Two people defined Progressive Profiling.
I was meeting with a client in Boston. They are a well-known company, so their website is very popular website that generates lots of sign-ups. Note that I did not call these leads. Please note that Marketo calls raw sign-ups Names, and not Leads. This client is passing these raw names to Sales. (Needless to say, Sales thinks Marketing leads are “crap” in this company.”)
The client said to me “I can’t wait to get lead nurturing in so we can process all of these.” I replied “Lead nurturing will help a lot, but you’ll see huge benefits from lead scoring.”
I went on to explain how they can collect information about the names. “While you may only ask for name and email at first, in each visit you can ask for another piece of information, such as Company, Title or Number of Employees. Over time you’ll build a complete record. This approach is called Progressive Profiling.”
Then a new person entered the room. He used to work for one of the big marketing automation vendors. The problem with names came up. Before either of us could say a word, he jumped in with his ‘answer.’ “You can use Progressive Profiling to address that. In each session we’ll capture another field and append the prospect record. We’ll keep appending it till the record is complete.”
Which do you prefer? Talk like an executive or like a programmer? “Ask for info” vs “Capture fields and append the record?” Words make a difference, I think.
What do you think? Do you dislike ‘programmer speak’ too? We love comments and people who share our content.
