In the ever-evolving marketing and sales landscape, one thing has always remained constant: the pursuit of high-quality leads.
Your marketing team must focus on delivering more targeted leads to your sales team so they can focus on closing more deals. This is what makes the world go round.
But here’s the thing about generating high-quality leads: you need to target people, not just places. Sure, you might know the sectors you want to target or the types of companies to go after. You may even have individuals in mind that you’d like to direct your marketing campaigns towards. But if you want to increase your pool of high-intent opportunities, you need to get much, much more granular.
Here’s why individuals are more valuable than companies when it comes to generating targeted leads.
What is a targeted lead?
Targeted leads refer to a specific subset of potential customers or prospects within a larger target market. The point is to narrow down the people you want to have sales conversations with. You can identify and categorise these prospects based on a variety of factors, including:
- Demographics: This includes characteristics like age, gender, job role, and the size of not only the individual’s company but also their immediate reports.
- Geographics: This includes location, city, and language preferences, as well as cultural differences. If they’re French-Canadian, for example, do they prefer speaking in French, and can your company accommodate that?
- Psychographics: This includes factors like lifestyle habits, values, and interests. Knowing these details helps ensure more meaningful conversations. For example, are they a hardcore DeadHead? Do they volunteer at the local soup kitchen? This helps you find a common language and understand what values to tap into to create a connection.
- Behaviours: This includes things like specific habits, online searches, content engagement, and other intent signals. What podcasts are they listening to? What books are they reading or TV shows are they watching?
Ultimately, understanding your targeted leads to this level allows you to focus your efforts on individuals who exhibit higher potential for conversion.
Here’s why it’s valuable to talk to individuals
Targeting specific individuals is beneficial for an array of reasons. For example:
1. You can discover specific pain points
Simon Sinek once said that “100 percent of employees are people. 100 percent of customers are people. 100 percent of investors are people.”
Each person has a unique pain point. One marketing manager might struggle to convince their IT colleagues that adopting a new tool won’t cause them too much work. Another might struggle to secure the budget from a risk-averse board.
Understanding individual pain points like this gives you fuel for your conversations. And if you time it right, you can leverage specific pain points into enticing sales opportunities.
2. You can gauge purchase intent
Intent is the key to saving your business time and money. Talking to a prospect with no intent of making a purchase will waste your sales team’s time. And it’s a lost opportunity in time they could have spent talking to a better-qualified lead.
According to research, 95 percent of B2B buyers aren’t even in the market for your products. This means that, for every 100 leads that come through your door, only five are actually ready for a conversation with sales.
Identifying who these five are as early as possible should be your top priority. Not only is this the key to reducing wasted time and money, but understanding these “intent signals” gives you a window into where prospects are in the buyer’s journey. Armed with this, you can tailor your sales and marketing efforts and provide relevant and timely answers to questions.
3. You can assess emotional state of mind
Whether it’s a new car or a new accounting software, emotions are always present when making a purchasing decision. A hesitant prospect may be afraid to look bad in front of their boss. An eager one might create an opportunity to cross-sell your product or service.
Understanding the emotional context of specific individuals allows you to tailor how you speak and what you say. This allows you to align with their current mindset and build rapport, which gives you the best chance of closing that deal.
4. You can explore interests and personality
To reiterate, Simon Sinek: 100 percent of employees are people. And people are more than just their job titles. They have unique interests, and what works for one prospect might turn off another.
Communication style can be the difference between building an authentic connection with someone and alienating them. If you understand what someone is interested in, you can personalise your message and connect with the human rather than just the “employee”.
5. You can identify content interests
One of the simplest ways to understand someone’s interest in your business is to analyse the content they are engaging with. Your content library is a powerful marketing tool, and it should be designed to engage various individuals in various ways. Some prospects will prefer data-driven whitepapers. Others will watch videos or attend your webinars.
By creating a library of multimedia content, you can begin to meet people where they are and provide them with personalised gateways into your business. Understanding their content interests makes it easier for your sales team to steer conversations and build authentic connections.
High-intent leads for highly-intentional companies
The prolific sales guru Mark Hunter once said, "It’s not about having the right opportunities. It’s about handling the opportunities right."
We live by words like this at Intentify Demand. We deliver match-made, intent-first B2B leads so you can get closer to your sales conversations and start speaking to real humans, not just faceless businesses.
To continue learning, read our latest whitepaper, “The marketer’s guide to choosing an effective data and AI platform” here.
