Interactive Profiling: Time to Hang Up Those Surveys Boys

The profiling series continues (read post 1 and post 2)! Stephanie Tilton challenged me to apply my thinking on “imaginative active profiling” more directly to B2B. I’m going to take her up on it. First we need to do a little terminology housekeeping so we are all on the same page.

1. Passive Profiling :: the process of tracking user engagement with content in an effort to determine their position in the sales cycle.
2. Active Profiling :: using questions, often functioning as gateways to content, in an effort to determine a user’s position in the sales cycle.
3. Interactive Profiling :: an interactive experience where users supply honest data in exchange for a valuable, relevant response. Profiling that functions as content instead of a gate to content.

By adding the prefix inter to active, we change the entire orientation of the word and process. The driver of interactive is interact, “to act reciprocally, to act on each other” (OED.com). In Interactive Profiling, we give the user a reason to act and then reciprocate. What’s missing in traditional B2B is the reciprocation—we let the user through the questionnaire gates (where they lied anyway) and then shoot webinars and white papers at them, and hope one sticks. That is not reciprocating. Reciprocating is listening to the answers and responding.  It is shaping the rest of the sales experience around the information the user provides us—we create a conversation that requires honesty to be of any value, and then we return value. Let’s dive in.

What are the goals of Interactive Profiling?

• To determine a prospect’s interest in a product.
• To discover what the prospects needs—size, scale, and perhaps price.
• To increase a prospects interest in a product and even upsell them on certain features.

Interactive Profiling determines interest far more accurately than Active Profiling because users have an incentive to tell the truth, but it is the third point that makes Interactive Profiling unique. Done right, an interactive tool can explain the benefits of a solution while collecting important information about a prospect’s interest. You can explain why a prospect would want faster processors or wheels on their desks or ergonomic chairs within the experience.

You will no doubt notice some of the things that did not make this list. In my opinion, the epoch of BANT questions (budget, authority, need, and time) has largely passed. A prospect encountering batch processing for the first time likely does not know what their budget is. Asking for a title is another invitation to lie, as many users might believe they will get additional content if they claim a higher-level position. Timelines are also a large question mark. Asking for a timeline is the equivalent of telling someone about a new band and asking when they want to buy front-stage seats to their concert before they hear the music. We must focus on Need. Discover the Need and the rest of BANT will follow.

What is Interactive Profiling for B2B?

Create an interactive experience, preferably with an eye-popping design, that returns information your audience would actually find useful. I am thinking here mainly about a product or solution design tool, but I’m sure games could work as well.

To give a firm example, we at Babcock & Jenkins are going to put Interactive Profiling to use for Epicor with an Implementation Timeline tool. It will give examples of three different implementations of an Epicor solution and then build out those three different scenarios. All steps in each implementation will be clickable with additional content popping in. By learning about the chosen implementation, we have an idea about timeline, budget, and need. Since we have directed the campaign to a specific list, we know they have the authority. We have solved BANT for this campaign without ever requiring the tedium and lies of useless survey questions.

Where Interactive Profiling is heading: a deep dive ::

We could potentially push Interactive Marketing one step further, towards the interactivity of the Turbo Gene Test or NIKEiD. Just because we are in B2B doesn’t mean our work has to be flat or sterile. The same flash and jazz that speak to us as consumers speak to us as businesspeople.

Let’s take a hypothetical example. Pretend that we are a company named SecureFiber, selling a networking solution to a highly variable audience—everything from small businesses to giant financial institutions. A key message and differentiator for SecureFiber is data security. So if we want to engage in Interactive Profiling, our survey might include a data security question, where the prospect rates the value of their data. Assume SecureFiber has a tiered data-security pricing structure, so as part of the interactive experience the user could also select a protection value for their data. The question might open with an open doorway and a gold chest representing your valuable data. Without SecureFiber, a 15 year-old hacker sneaks in and steals it—hope you weren’t too fond of your identity. Now clicking on the first level of data security could cause a gate to clank to the floor. If the user rated their data relatively invaluable, the hacker is stumped. If the data is of high value, perhaps level one security isn’t high enough and the bandit dynamites his way through the door. For level two security, red motion detectors sweep across the floor, which the hacker can pass only if the data is of extreme value. For the highest level of data security, biometric scanners drop down, another safe door clanks shut, and our prepubescent data-thief is stumped by SecureFiber. It’s didactic, engaging and it tells SecureFiber’s story. Now everyone believes their data is of high value, so the tool automatically begins to upsell clients. It also speaks to their fear and pain point about data theft. But that is not where the utility of the tool ends.If the prospect selected a high level for their data we could link to a white paper within the experience about the security strength of SecureFiber and the danger of data theft. Then, since we are also using Passive Profiling, we can store this fact and later serve up security content in an email to re-engage users.

Other questions in the interactive experience could include size of company (preferably asked in an unexpected way like how large a room would it take to fit all your employees, or how many company birthdays do you celebrate a year), or “what simulates your loading experience?” with videos of slowly loading computer screens, with the message that SecureFiber is better, faster. If the user indicates a lot of frustration with network speed, instead of serving up an email about data security, we can serve one up about the performance advantages of SecureFiber. Again, the keyword is interact, to reciprocate.

After the user completes the survey, the tool could supply a pricing estimate if the business is willing to provide it or, if not, something more abstract like expected ROI of the solution. It could also give statistics like percentage increase in data security, expected decrease in downtime, or another relevant statistic. It needs to promise enough to justify the prospect’s time—though great design and eye-candy can motivate involvement just as well as an ROI data point. As already indicated, the end of the survey should provide another jumping off point for area in which the customer was most interested, providing white papers on performance or security.

The users answers throughout the survey are now used not only to deliver the right content throughout the rest of the campaign, they are also used to gauge the user’s interest. If they express frustration with current loading times, and indicate the high value of their data, we can grade them as a warmer lead.

Wrapping Up ::

In the coming years, Interactive profiling is going to replace Active Profiling. It provides more meaningful, truthful results, and it engages people like nothing else. I am pretty convinced but I am interested to hear what you think. I anticipate the largest objection will be cost as a fill in the blank Active Profiling survey is about the cheapest solution imaginable, however, if we think of Interactive Profiling as content, lead grading, and the means of orienting and personalizing an entire campaign, and we consider how valuable a single relationship can be in B2B, I think you will agree that Interactive Profiling is the future, Active Profiling the past.

Questions ::

There are a few questions that I haven’t addressed because I don’t have the answers. Should Interactive Profiling be mandatory (particularly if it is going to shape the rest of the sales experience)? Are there industries that it makes more or less sense for? What data do we absolutely need? (See great articles by John Bottom and Chris Koch). Thanks for your time.

 Update ::

Another interesting profiling idea is courtesy of Anne Holland, a pop-up overlay that asks a quick question, in this example, “Are you a designer?,” and then features two large yes and no buttons. It then lead to a registration page.  It received 24.7% higher registration than a typical Active Profiling registration process. I wonder if we might take this a step further and create a widget that repeats this process over multiple visits and at relevant moments in the campaign where content could branch off.  For example, returning to the SecureFiber example, when supplying a white-paper produce an overlay with, “Are you in Healthcare?”  Store the information, change the experience to better target the user, and reiterate throughout the campaign.  If the user sees that the experience has been catered to their answer they will be more likely to respond truthfully in the future.  The caveat of course is that this technique should be used sparingly or it will really annoy your audience and possibly increase bounce rate.  Check out Anne Holland’s write-up here.