Overview
Sona assigns buying stages for each visitor and account profile to help you identify where they currently are in your sales and marketing funnel. This guide shows you how to use buying stages to segment leads for more effective nurturing and sales outreach.
The different buying stages that Sona implements are defined as follows:
Awareness: indicates an initial interest or need for your product.
Consideration: prospects are actively searching for solutions to their problem.
Decision: prospects are shortlisting and evaluating their available options.
Purchase: prospects are on the verge of converting.
These buying stages are determined by analyzing multiple data points, such as pages visited, total active time, intent signals, ICP fit score, and, in the case of accounts, the number of tracked visitors.
You can use buying stages to split up prospects and leads into different audience segments. You can then target each segment with campaigns that are tailored to address their specific needs and influence them to move to the next stage.
This is especially helpful in the B2B space where sales cycles tend to be longer, because it lets you identify and re-engage leads that have dropped off or are stuck at a particular stage of the funnel. It can also help you identify and address gaps in your content marketing and outreach efforts.
Step 1: add filters
Configure a new filter for the Buying Stage that you want to address. The Buying Stage filter is available in the Web Visitors, Accounts, and People pages.
Add more filters to further refine the dataset so that it only lists qualified leads.
Experiment with various combinations of filters to better understand the different types of leads found in each buying stage, which can help guide your go-to-market strategy.
Step 2: create an audience
Once you have settled on a set of filters and are happy with the resulting dataset, you can save it as an Audience segment.
You can create multiple audience segments for each buying stage, allowing you to target them with more personalized offers and impactful messaging that addresses their current needs.
Audience datasets are automatically updated whenever new visitors or accounts match your filter criteria.
Step 3: sync where you build your campaigns
Sync your buying stage audience segments to other platforms using Destinations.
Destinations are designed to automatically sync and push data into the tools you are already using, ensuring you are always working with the freshest data and the warmest leads.
You can further analyze or enrich an audience segment once it is synced to other platforms to make the lead data more actionable.
Build targeted campaigns using your marketing automation tools and email sequencers with the help of the data-driven insights you have gained while creating and analyzing different audience segments.
Final thoughts
Categorizing and segmenting leads by buying stage helps you identify the characteristics of the audiences that you are attracting and gives you a clearer picture of what needs to be done to get them through your sales funnel. This lets you create more effective targeted campaigns across multiple channels, ensuring better returns on ad spend, content marketing, outreach, and other sales and marketing activities. Buying stages are a powerful metric because they bring to light insights that are often obscured by the overwhelming amount of raw data that needs to be analyzed.
FAQs
What buying stages does Sona track?
What buying stages does Sona track?
Sona tracks four buying stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Purchase. Each stage is determined by analyzing data points like pages visited, total active time, intent signals, ICP fit score, and, for accounts, the number of tracked visitors.
Why segment leads by buying stage?
Why segment leads by buying stage?
Segmenting by buying stage lets you target each group with campaigns tailored to their specific needs, which is especially useful in B2B sales cycles that tend to be longer. It helps you identify and re-engage leads that have dropped off or are stuck at a particular stage, and spot gaps in your content marketing and outreach.
How do I turn a buying stage segment into a campaign?
How do I turn a buying stage segment into a campaign?
Filter Web Visitors, Accounts, or People by Buying Stage, save the result as an Audience, then sync that Audience to your marketing tools using Destinations. Audiences update automatically as new visitors or accounts match your filter criteria, so your campaigns stay targeted at the freshest, warmest leads.