Have you ever tried to sell your product or service to a total stranger? 

How did that go? 

There is no doubt that knowing information about potential customers increases your chances of closing a deal. 

So if that’s what you want, lead intelligence is what you need. 

A survey conducted by Databox showed that almost 70% of marketers and salespeople said that lead intelligence is a very effective tool in prospecting new customers. 

Before diving into what tools to use and what to do with the information gathered, let’s take a step back to define what lead intelligence is and why it’s important.

What’s the Difference Between Lead Generation & Lead Intelligence

In marketing, we often see lead generation as an isolated strategy that focuses on generating big lead numbers, with far more focus on quantity than quality. List buying services come to mind. 

The result? Your sales team will focus their efforts on unqualified leads that will likely not convert. 

But lead intelligence is different. 

Lead intelligence is the practice of information about prospects and using this data to become more knowledgeable about leads before qualifying and nurturing them. This doesn’t have to be done by hand. It can also be done by way of software too.

Why Is Lead Intelligence Important

Leveraging lead intelligence is important from both the end-user perspective and your business perspective.

Think about it – when you have accurate information about your prospects and customers, you’re able to send them information about what they’re genuinely interested in through the right channels and at the right time. This way, they receive personalized communications about what matters to them when they are more likely to be interested in it.

From a business standpoint, you’ll be able to focus your efforts on the hottest leads while nurturing cooler ones within the sales funnel. 

It’s a win-win situation.

The goal is to put prospects first and capture as much data about them to shorten the sales cycle and, ultimately, close more deals.

Lead Intelligence Tools For Success

Lead intelligence software make it possible for you to collect and manage accurate customer information in one location. Lead capture, sorting, labeling, and scoring are all features available within most lead intelligence software.

As you can imagine, there are endless lead intelligence and lead generation tools out there, and you need to do your research to find which ones might be best based on your needs. 

Here are two that have worked well for our B2B clients. 

Site-Insights 

Did you know that 97% of website visitors leave your website without converting? 

Site-Insights can help you identify these unknown visitors by business name by using reverse IP lookup. Though the code is complex, what you see is quite simple. When a visitor hits your website, it matches the IP address against a record in its database. And it does it almost instantly.

From there, it gives you information about that business – company size, industry, location, etc – as well as it tells you how they found you, what pages they visited, and how long they spent there.

Site-Insights is a  great tool to prioritize and engage with prospects who already know who you are and have directly expressed interest in your products or services.

But it’s not enough to have this intelligence. You have to do something with it!

There are three main use cases for this particular software.

First, it can be used to validate your marketing efforts. If you run a LinkedIn campaign or spend money on Google PPC ads, you can monitor the traffic that was generated from those efforts and identify the quality of those businesses. This helps tell you if your investment and work have been worthwhile.

Second,  the tool can tap into the contact information of folks from those visiting companies. You can then have your sales team prepare direct outreach – through email, phone, or LinkedIn, for example. The messages can and should be tailored based on what they’ve engaged with on your website. 

Third, Site-Insights isn’t just beneficial for new leads. You can also set it up to receive alerts when existing customers re-visit your website. This can be specific to what pages they viewed or how long they spent on the site. By understanding this, you can improve your customer support efforts or enable your account executives to uncover opportunities for upsells and cross-sells. 

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a powerful tool that has a lot to offer as well. 

Like Site-Insights, it helps you track your website visitors. But its most popular feature is its ability to search for specific companies and contacts. This helps sales teams with their prospecting research and saves them a ton of time when making dials or sending emails.

An additional feature is its intent data tool. This allows you to see which buyers are interested in a particular solution within the next 30 days. It does this by looking at buying signals expressed through their online behavior as well as the third-party ads that are targeting that particular user. 

We will get into more details about ZoomInfo in our next article about Account-Based Marketing, so make sure not to miss it!

How To Leverage Lead Intelligence

Let’s say you’ve chosen your tool(s) and have started gathering data about leads. 

Now what? 

