Instinct and empathy are good qualities in a sales agent, but the intuitive approach alone is not enough anymore to win Clients and exceed sales targets. You need to get factual data from prospects in order to understand what the buying signal is to move them into the Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) stage and then close the deal.
So, what are the top buying signals for you to consider a prospect as an SQL?
Downloads or Form Submissions
Set up a rule to notify the sales team whenever sales-driven content is downloaded or a form is completed.
Assigning Leads to Your Sales Team for New Contacts
Automatically assign leads to certain team members based on factors like: form, page view, chatflow engagement, etc.
Abandoned Cart
Depending on your eCommerce platform you can set a rule to notify you and perform presets when someone abandons their cart or payment.
According to SaleCycle, 48% of abandoned cart emails are opened, leading to an increase in sales.
Nurturing Prospects
66% of buyers indicate that “consistent and relevant communication provided by both sales and marketing organisations” is a key influence in choosing a solution provider (Genius.com).
This is backed up by the marketing Rule of Seven, which states that it takes an average of seven interactions with your brand before a purchase takes place.
But it is not enough to simply generate and send out masses of emails to all your prospects. “Relevant communication” means it is related to the product or service area the prospect is considering and is appropriate to where the prospect is in the buying journey. You can further refine and personalise your messages by taking into account the segmentation criteria you applied earlier. Does distance from your premises make a difference perhaps, or demographics, perhaps if you are promoting a premium product, etc?
You might have separate communications scheduled to send out for marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads and opportunities.
Engage Neglected Prospects
There is always the possibility that some prospects might not fit neatly into any one of your segmentation classifications and so drop out of your regular communication workflow. This is a significant threat to sales. If you don’t maintain regular communication with a prospect it is likely that you will lose them.
However, you can set a failsafe with a rule in deals to send a reminder that you have not contacted a prospect for a certain length of time.
If your product is complex then signals from your buyers will be more complex. Perhaps you could develop lead scoring for each action that counts towards SQL status and once you reach a trigger point, you move prospects to Deal stage.
Buying signals are different for each industry. Think about your recent clients and how they approached you and ask yourself the question: what can you do to seal that deal?