for each group to get you started.
- Hand Raiser - someone initiated a live chat on your website and asked to speak with sales
- Actively Investigating Your Product - someone looked at your pricing page and read a blog about that same product or service
- Passively Interested in Your Product - someone followed you on social media or visited your home page
- Not Interested - someone unsubscribed from your emails
Putting It All Together: Implementing Sales Readiness
At this point, you know your ideal customer profile, you know the different actions they can take to portray sales readiness, and you have prioritized each activity, but now what?
You need to take all of these excellent criteria that you and your sales and marketing have put together and put them to work for your company. As a HubSpot Partner, digtialJ2 uses HubSpot to put all of this together, but really, you need to ability to track the actions that are important to you.
Make sure that you can track all of the actions from email engagement, to website activity to social media engagement. When prospects show activity, whether they are high value or low value, you can cross-reference the prospect to your ideal customer profile to determine if they are a good fit or bad fit. From there, if their actions are of high value (i.e., Hand-Raiser) and they are a good fit, call them!
You can automate all of this through a marketing automation tool like HubSpot. It can be a daunting task to do it manually, but it is possible.
Measuring sales readiness in your online leads is easiest when you can set up things like lead scoring, internal notifications, tasks for sales reps and email automation in a tool that stores all of this data.
Similar Posts:
