Sales Enablement Pro Tips: How to Identify Your Highest-Intent Buyers

One of your many jobs as a marketer is to send high-quality leads to your sales team. One of the biggest challenges, especially as your traffic increases and your contacts grow, is identifying which leads are worthy of follow-up versus leads who may have other intentions for being on your site (like looking for a job or finding contact information to sell you something). 

Here is a simple system you can use in HubSpot or most CRMs to identify the best leads, follow up with them, and send them to your sales team. 

Step 1: Identify your “money” pages.

What are the pages on your site that high-buyer-intent visitors would be reviewing before raising their hand to speak to sales? For SaaS companies, this might be a “Sign Up for a Free Trial” page, whereas a healthcare consultancy might see high traffic on a “Request a Consultation” page. 

The most scientific way to find these pages is through attribution reporting and knowing what content or touchpoints lead to a sale, but if you don’t have attribution reporting set up yet, your bottom-of-funnel pages (like “Pricing,” “Contact Us,” or “Request an X”) are good places to start.

Step 2: Build out buyer intent properties.

Next, let’s get the infrastructure in place before you build out automation and reporting. Here are three properties and their respective field types to create:

1. “Visited Money Page”: A single checkbox property.
2. “Last Visit to Money Page”: A date picker property.
3. “Number of Money Page Visits”: A number property.

Here is a list of all of the property types in HubSpot and their definitions.

Step 3: Build out workflows.

After your properties are built out, it’s time to build out your automation. You’ll need to build two workflows: a property update workflow and a sales notification workflow.

Property Update Workflow

For this workflow, when someone visits your “Money” page, they will be enrolled in the workflow. Upon enrollment, you’ll want to: 

• Set “Visited Money Page” to true
• Timestamp the “Last Visit to Money Page” property
• Increment “Number of Money Page Visits” property by one

This will update the three important properties that show if and when your prospects have visited your higher-buyer-intent pages.

Don’t forget to turn on “re-enrollment” so contacts are re-enrolled every time they visit your money page.

Sales Notification Workflow

For this workflow, we can enable our sales team to follow up with leads who have visited our “Money” pages. Our enrollment criteria would be “Number of Money Page Visit” greater than 0. When leads are enrolled in this workflow, an internal email is automatically sent to sales that says “One of your leads recently visited the ‘Money’ page but didn’t fill out the form. Pick up the phone and call them.” 

One tip to keep in mind here is that if you are short staffed in sales and/or get a lot of leads, then you may want to limit which sales notifications go to your reps. Maybe you only want leads who visited “Money” pages and whose lifecycle stage is “marketing-qualified leads” to go to sales. Or maybe you only want leads (who visited your “Money” page) from target accounts to go to sales.

The last thing you want to do is engineer a notification workflow and then have sales immediately start ignoring their notification emails, so be thoughtful about which lead notifications you are sending to sales.

Step 4: Build out reporting dashboards.

Now, it’s time to put together some simple reporting visualizations that show us the volume of leads visiting our “Money” pages. The x-axis would be the “Last Visit to Money Page” property, and the y-axis would be the count of contacts that have the “Visited Money Page” property set to true.

This is the bare minimum of what you need to create in terms of reporting. You could get very sophisticated with these reporting efforts—for example, you could show how the sales process speeds up when sales follows up with these specific leads (versus waiting until the lead actually fills out the form). 

In every marketing or sales enablement initiative you do, show your work. Show your results. 

In closing, your marketing automation system should be used in an intelligent way and not for spraying and praying your database with personalization-less emails. If your CRM, web analytics, and marketing automation system are all synced, then this is the most effective tool to be helpful to your sales team—and, ultimately, your customer.