This is a guest post written by Chris Kelley, digital marketing strategist at V2 Marketing Communications, a HubSpot Certified Partner located in Rockford, IL. You can contact Chris and his and his team via Twitter: @marketingV2
I love cold calling almost as much as a poke in the eye. Well maybe not quite that much. In fact, few things are more painful than contacting a prospect out of the blue or more difficult than establishing that first shred of trust needed to begin a conversation. Knowing even a little bit about your prospect can warm even the iciest of cold calls.
You devote a lot of effort to inbound marketing, consistently blogging with the goal of attracting hoards of prospects to your website. You nurture your leads through their decision-making process with automated workflows. The information you capture with HubSpot analytics and landing pages helps to qualify your leads and gives you ammunition for your introductory phone call.
HubSpot provides a number of ways to gather lead intelligence about your website visitors. The Leads Database houses all of the information for each contact, whether submitted by the lead via a landing page form, or data compiled from the HubSpot tracking code, social networks or other sources. There you can search and sort your contacts, create lists and manage workflows, in whatever ways work for you.
Qualifying Leads
Since HubSpot tracks your visitor's behavior as they browse your website, download your content and click your emails, you can measure and analyze visitor engagement with your website over time.
By reviewing this history, you can qualify your leads and draw informed assumptions about their interests. If your lead has clicked on several of your emails, downloaded more than a handful of your ebooks or responded to your workflows, then it may be worthwhile to take the next step and reach out to that lead in person.
For even more information about your lead, or just to verify your data, click the "Search in Google" link on the contact's record to query the search engine.
Making Lists
It won’t be long before your inbound marketing program starts to generate a fair number of leads. It can become time consuming and cumbersome to weed trough the list of contacts one by one to determine who to follow up with. HubSpot makes it simple with automated Smart Lists.
Like Smart Playlists in iTunes organize your music according to genre or tempo, Smart Lists in HubSpot organize your contacts according to information in their contact record. For example, create a smart list of all leads who have downloaded more than three ebooks, or who have a Hubspot score of more than 30. The list is automatically updated whenever a lead meets the criteria.
Smart Lists get even more powerful when combined with HubSpot workflows. Use a Workflow to automatically send an email or change some criteria of a contact’s record if they are added to a specific Smart List. The possibilities are limitless. Use Smart Lists in HubSpot to qualify your leads and provide warm contact lists to your sales team for followup.
Engaging Leads
The tracking tools in HubSpot provide loads of information about your website visitors and leads. But don't try to impress the lead during your conversation with everything that you know about them. Most people find that creepy.
Instead, use the data to give insight into your prospect's interests and provide potential talking points. Do you and your contact share a similar hobby? That could be a conversation starter that could build trust. Does the tracking show that the lead has spent a lot of time on your products and pricing pages? You might try a soft close.
You don’t need to be a super sleuth to find a good conversation starter. HubSpot makes it easy to generate leads, manage contact data and gather the lead intelligence you need to warm up your cold calls.
Final Takeaway
Peoples’ shopping habits are changing as the Internet enables them to do their own product research, getting recommendations and comparing brands online. As a result, company sales reps are losing their opportunity to influence shoppers’ opinions during their decision-making process.
Watch our Inbound Marketing Video Briefing to see why Inbound Marketing is so effective for gathering lead intelligence to help you better connect with prospects:
