How to Drive ROI with Lead Intelligence

Lead intelligence is crucial to ensure teams focus their efforts and resources on the most qualified leads, as well as action appropriate lead nurturing strategies to drive brand interest and encourage future purchases.

Therefore, in the context of demand generation, lead intelligence can be understood as data that supports campaigns to achieve growth and revenue goals.

Establish a comprehensive database of lead intelligence, as well as implement a process to collect and analyse this data by following the 5 steps below:

Gather and collate insights from sales interactions with leads, your Client Relationship Management (CRM) system, surveys, and any other mediums where you are able to collect data on your clients and leads.

Rather than aiming for a perfect dataset, work with what you have to form hypotheses, which you can then test to authenticate and refine your lead intelligence.

For example, launch short campaigns targeting common interests and pain points, collect results, and then analyse this data to inform your future efforts.

Ensure alignment across marketing and sales, as well as other departments by sharing updates on the development of your hypotheses you made and the results.

Promoting transparency and collaboration can help to collect feedback on additional hypotheses that can be tested, as well as identify other results from across the organisation that can enrich your dataset.

To ensure alignment between all departments, develop a secure, shared dataset space (a CRM, for example) and establish routine meetings to refine data insights before moving on to the next step.

Having pooled feedback from other teams and formed substantial hypotheses, create a test campaign to provide further clarity on your assumptions, as well as build out your first definitive lead intelligence dataset.

At this stage, the idea is to launch a campaign that engages your target audience at a relatively low cost, but that is still comprehensive enough to test all the hypotheses you may have. That is why, for example, paid media campaigns running for a couple of months (or even a quarter) are a good option, as well as content syndication campaigns.

Once the campaign is finalised, you will have your first lead intelligence dataset to validate hypotheses and inform future efforts with more confidence.

After your first lead intelligence campaign and dataset, it is imperative to establish processes that ensure that data from future campaigns feeds into analytics. This will enable you to continuously assess your information on leads. This is important to evaluate whether campaigns are correctly engaging your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) and buyer personas, and if updates are required.

Thus, make sure to compile and measure campaign reports through a lead intelligence lens, in order to glean insights that can enrich your dataset and inform future outreach efforts.

Regardless of the value of your collected data, activating it across your organisation is not possible without efficient data-sharing processes. Once your lead intelligence dataset has undergone several optimisations, enable teams across departments to analyse these readily available datasets to inform KPIs. This is a key element for RevOps, for instance, but it is also important for orchestrating effective demand generation as a whole at any B2B organisation.

By implementing a data-driven culture, you allow for lead intelligence to positively impact all teams, leading to optimisation and greater importance. Such collaboration can also help to continuously update lead intelligence to inform strategies across the entire organisation.

Below are steps to start efficiently analysing your lead intelligence data:

Focus on KPIs and metrics that will help the organisation achieve its goals, rather than those that are nice to have. A RevOps-driven organisation, for example, would most likely have overall revenue KPIs for both marketing and sales teams to strive for.

Tracking the metrics explored above can also help you assess the quality of your lead intelligence, and therefore, determine if your lead or demand generation campaign was successful.

Pivoting campaigns is essential once you are sure a campaign is heading in the wrong direction, however, it should always be a decision informed by accurate data. This means the scope of the campaign (and its importance for overall brand growth) is crucial to determine if action needs to be taken, as well as the urgency (i.e. immediately or at the end of a quarter).

Waiting for the end of a cycle (as is the case with quarterly campaigns) has the added benefit of gaining more feedback and evaluating performance over a fixed period of time. Allowing for enough time to truly determine the success of campaigns is essential, particularly in the case of long-term efforts, such as those which are focused on driving brand interest and lead engagement with marketing.

Unless there is a serious issue regarding a campaign, a reliable method for identifying the need to pivot is to reference lead intelligence and evaluate the relevancy of campaigns for both target audiences and helping the organisation meet its goals. Consider, for example, the question below:

If yes, then it is time to pivot and launch a new campaign.

Below are actionable ways to drive outcomes with lead intelligence once a campaign is finalised:

Although a given, reporting in a way that favours collecting and sharing insights for lead intelligence is crucial. This means combining KPI and metrics data with feedback from sales and Client Success (CS) teams who were involved in the execution of the campaign and can share valuable insights into its performance.

When applicable, consider developing a report to track the progress of active campaigns, as well as one for when campaigns are finalised. This lead intelligence will assist your teams in strategising future approaches to engaging leads and driving conversions.

When collecting lead intelligence, it is important to focus on areas that will improve the success of outreach, and therefore result in greater ROI from campaigns.

1. ICP, messaging, and pain points

Regularly assessing lead intelligence should be supported by evaluating the accuracy of your Ideal Client Profiles and buyer personas to determine if:

a) You are targeting who you initially envisioned
b) The right fit for your solutions is not who you expected

In both scenarios, the process of reevaluating your ICP can help identify if new pain points should be emphasised in your marketing and sales messaging.

2. Lead scoring, the sales funnel, and the buyer’s journey

Lead intelligence determines how you motivate buyers to progress through their journey, as well as when to deploy touchpoints to encourage conversions and adequately build brand interest in your offerings.

This means, post-campaign, there is the opportunity to revisit your lead scoring and sales funnel in order to identify where leads drop interest, and where more nurturing is required to drive campaign objectives.