What we’ve seen at Site-Seeker is that B2B companies are really focused on how to get information, but they don’t have a plan on what to do AFTER they’ve gathered it. 

While your salespeople build relationships with hot prospects and try to have them sign deals, your marketing team should focus on nurturing leads that just aren’t yet ready to buy. Here’s how. 

• Qualify 

Having a strategy to qualify leads is important for any business.

When you integrate tools like Site-Insights with your CRM, you need to have a plan in place to help you segment and organize your qualified contacts and leads. 

First, you need to figure out what makes a company qualified.  This is the time to think about what your ideal customer looks like. Are they in a specific industry? Geographical area? Do they offer a particular product or service? Are they visiting specific pages of your website? 

With tools like Site-Insights, you’d be able to include (or exclude) businesses that don’t fit your criteria. 

Here’s an example.  Visitors on your careers page are not qualified as buyers. Chances are they visited your website to join your team. It might be helpful to HR, but not for sales. If this is the case, you should exclude them from your program. Focus on the ones who visit product pages instead. 

Segmenting qualified leads helps you break your contacts into smaller lists based on visitors’ actions, location, business type, and more. It, therefore, allows you to communicate with them with more compelling and targeted messages. 

That’s when nurturing comes into the picture.

• Nurture

Now the fun part begins! 

Providing leads with relevant, personalized messages is going to make a big difference. Ultimately, you could shorten your sales cycle while also improving your conversion rates.

Once contacts are segmented and organized, you’ll know what services or products your leads care about most, and you’ll be able to talk to them in the most effective way. 

If you have a content marketing plan, this is the time to leverage it to maximize the performance of your outbound communications. 

For example, if you knew a visitor spent quite some time exploring a specific product on your website, you could email them with a side-by-side comparison PDF of that product vs. a competitor’s (and how yours stands on top).

 Did you know that 69% of prospects find that their business needs are not met on the first call? You should focus on your nurturing efforts to satisfy the needs of your buyers as best as you can. 

How Lead Intelligence & Lead Generation Together Can Produce A Positive ROI

It takes time (and could be a bit intimidating) to learn a new tool while creating an effective marketing strategy that maximizes sales and revenue.

At Site-Seeker, we’ve empowered many clients by helping them get the most out of these tools within their digital marketing strategies. 

One particular B2B client heavily relies on a number of lead generation tactics – both outbound and inbound. When they learned of Site-Insights, they decided to leverage it not only to identify new leads but also to improve their customer experience and monitor the results of their marketing efforts.

After installing Site-Insights, we identified the categories of visitors coming to the site, what criteria would qualify them as leads, the target areas, and what the sales process would look like after leads were labeled. 

This primarily included direct sales outreach via email and phone, with hot leads being contacted within an hour of their website visits.

Within the first three months, the team closed a $100,000+ deal as a direct result of the tracking software and the efforts they put in place. That single deal generated 7x ROI on the investment. 

Conclusion

Lead intelligence should be one piece of your digital marketing strategy. 

Collecting information about leads will give you a significant advantage in understanding your prospects’ pain points, interests, and needs. Armed with that info, you can be much more tailored and personalized when you make contact. This will make it easier for you to build relationships with them and ultimately make sales. If you’re ready to automate your marketing processes, shorten your sales cycles, and close more deals, reach out to our team. We’d be more than happy to help you figure out what tools would best meet your needs and help you reach your unique business goals.

What Is “Hooked On Marketing With Corinne And Carlotta?”

Hooked On Marketing With Corinne And Carlotta is a 4-episode video series about how to enhance your business’s digital presence through digital marketing. 

This series aims to provide you with an in-depth understanding of 4 different marketing strategies and tools that are available today and how they can help your business grow its online presence. These include Search Engine Optimization, Google Ads, Lead Intelligence, and Account-Based Marketing. 

Each episode covers tools for success, real-world applications, success stories, and actionable items you can start implementing today. 

Hooked On Marketing is led by Carlotta Bartolini and Corinne Dunston, Account Managers and Digital Marketing Specialists at Site-Seeker. They are accompanied by Coco, their monkey mascot.