Intent Signals Aren't Conversions

Recently, a popular SaaS platform automatically enrolled previous attendees as joining the next annual occurrence. The strategy of "assuming the sale" isn't a new one, but how far is too far? How do you define what intent counts towards which metric?

What is an intent signal anyways? If you think it is an action taken by a potential buyer that correlates to moving forward in a customer journey, you're correct. Where this goes awry is defining that action within a linear journey.

Customer Journeys aren't Linear

While businesses have to play part mind-reader, part data analyst, there are some premises that regardless of the data points you can pull out of them, are somewhat flawed to start. The biggest is the notion that a customer journey is linear. This happens because Businesses need to start somewhere and the linear journey does have some merit. If you never heard of the company it would be impossible to convert. Maybe you agree, that everything that happens between first touch and last touch or even afterwards, through customer success, has a ton of variability in perception. Many customers maintain an air of ambivalence, lack of concrete emotional tie down or deep preference through their brand experience. They might not even care about getting the job done that the product or service provides.

It's hard to run your business caring in explicit measures of success or OKRs being too inclusive of the spectrum of attraction, or potential attraction. The entire exercise would be easier if people were logical and robotic, but they are not. Some aspects are "dark" or just qualitative.

You Can't Define Intent

Apologies for the clickbait, but pushing a definition of intent at your customers is the same as telling someone angry that they should calm down. It's emotionally unintelligent. Understanding customer intent requires consent- a dialogue of sorts between customer behaviors, conversations and internal hypotheses. Where this goes wrong, is making assumptions about the motivations of behaviors. A popular example is filling out a form to download an asset. There is a wide range of nuance that needs to be included in the discussion of whether or not it shows buying intent. For example, someone newer to the industry may want the asset to learn about the industry and not care about the author's brand. Competitors may want the asset to measure their own content against. Someone may have been served a PPC ad, downloaded it having no clue what its about until receiving it and bounced from there. The asset may be off-base from what even matters to help a customer move forward in their likeliness to convert but on-base to the ad that was served that got them there.

Solutions For Dealing with Intent Signals

The best way to deal with a complicated matter is to make it simple. Ask. Marry the "old way" of defining intent signals with an opt-in. Ask the potential customers if they would ALSO like to continue their journey to potentially purchase. Redefine a perceived behavioral intent signal as an explicit, but appropriate, statement from the customer instead of assuming their motivation. The benefits of this are stronger relationships, and a clear MQL (marketing qualified lead) that can be attributed within a CRM instead of paying for platforms that essentially guess. Another benefit is serving different types of more closely aligned retargeting or nurturing sequences. The person who behaved in the previous intent signal may get more introductory content served toward them, they already let you know they're just not there yet, if they ever even get there. However, now you have a more explicit opted in MQL. They can be further served more relevant to their behavior and therefore more resonating content to help them decide if your product or service is right for them.

While this seems like a fairly obvious conclusion, it starts with the culture, mindset and partnership with the customers as a foundation. Things like market research- both quantitative and qualitative, familiarity with contemporary buying preferences and a curiosity are crucial acts and attributes the organization has to believe in.

When it comes to human behavior, true or false decisions based on someone else's actions are most accurate when you include the ability for them to communicate what they were actually thinking. Unlike the company that decided previous attendance was automatically intended to repeat attendance.

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