Lead Scoring…Baby Steps – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #256
It’s the topic of discussion for so many webinars, whitepapers and blog posts (even here), but do you actually do lead scoring? Until very recently, we hadn’t figured out a way to incorporate all of the various technology tools (Eloqua for Marketing Automation, HubSpot for its unique Internet Marketing tracking/features and Salesforce.com for Sales Automation) we use into one comprehensive score. So the question is, how do you close the loop with that many systems interacting?
To regress a little bit, we have always had lead scoring on the list of to-do’s. It’s been on that list for easily the last three or four quarters, but each time it comes down to the wire either there’s not enough time or there is just so much for us to wrap together that it’s a little overwhelming. Honestly, it wasn’t a high priority this quarter, but our Sales team was looking for a way to prioritize the accounts they were working so we initially (accidentally) built an explicit lead scoring system. We set point values for things like:
- Having key players in the decision making unit in our CRM and/or knowing that they exist
- Knowing if the prospect markets to more than one vertical (and what space they play in)
- What Marketing Automation system the prospect uses
- What CRM the prospect uses
- ASP (Average Sales Price)
Eventually this all gets tabulated into a score (and the information collected in creating the score), that score determines a few things. First, what kind of marketing messages the contacts within the account get and secondly, whether or not the rep even wants them followed up with. That second item is determined by a score in the negative range…we’ve got some accounts that our reps don’t want to work with for specific reasons and those automatically get a -100 added to their score so we can better differentiate them from the rest of the crowd.
Originally this was good for us, we felt that it was a start towards the lead scoring we wanted to have and that it would give our sales team the info they needed to better prioritize their follow up. Well it left something out…in focusing only on the accounts they were selling in to, we left out the leads they still need to follow up with in order to efficiently prospect for new business. So we went back to the drawing board.
Our next pass ended up being a more implicitly focused lead score. With the help of one of our more development minded co-workers, we were able to employ an Apex Trigger in salesforce.com that checks for activity on the lead records and gives a score according to the frequency and creator of the activity. To speak slightly more English (and less tech), if a lead has 3-5 activities from either HubSpot or Eloqua, meaning a form download, website activity or email open, created within a 3 month timeframe then they are ‘cold’ – if they have 3-5 activities within a 1 month timeframe then they are ‘warm’ and if they have 3-5 activities within a week they are ‘hot.’ Our basic idea being that within salesforce.com we set up views of cold-warm-hot leads and our reps can just follow up with those, instead of worrying about who is coming out of what nurture cycle behind the scenes. So the sales team essentially gets a window on who is actually raising their hand and only those who do so often enough to be considered interest in us and our products.
By no means have we completed this process but we’re definitely off to a start. Closing the loop between our various tools one score at a time…do you score your leads, if so, how?
Friday, August 28th, 2009















What is LoopFuse?



