Leads aren’t enough on their own. In fact, no amount of leads matter if they aren’t ultimately converting to sales and contributing to your bottom line.
Maybe it’s a breakdown in lead quality, inbound systems or people process, but It’s a common problem that we address with clients.
In order to help, we’ve created a series of blog posts exploring reasons why your leads may not be converting. In this first post, to fuel your lead conversions, we will discuss the importance of identifying which types of companies are your best customers: your Ideal Customer Profile.
There are many factors that go into defining your ICP. You’re looking for the perfect customer or business for your services or product.
To find this, you’ll map out the demographics that make up your target audience, including the number of employees, the type of industry, average revenue, typical location, the technology they use, and the size of their customer base. This article from HubSpot goes into more detail about how to define your ICP.
Next, it’s time to identify the best-fit leads you have that currently fit your ICP. To begin the exercise of finding your ICP, identify these factors for leads and accounts that you have pitched and successfully sold in the recent past.
This will give you a jumping off point for seeing common attributes across your customers. If you do not yet have customers, brainstorm which type of audience would benefit from your products and use that as your initial ICP. It doesn’t have to be perfect to start - just start! Your ICP will evolve as your company and the market for your product evolves.
Your HubSpot instance can help you track and analyze common attributes across your prospects turned customers. You can capture in real time what types of companies are a fit for your product. Start by adding fields or properties to your HubSpot to input the factors that are important to your ICP.
In HubSpot, create the custom properties needed for Companies so you can see which companies start the sales process and ultimately which companies become qualified prospects and purchase your product. You can also utilize HubSpot Insights to automatically gather information about companies from their website including Annual Revenue, Address, Industry, Number of Employees, and Web Technologies.
Moving forward, you will capture this information for new leads and accounts. In HubSpot, you can do this by making fields required when creating and updating records. Now, you can analyze the types of companies that sales reps are spending their time on AND the types of companies where they are finding success.
You can build reporting within your HubSpot and outside of your CRM to see trends and common features that are transforming leads into customers. From there, you'll have the data you need to accurately identify and refine your ICP definition.
Within HubSpot, you can create custom reports or modify report templates to understand how different types of companies are generating revenue. For instance, you may want to create a Custom Report of Deals with Companies to see what percentage of generated deals or won deals come from companies with common attributes.
You can use this data to inform your sales processes, including which companies your sales teams reach out to through outbound sales, how your marketing department targets new prospects, and how your sales team responds to inbound inquiries. You can also utilize this data in lead scoring to determine which leads to prioritize.
In our next post exploring why leads are not converting to revenue, we will discuss why improving your speed to lead is crucial to winning business.
If you'd like to talk with an expert about how you can set up your HubSpot instance to best track ICP criteria, let’s start a conversation.