Learning B2B from the CIA: Passive Profiling

Name: MC Hammer

Company: Aslsal;fkjds Inc.

Title: Cryptozoologist / Whiskey Ambassador

Address: Splash Mountain, Disney Land

Budget: $25 billion

How Would You Rate Your Interest: Lavender

Are You Lying: Yes

According to MarketingSherpa, 71 percent of people who fill out a form give false answers. I am one of them—if you give me an online survey I will lie on principle. It’s a pity—all those carefully chosen questions, and you are left with a truckload of fake data clogging up your spreadsheet. How can you grade leads if seventy percent of your data is riddled with errors? Next consider the people who you turned away because you stuck a giant time-barbed gate in front of your content.  Considered in this light, Active Profiling, in which you ask a prospect for information about themselves, become a true loss proposition. Thankfully, there is a better way.

Enter Passive Profiling, a solution that does not require uninviting survey questions. Instead passive profiling is built around content and tracking engagement with that content. We all know the value of content on the new Web.  In order to track content, we do require a quick registration, but we only really need name and e-mail.  In a perfect world, registration will be pre-populated, removing even that obstacle to content, so prospects only have to enter a personalized URL.  Then the gates swing soundlessly open and content, beautiful content floods in.  Content like white papers, vbooks, ebooks, and youtube videos is going to gradually sell the prospective client, but passive profiling’s genius is its recognition that content engagement not only increases a prospect’s willingness to buy, it also measures it. By tracking a customer’s engagement with content, we actually have a very good idea of their position in the sales cycle.

For example, in our campaign with Level 3, a leading fiber-based communications company, we tracked whether prospects downloaded a vbook. Since the vbook explains the need for reliable connectivity (Level 3’s product), if the user browsed through several sections, we could reliably consider them a warm lead. The vbook also contained a Level 3 Network Map embedded as a PDF. If prospects downloaded it, we can assume they were checking if their building or business is within Level 3’s fiber network. PDF-checkers were hot leads, interested in Level 3’s solution, so we quickly passed these leads off to Level 3’s sales team to make the call in time.

The Level 3 Network Map is an example of a clear indicator, purposefully built into the content to determine interest. Other examples of clear indicator’s include business case builders, like we have used for Sun Microsystems, or ROI estimators, like we have recently used for Epicor Software and Progress Software. But passive profiling can be more complicated than that—consider the prospects with short attention spans who will rarely make it to a PDF.  To capture these users, we create more complex measuring grading systems that aggregate and compute interest based on engagement across multiple pieces of content. Let’s bring it back to Earth by returning to our Level 3 example. Image a prospect who never opened the PDF, but read a technical section of the vbook. They responded to a follow-up e-mail by logging into the microsite a second time, downloaded nothing, then logged in a third time with a third e-mail and downloaded a whitepaper. Examining their record of engagement we know they are probably educated about fiber and the issues from their engagement with the vbook and interested enough to return several times engaging with a second piece of content that interests them. We can reliably assume the prospect is a hot lead, and we never had to ask her any questions. The content cannot lie.  Exciting stuff!

What do you think? Are there limitations to passive profiling? Is there a way to meld active and passive profiling? I will be back with more thoughts tomorrow. And now I leave you with what the founding fathers of the internet clearly had in mind when they created it: funny cats.

Update: Just posted extended thoughts on how to redeem Active Profiling.

Updated Update: Refined thoughts on the perfect complement to Passive Profiling: Interactive Profiling.