surveys and polls

Some of what you want to know about your leads is straightforward. Other data only becomes clear after some effort. Basic contact data is only the beginning of what you can learn about your leads – and often, all you need to do is ask. Not all questions are created equal, though. Here’s how to gather more in-depth data and put it to work by asking questions that encourage engagement.

Self-Assessment Tools

A great way to introduce concepts to your audience while learning more about them is through a self-assessment quiz. The questions you ask and the phrasing of your answers are a discovery process for leads, but they also guide your marketing and sales approaches. Asking about their awareness of a given problem or what they’re currently doing to address it gives you deep insight into what your leads need so you can start to deliver specific solutions.

Polls

Sometimes a little Twitter poll can make a huge impact. It takes leads less than a second to share an opinion, but with a well-designed poll, you’re able to take the pulse of a large audience. A well-designed social media poll is brief enough to take in at a glance, long enough to provide some detail, and catchy enough to draw a response. Here’s an example of a Twitter poll we ran to learn more about how our customers felt about their current level of sales and marketing integration. The answers we got helped shape our Sales/Marketing Integration guide, making it more useful to our customers.

Surveys

Surveys let you drill deeper into the motivations of everyone from first-time site visitors to longtime customers. While a self-assessment quiz tells leads more about themselves, surveys expressly ask them to tell you more. For example, a self-quiz might ask leads to rate their own comfort level with technology. A survey question might ask them for their opinions on your software.

A survey’s typically more involved than a poll, so use them sparingly, and consider offering incentives for filling them out. Good times to offer surveys include:

  • After an initial site visit
  • After a recent purchase
  • As an annual check-in with loyal customers
  • As a follow-up to a recent customer service interaction

Comment Sections

When you ask open-ended questions in blog posts, you frequently get enlightening answers. Like other data, these can become part of a master account file so your sales and marketing teams can access the information later. Let’s say you write a blog post about the five biggest mistakes CEOs can make and ask readers if they have other suggestions or remember a time they successfully avoided these pitfalls. In one response, a lead’s concerned about making one of these mistakes; that’s your cue to offer a specific solution.

Whether it’s a Twitter poll or a longer question-and-answer session, the answers your leads give you reveal more about them. Encourage interaction with polls and self-tests; you and your leads will both learn a lot.

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