10 Buying Signals to Identify Prospects Who Are Sales-Ready
It is not hard to determine purchase intent in the world of digital sales. With proper tracking of behavioral patterns, you can find out which prospects are gesturing buying signals at any scale, whether you have 10 leads or 10,000 leads. In sales, timing is a crucial factor. Going in too soon or too late can significantly change the outcome. By identifying buying signals, sales can prioritize leads who are ready to buy and also perfectly time the sales process.
Defining Buying Signals
Buying signals are behavioral patterns that leads show while evaluating your products and services. With digital purchases and SAAS, these patterns can be easily identified by tracking website, emails and in-app interactions. The signals can also be traced by monitoring sales engagement. Is a lead very active with sales? Is he/she asking relevant questions?
Let’s take a look at these 10 defining signals that will help you find sales-ready leads:
1. Enquiry about pricing
If a prospect checks your pricing page or makes an enquiry and then continues to evaluate your product, it gives out a strong buying signal. It means that the prospect is receptive of your pricing and is likely to buy if they find your product fitting their requirements.
2. Booking a demo or signing up with free trial
Another signal is scheduling a demo or signing up for a free trial. While this is not a direct purchase intent, it rather implies that the lead is micro-committing to your product and is considering it. Think of it like the difference between seeing an interesting product on Amazon and adding to a wishlist. The addition to wishlist action can be considered as a more serious interest as compared to just taking a look.
3. Engagement with pre-sales emails
It is a good idea to keep track of how leads are engaging with your onboarding and pre-sales emails. Reading your emails and even responding to them or clicking links from them can be considered as good engagement and will work as a strong signal. Combine this metric with other data points to determine intent and follow through accordingly.
In the day and age of mass emails to the point where people now are desensitized to emails, good email engagement can be considered as a strong signal.
4. Account activation and completing the setup
For SAAS companies especially, this is a strong data point for product qualifying leads. A prospect who has completed all necessary onboarding steps and has set up his account properly is showing strong intent.
To start, identify key onboarding steps and set up a process to track when leads complete these steps. For an email marketing software for example, setting up your email with the software and creating a test campaign is a good indicator for initial interest.
5. Engagement frequency with the product
By far the strongest indicator of intent is product engagement. A prospect who has visited your website multiple times throughout days is far more likely to buy than someone who just visited your website one or two times. If you have a SAAS product, a lead using your product frequently is a very strong signal. Again, this is part of the product qualifying process.
6. Asking questions about migrating to your product
Serious buyers who are using competitor products would often ask you how you compare with competitors and how they can smoothly shift to using your product. If a lead has seen your pricing, tried your product and is now asking you about migration, he/she is a strong buying candidate.
7. Asking questions about policies, contract, and post-sales
Serious buyers, especially high-ticket customers who are interested in your product will often ask you hard questions about your policies, contract terms, etc. Questions can be:
- I have a question regarding something mentioned in your terms of services
- How do you handle customer data? Do you provide a non-disclosure agreement?
- How do you handle data security?
- Are there any additional charges?
- Do you provide a dedicated account manager?
- What if I have to upgrade at a later time?
- How do you handle cancelations?
If high-ticket leads are asking questions like these and have also tried out your product, chances are that they are in the consideration process and need these questions answered before they purchase.
8. Crossing free usage limits
Most SAAS companies offer some form of a free trial or a free account that have restrictions. Users who are crossing the free limits, are probably getting good value from the product and should benefit from an upgrade.
It is a good idea to create an automated process to identify these leads and promote account upgrades to them.
9. Interest in a particular use case/product/solution
People who are trying to solve specific problems are likely to buy when their problems are solved at the prices they are able to pay. If a lead is engaging with content related to a particular feature, product or use case, it implies strong intent. The data not only helps you track buying signals but also helps you target your nurturing content and give sales a headstart by providing them the data.
10. Consumption of high-value content
Engaging with some content types send out clear buying signals. These are:
- Support content
- Webinar
- Case studies
- Guides
- Implementation tutorials
Only those who are seriously considering your product will engage deeply with your high-value resources. Using website tracking and page view duration data, these buyers can be identified.
Look out for these 10 buying signals to prioritize high probability deals and sell efficiently.
Implementing strategy with Salespanel at any scale
We discussed all the buying signals available but the question that arises is: how can you detect these signals and filter out high intent leads on a scale? If you have 100 leads a month or 1000 leads a month or more, you certainly cannot keep an eye on everyone all the time. This is where a lead tracking and qualification software comes into place.
The way Salespanel works is that it automatically captures leads from all of your channels like forms, live chat, email campaigns, etc. and tracks them in real-time. Now, you can set up a lead qualification process that looks for desired behavioral patterns and brings out high intent leads. The most efficient feature to use here would be lead scoring. With lead scoring, you can set up rules for every buying signal that is suitable for you. In that way, instead of relying on one buying signal, you can use a set of signals to strengthen your process and avoid false positives. Salespanel also alerts your sales team in real-time, sends them all relevant lead data and creates deals on your CRM to help close these deals.
To let Salespanel take care of all of your lead identification, tracking and qualification needs, start your free trial today.
Sell more, understand your customers’ journey for free!
Sales and Marketing teams spend millions of dollars to bring visitors to your website. But do you track your customer’s journey? Do you know who buys and why?
Around 8% of your website traffic will sign up on your lead forms. What happens to the other 92% of your traffic? Can you identify your visiting accounts? Can you engage and retarget your qualified visitors even if they are not identified?
