Progressive Profiling is a remarkably effective tool for a marketer! It allows you to gather all the information about a contact without bothering them with a single contact form that is too long, and therefore inefficient.

This is a great way to qualify leads and ensure that Marketing and Sales s work is made easier. How does Progressive Profiling work?

Why is it so important to (properly) qualify your leads  ?

First and foremost, proper lead qualification makes it easier for your sales force to act.

By collecting enough information about a prospect, you are indeed able to determine at what level of decision they are in their buying process (buyer's journey) and thus you can determine the appropriate action towards them.

For example, knowing your lead's projected budget or decision level is valuable information before contacting them to offer a product or service.

The only problem: how to get this type of data without scaring your contact?

That's where Progressive Profiling comes in! 

What is Progressive Profiling?

his is a lead acquisition technique used in Inbound Marketing that breaks down the collection of information   starting with simple questions (often name, company and email) and moving to more specific questions as your prospect downloads free offers (an ebook, for example).

This approach leads to accumulating more and more precise data about your prospects by segmenting the requests with each new conversion. 

For example, getting the first document your visitor downloads, usually to make them aware of their need, will be conditioned by questions related to:

• His identity
• His contact information (email, phone)

In the second stage, as your lead seeks more information, you'll look for:

• His position in the company
• The size of her company

Finally, the third content it will procure will allow you to retrieve qualifying items for sales like:

• The budget it has
• His level of decision-making

Some tips for implementing Progressive Profiling

Ask for the most important information up front

Get the key data at the earliest opportunity to allow you to segment properly. This way, you can customize some of the content and increase your chances of retrieving other, more accurate information. 

Align your questions with your sales cycle

Make sure your form fields are consistent with your prospect's buying cycle. For example, if they are in the discovery phase, don't ask them what budget they have, it's way too premature!

Tailor your questions to your Buyer Personas

Knowing your Buyer Personas allows you to know which sequence of questions is most relevant to your prospect types. If a piece of information doesn't have operational importance in a persona's buying process, feel free to delete it. 

How to set up Progressive Profiling

Progressive Profiling can be set up with many Marketing platforms. Here's the process with our partner, Hubspot:

• Go to the Forms section of Contacts.
• Click on the form you want to edit or create a new one.
• Indicate that you want to make the fields "smart" by clicking on the button with two squares and two arrows like in this image:

• Add fields to the "pending fields" (Queued questions) section of the form editor to replace Smart fields once they are known, as shown here:

With this last operation, the user won't feel like the form size is increasing as you ask for more information.

In conclusion, Progressive Profiling is a very smart tool to qualify your contact base without appearing too intrusive. The user experience is improved as is the quality of information transmitted to your sales force.

All benefits, right?

Would you like to implement this feature within your company? Contact us and we'll answer your questions.