Intent-Based Sales - What You Need to Know
Jake Dunlap
“We should be shaping the way that we have our first and subsequent interactions based on the customer’s level of education.”
The topic this week is something that’s very top of mind for me right now: intent-based sales.
If you’re pressed for time you can check out my short recap and breakdown of how we should start to treat buyers in the sales process based on intent and in our first interactions.
But if you have 25 minutes or so, check out the replay as I go deep on what I mean by intent-based sales, examples of how to frame conversations, and take questions from the audience.
Recap: Intent-based Sales – What You Need to Know
What has happened in the sales process today is that we have become overly focused on qualification.
The first part of the conversation we have with buyers is now 100% about qualification criteria and gathering the right information that I know my boss wants to see, and we don’t spend time to truly understand the customer.
The concept of consultative sales has been around for a while now. It’s not necessarily a brand new term, but with that being said, I do feel like we have lost sight of it.
When I talk to VPs of Sales and CEOs about their company, their business, etc., I hear time and time again that the first call truly is just a qualification call. And if you’re a customer, it’s usually completely worthless.
God forbid someone came inbound, right? If someone comes inbound, your goal is to try to get them through the process as effectively and efficiently as possible, and in a way that’s productive for the customer, not productive for you.
We’ve created these sales processes and we’re so focused on qualification up front, that we’ve forgot that people today may have access to more information than they did last year and the year before that.
In the live session I talk about three different ways that people come in today, and why we need to think about this concept of having intent-based sales processes and not a one size fits all first meeting where they get the exact same experience.
Three levels of intent
There are a lot of flavors in between these three, but #1 is cold outbound. A buyer doesn’t know anything. They just became aware of a problem, but they’re kind of interested in learning more. You reached out to them cold, it sounded interesting, so they agreed to talk.
These can also be the people that downloaded one piece of content.
#2 is a buyer thinks they now need a solution and just start looking around; they still haven’t done a ton of research, but they’ve done enough. They at least have a good idea of what the space looks like.
They may come inbound or outbound but the deciding factor is they have some basic education on the space.
#3 is they came inbound. They took a look at your website, looked at some of your service offerings, googled the space, and went and looked at three or four other companies’ offerings.
These buyers have done a lot of research, and by that, I mean probably a few hours.
So let’s call those three levels low to no intent, medium intent, and high intent.
The big problem is this third level of intent often gets treated as less intent because that low intent person may have downloaded a white paper, and we can track that.
My friend Chris Walker talks a lot about dark social, and there are some elements of that in here, but I call this – people who have started to become extremely high intent buyers that your CRM or marketing automation platform knows nothing about.
As you’re thinking through your intent funnels and what is intent-based sales, you have to realize more and more people are being influenced through word of mouth, a LinkedIn post, a question they asked in a Slack channel that you can’t see, etc.
More and more of those things that used to be calculated into lead score that let the sales team know Hey, this person is “good to go,” we actually can’t track.
Shaping first conversations
Going back to the sales process being too focused on qualification, the question now becomes “What should the first interaction with the customer be based on?”
This is what I dive into in the second part of the live session. We should be shaping the way that we have our first and subsequent interactions based on the customer’s level of education and these three levels of intent.
I give a few examples of this that you can listen to in the recording, but the idea is our buyers are changing, and we need to frame conversations around where they are in their process.
Some groups of people want to talk to a salesperson early and know nothing about the space. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people that just want to self-serve, buy now, and maybe get on a call later if they have to.
A story I’ve talked about a couple of times now is my experience with Salesforce last December when I just wanted to prepay for the year, not get on a call with an AE, and it broke their process. And this was Salesforce.
The B2B buying process has to change. We need a sales process that knows how to get buyers to the right place as fast and effectively as possible versus putting the low-intent people in the same process as a high-intent people.
Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you want to talk more about what intent-based sales should be. 💯