3. Content strategy and creation

The goal of content marketing is to inform audiences on topics of interest and address knowledge gaps and objections, while also driving brand awareness. This makes revisiting your content strategy to evaluate its relevance to your leads a priority.

Depending on performance and other data points, check content plans for necessary edits. This could include the need to cover new topics, themes, or pain points to drive the effectiveness of your content.

The INFUSE team shares 4 scenarios where lead intelligence was leveraged to improve demand generation performance:

By analysing the touchpoints that drove the most engagement with leads (their theme, format, and channel), it is possible to determine the best topics for future outreach, and therefore optimise the cost of new campaigns with the same audience.
The key in this scenario is identifying which behavioural signals to prioritise, to then build out a proper nurturing strategy.

This can be broken down into 4 steps:

INFUSE example

A SaaS (Software as a Service) platform in EMEA launched a nurturing campaign with the support of our demand strategists. The goal was to identify the most valuable ICP accounts for their proprietary manufacturing process system.

Through the nurture campaign, supported by display ads at the top of the funnel, our team identified three high-quality leads from a single account that met their ICP criteria for job titles (chairman, vice-president/chief operational officer, and innovation manager). These leads had also engaged with 4-5 touchpoints in the nurture stream, which signalled their brand interest.

Once these leads were identified, the SaaS platform prioritised these accounts with their nurturing efforts, earning a new deal that met ROI goals.

Often, when a campaign is finalised, leads that were not considered as ICPs might have engaged better than expected with your demand generation assets, which can inform a possible pivot (as well as an update to your buyer personas).

Another common challenge encountered in this scenario is when leads across the board do not respond positively to the campaign, meaning that the approach and messaging must be reevaluated to properly engage your target audience.

Either way, the goal is to identify the themes, formats, and channels that drove the most engagement (preferably the top three content assets), and then utilise them to inform future demand generation efforts.

INFUSE example

A global information technology enterprise launched a multi-geo campaign in France, Germany, South Korea, and Canada, in order to identify which location generated the most ICP leads, as well as evaluate the pain points and offerings that resonated the most with decision makers in each location.

To achieve this goal, the company launched a global display ad campaign with INFUSE, with localised content for each of these countries. The campaign identified that out of a total of eight assets, one performed consistently across all locations. Therefore, all campaigns pivoted to promote this particular asset to decision makers to optimise ad costs.

Retargeting is a cost-effective solution for engaging current leads and promoting nurturing assets that can drive them toward the middle and bottom of the sales funnel. It is also the most sure-fire way to A/B test messaging and graphics, which means you can assess the performance of different pain points with a current audience to determine the best copy and imagery for future promotion with similar accounts.

INFUSE example

The same global information technology enterprise from the scenario above also leveraged this INFUSE retargeting approach. The idea was to A/B test copy and imagery across its geos (France, Germany, South Korea, and Canada) to identify which messaging and imagery resonated best in each location as well as worldwide.

With this geographic breakdown, our demand strategists identified that Canadian decision makers engaged more with green imagery, while Germans preferred orange graphics. This, combined with the content from above, then informed future display ads for both geos to ensure higher performance.

Account Based Experience, an approach that drives Account Based Marketing (ABM) efforts through a client and user experience (CX and UX) lens, is a powerful strategy not only to nurture leads, but also retain clients after a purchase.

ABX helps support Client Success teams by delivering a streamlined and personalised buyer experience on an account level, which also collects continuous feedback to ensure the sold products are relevant and easy to use. Thus, by adopting an ABX approach with leads, the business can reduce churn and gain lead intelligence to inform future campaigns with accounts from the same industry.

INFUSE example

A cloud services provider was facing challenges defining their ICPs beyond demographic traits that were not actionable. INFUSE demand strategists decided to host a workshop with the marketing, sales, and Client Success (CS) teams of the organisation to discuss methods of enriching this dataset with technographic and firmographic market segmentation factors.

Through this workshop, both demand strategists and teams at the cloud provider decided to adopt an ABX approach focusing on the ICP that drove the most CLTV; businesses with large, complex IT teams. This approach was then leveraged to retain clients of this ICP, as well as target prospects that met the same criteria.

Collecting lead intelligence and enabling long-term results can be challenging. Here are some best practices to follow to help your teams drive the best outcomes with this data:

Make it a standard for client success teams to develop a lead intelligence report after each campaign.

This report should include marketing segmentation data on the engaged leads, their touchpoints per funnel stage (which content assets they engaged with), conversion rates, and KPIs for measuring ROI.

Additionally, this report could also include intent data and searched queries by the leads, to evaluate their buyer intent and if the campaign effectively met the needs of leads.

Best practices for analysing the lead intelligence report

Beyond revisiting your ICP (mentioned in the '3 areas of improvement to prioritise' section), you should consider updating the messaging of your Unique Value and Selling Propositions (UVP and USPs) after collecting lead intelligence data.

Since the goal of both a UVP and USP is to summarise the key benefits of your product to your ICP, then it makes sense to analyse the pain points that leads manifested during the campaign, as well as their language, to update messaging and how you position your solutions.

It is possible to A/B test assets with new messaging in future campaigns to ensure their relevance before 'officially' updating your UVP and USPs across all branding efforts.

Below are 4 takeaways to keep in mind when building your lead intelligence datasets and strategising campaigns: