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Progressive Profiling: How To Use It As A Lead Prospecting Tool?

Sales is a crazy, fast-paced, and high-pressure industry!

Although tech solutions like sales prospecting tools help you cast your net as wide as possible, you might still fail to brim your pipeline with potential leads.

It’s not that your tools aren’t effective; it’s because your clients often dilly-dally with their decisions to approach you. Well, why do they do that? It’s because they either find your outreach approach very complex or aren’t genuinely interested in your service.

So, when formulating your sales plans, you must always come up with a technique that can nudge your leads to engage and move your sales forward. Today, we will introduce a tactic called “progressive profiling” that can help you do so.

So, let’s dig in to understand what this strategy is all about.

What is progressive profiling?

If you are looking for ways to convert your leads, you probably need a big chunk of information about them first.

However, in today’s busy world, you can’t expect your leads to share everything you want to know in one go. Asking for tons of information at once can turn off your prospects and, thus, can decrease your lead conversion rates.

So, how do you fetch your lead’s details without damaging conversion rates? Here’s where “progressive profiling” comes into the picture.

Progressive profiling is a marketing technique that allows you to gradually collect prospect data instead of gathering it all at once. In other words, you ask your prospects to provide small bits of information at various vital touchpoints. Well, how do you carry out this task?

You do that with the help of dynamic forms! Let’s look at the example below to understand this concept in greater detail.

During the first touchpoint, company “A” sends a form to its leads, asking for their name and email address. Then, when company “A” receives basic information about its prospects, it strategically moves forward to seek more data, such as the company name and location. This way, it keeps collecting the data step by step and looks forward to closing its sales.

Accordingly, in the progressive profiling process, you send out forms to your leads based on their previous interactions with your company. They continue to provide you with data as they proceed down your sales funnel.

Why do you need progressive profiling?

Progressive profiling is a technique that can prompt your leads to share their data. How? It lowers the threshold for completion, making it feel less like a chore to complete a form; as such, your prospects will be more than ready to share their details.

Well, by employing this technique, you can gain a wealth of perks that ultimately strengthen your sales efforts and close your deals:

Delivers qualified leads – Progressive profiling will help your sales team gain deeper insights into your prospect’s details and help them identify the leads ready to buy your offerings.
Speeds up the buyer’s journey – With more information on prospects, you can provide an individual approach to encourage your prospects to move further in their buying process.
Boosts conversion rates – The lengthy forms usually dissuade the conversations. However, with progressive profiling, your forms will always be short and sweet, and you can nudge your prospects to answer.
Avoids repetition – With progressive profiling, you only ask fresh questions as and when your lead responds, and thus, you avoid the risk of annoying your prospects.
Optimizes sales time – By incorporating a progressive profiling method, your sales team will no longer waste their sales time by asking irrelevant questions to your prospects.

Progressive profiling helps you land with potential prospects but also enables you to ignite a conversation with them so that you can take them closer to becoming your next clients.

This technique is no less than your lead prospecting tool. So why not use it as your lead prospecting tool? Here are three tips that can help you strategically use progressive profiling for hunting and drawing more leads to your sales funnel:

1. Ask for the most important information upfront

Before you begin the progressive profiling process, you must know which data points to capture. However, keep in mind that, apart from collecting standard information, try to obtain essential data.

Because having the data required at the earliest opportunity can allow you to personalize your content and, hence, help you connect with your prospects as soon as possible.

2. Align your questions to your buyer’s lifecycle stage

When sending out your forms, you must never fail to keep your customer’s buying journey in mind. In other words, the questions you ask in the form fields should mirror the buying stage of your prospects.

For example, you can’t ask about the budget when your prospects are still in their discovery phase. This could prevent your sales from being converted. Therefore, be sure to be aligned with your prospect’s buying journey when performing your progressive profiling task.

3. Tailor your questions to your buyer personas

If you know your buyer personas very well, you will know what questions to ask so that you can nudge your prospects to respond. So, if you haven’t developed your buyer personas yet, create them and ask relevant questions to propel your sales forward.

Progressive profiling allows you to fetch your prospects’ information naturally and, hence, does not pose too much friction between you and your prospects. With this approach, you can capture more granular, meaningful information and build robust customer profiles, making your outreach highly effective.

Therefore, execute progressive profiling correctly and unlock enormous opportunities for your business.