Why Behavioral data matters for Lead Qualification

Published by Nilangan Ray on August 10, 2019

Lead qualification is an important step for B2B companies to turn generated raw leads into qualified prospects. According to a research conducted by SpearMarketing, more than 65% of surveyed companies use both demographic and behavioral lead scoring. However, there are still many businesses who don’t use any qualification system at all. More than 35% of them don’t have a lead degradation system based on behavior. Quite a large number of businesses are relying on profile-based qualification only and completely disregarding lead behavior.

The Basics

Data attributes needed to qualify a lead:

Lead profile information: A lead’s firmographic and demographic information is used to find out if a lead is a good fit for the product/service. The data used for qualification include job role, company size, industry segment, company location, etc. Leads who match with the Ideal Customer Profile of a business are deemed product fit.

Behavioral Information: How a lead engages with product and content is used to determine if a lead is interested in the product. Qualifiers include specialized page visits, material downloads, email opens, and other behavioral triggers. Undesired lead behavior can also be used to negatively score a lead.

A lead scoring framework that includes both profile and behavior data into consideration will bring out the most qualified leads.

Why use behavioral data to qualify leads?

A lead can be a perfect fit for you but you also need to be a perfect fit for their business for them to buy from you. How interested is a lead in your product or service? Is it something they really want or are they just looking around? Behavioral data is used to find answers to these questions and find out if a lead is ready to buy. It is important to understand what lead behavior represents. If somebody is checking out your Product page, he might be interested. If someone is reading content related to a use case of your product, it probably means that the lead is trying to solve a specific problem. If a lead checks out your pricing and then decides to sign up for the product trial, he has some buying intent. If a lead is regularly using your product and integrating it to his existing framework, chances are he is seriously considering you. All of these behavior attributes are used to identify sales-ready prospects.

Use behavior data to personalize a lead’s buying experience

Apart from lead scoring, lead behavior also helps you personalize content and messages that you serve to them. All leads with buying intent have a job that they are trying to get done. Once you understand their job from their behavior and firmographic data, you can serve the right content to them. The entire process can be automated. For example, a small startup and an Enterprise company may have different use cases and buying procedures. Showing the same content to everyone won’t be as effective. If a lead is interested in a particular feature, you will show them content to educate them about the feature. This will improve your conversion rates and overall increase your ROI.

Behavioral data for Salespeople

Behavioral data is what many modern-day salespeople use to understand a lead’s motivation and track them. Sure, you can get information from a call but won’t it be better if you knew what a lead exactly wants even before the conversation starts? Also, salespeople use visitor activity information like email opens and webpage visits to know how sales-ready a lead is. When a lead is hot, they can strike the sales conversation to close the deal. When a lead is going cold, he/she can be sent for nurturing.

It is pretty evident by now that lead behavior data empowers your sales framework from the moment a lead enters your funnel. Use lead firmographic and behavioral data to find qualified leads, personalize content and improve the overall selling process of your business.