Imagine being aware of your leads’ degree of brand engagement, their willingness to purchase your goods, and even the most effective ways to reach them through communication. You could close more transactions and improve the efficacy of your prospecting with that kind of information. That is only made possible by lead intelligence. It is regarded by 70% of marketers and salespeople as a useful tool for attracting potential customers.
However, what exactly is it, and how can your company begin utilizing it? This article covers the fundamentals, including how it operates and the top tools on the market right now. After you discover how to use lead intelligence, you’ll question how you ever generated sales without it.
Let’s get started!
What is Lead Intelligence?
Lead intelligence is the term used to describe the thorough and perceptive information obtained about prospective customers or leads. It goes beyond simple contact details and demographics to explore a deeper, more complex understanding of people and organizations.
It can include:
- Contact information: Basic demographics and contact details
- Firmographic Information: Organizational attributes such as revenue, firm size, and industry
- Chronographics: Up-to-date information that could affect a lead’s purchasing decisions
- Technographics: The tools and software that a business employs
- Lead interaction on a website: The way a lead engages with the page
- Social media usage: The manner in which a prospect uses social media
- Brand interactions: The exchanges between a lead and a brand
You may be surprised to learn that 70% of customers anticipate a chatbot response in under five minutes, underscoring the significance of speed in lead engagement. Let’s examine its significance in more detail.
Also Read: How Account Based Marketing (ABM) Technology is Driving Business in 2024
What is the Importance of Lead Intelligence?
Every day, your sales team probably gets thousands of leads. They have less time for lead nurturing when these leads are manually validated. These technologies reduce the amount of human labor your sales staff must perform by verifying contact information such as phone numbers and email addresses. The sales team benefits by having more time to dedicate to qualifying leads, nurturing them, and closing deals. By using lead intelligence, teams can focus on strategic tasks instead of manual evaluations, cutting down on lead qualifying time by over 90%.
Let’s see an example of lead intelligence in operation.
Suppose your business is a major participant in the real estate CRM software market. You see leads as a salesperson from landing sites, organic search, and sponsored advertisements. Realtors seeking CRM systems to locate, monitor, and oversee both new and current tenants and buyers of real estate make up the leads. The leads wish to get in touch with the sales staff or submit a demo request on your website.
Validating and certifying thousands of leads each month becomes a daunting undertaking. Lead intelligence enables you to score these leads and categorize them according to criteria such as prospects who engaged with the features page, went to landing pages offering group plan discounts, or indicated that their demo request was “urgent.”
You may authenticate leads, rank high-quality leads using lead scoring, and nurture leads by using lead intelligence tools.
How is Lead Intelligence Used?
Technology and data sources are combined by sales lead intelligence tools to deliver useful information about prospects. The following steps are usually involved in the process:
➢ Data Collection
Relevant and valuable data is gathered from numerous sources, such as:
- data that is accessible to the general public, including business websites, social media accounts, news stories, and industry databases.
- vendors with specific expertise or third-party data providers who compile and enhance data from several sources.
- Internal data gathered via sales engagement platforms, website analytics, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems within your company.
➢ Data Enrichment
After being gathered, the data is cleansed, standardized, and expanded with new information. This could entail providing firmographic and technographic insights, confirming contact information, or appending missing data.
➢ Data Analysis
After that, algorithms and machine learning models are used to examine the enhanced data in order to find trends, patterns, and correlations. This examination could concentrate on elements like:
- Lead scoring: Placing a number on each lead according to how well it fits the ideal customer profile (ICP) and how likely it is to convert.
- Division: Putting leads into different groups according to similar traits to facilitate focused outreach.
- Predictive Modeling: Predicting actions and results in the future by using data and trends from the past.
➢ Data Visualization
The insights gleaned from the analysis are presented in a user-friendly format, such as dashboards, reports, or alerts. This enables sales teams to quickly grasp key information and make informed decisions.
➢Integration with CRM and sales tools
Lead intelligence solutions frequently interface with sales interaction platforms and CRM systems that are already in place. This streamlines outreach activities and makes it simpler for sales teams to receive lead intelligence immediately within their workflow.
5 Best Lead Intelligence Tools Reviewed for 2024
There are numerous lead intelligence tool types that may locate and assist you in understanding the most accurate information about your prospects.
1. HubSpot Sales
CRM heavyweight HubSpot provides free sales tools that anyone may use. The platform’s subscription version has tools to help you find potential companies and assess how involved they are. In addition, it can monitor the quantity of visitors from each organization as well as page views and pages visited.
2. Albacross
Similar to HubSpot Sales, Albacross lets you know which businesses are seeing your website and displays their level of engagement. It also includes information on the company’s earnings, workforce size, precise pages seen, and average time spent on the website.
Albacross provides a list of GDPR-compliant email addresses for decision-makers at the firms that visit your website; nevertheless, it does not personally identify individual visitors. You can tell more clearly with this tool whether the individual you’re contacting is authorized to make a transaction or not.
3. LeadSift Buzz
LeadSift’s Buzz feature keeps tabs on a potential company’s activities, such as the introduction of a new product or the acquisition of new money, saving you the trouble of conducting your own research. Buzz not only selects all of this content for you, but also provides direction on how to use it, eliminating the uncertainty over talking points or discussion starters.
4. Crystal
By emphasizing personality intelligence about a lead, Crystal distinguishes itself from other tools in this list. This is particularly helpful when it comes time to follow up with a lead, submit a proposal, or negotiate a deal. While not all tools can measure a lead’s degree of interaction with your brand or predict their likelihood of making a purchase, Crystal can provide an unparalleled level of insight into their personality.
5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes use of a platform that you and your potential customers already utilize. With the help of Sales Navigator’s sophisticated search features, finding leads that fit your ideal client profile is now simpler than ever. It can even suggest leads you may not have considered.
Concluding Thoughts
A more tailored and successful outreach plan is made possible by lead intelligence’s capacity to offer greater insights into prospects’ requirements, preferences, and behaviors. Acquiring competitive advantage through the use of AI in lead intelligence entails developing real relationships with prospective clients, earning their trust, and eventually resulting in more fruitful and effective interactions. By doing this, you may increase customer loyalty and retention in addition to guaranteeing a consistent flow of high-quality leads.