Thanks to Kevin Joyce at Market2Lead for his post earlier this week.  In addition to learning about Market2Lead, we want to share with our readers one of their whitepapers, Increase Lead-to-Sales Ratios with Effective Lead Qualification and Scoring.  In it Market2Lead’s CEO Geoff Rego walks through some key pieces to developing a robust Lead Scoring process.  Some of the highlights:

1. Define ‘Qualified’ – this is something we’ve spoken about before on the B2B Lead (check out Amy’s post, What is a Lead? What is a Prospect?), it’s key to make sure your entire team is on the same page when it comes to what a qualified lead is, what a prospect is, etc.
2. Qualify your leads in stages – don’t assume that you can qualify all of your leads at once or one time, you should continuously be in the process of qualifying what is in your database as well as what is coming into your database.  By the same token, make sure you’re also disqualifying things continuously too!  (We’ve chatted about ways to disqualify)
3. Get help!  If you can’t do this alone (which is pretty likely), use technology.  There are numerous tools out there, both within Marketing Automation Systems and things you can build yourself within Sales Force Automation tools that can score your leads for you.  It’s reasonable to assume you can qualify a few hundred (or even a few thousand) leads with good eyes and some manpower, it’s a bit overwhelming to assume you can qualify tens of thousands (or more) leads by yourself.  Don’t let this task overwhelm you, look for software that can help.
4. Do this now!  Don’t wait to implement lead scoring and qualification practices, it may not be perfect the first time around but getting the ball rolling is an important step.  The faster you start, the more ‘gems’ you might find in your own data.

Need more tips on Lead Scoring? Check out the Market2Lead white paper!

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?

Lead Scoring is hot right now and for good reason. As marketers, we finally have the technology tools available to enable us to score and qualify leads before passing them off to sales.  What a lot of people are talking about is activity based or implicit lead scoring. This means scoring a lead based on the actions they are taking like downloading an eBook or attending a demo.  There is another side to lead scoring, explicit or attribute based lead scoring.  This is a way of scoring a lead based on things like title, geography or industry.

Here are some actions to consider for implicit lead scoring:

• content download
• email open/click-through
• website visit
  • number of pages visited
  • time on site
  • time spent on product pages
  • time spent on careers page
• event attendance
• viewed webinar
• viewed product demo

When you are scoring a lead based on their actions, remember that some actions will actually lower a lead’s score.  You might consider taking points off for those leads that are visiting your careers page.  Also remember to track inactivity.  A lead that was hot six months ago but has had no activity in the past six months should probably lose points and be downgraded from hot lead status until they re-engage.

Here are some attributes to consider for explicit lead scoring:

• title
• department
• industry
• budget
• propensity to purchase
• role in the decision making unit

If you don’t have all of this information about your leads you can gather it through your web lead forms or through surveys.  We have found internally that our sales team prefers to know more about a lead’s explicit attributes rather that their actions.

The best lead scoring programs will have both explicit and implicit components.  Talk to your sales team to find out what they value most.  They will also have insight into what types of leads convert.  Look back to see where your current customers came from.  Did they download a certain whitepaper?  Did they click through a specific email?  Did they attend a webinar?  Determine your ideal buyer profile.  Are they VP level?  What industry are they in?

Once you have your lead scoring program in place, don’t forget to educate your sales team on what that means.  Make sure they know how the lead attained the score.  Also be sure to allow sales to turn those leads back to you if inactivity warrants further nurturing.  No matter how well you research ahead of time to score the leads the most approriately this is still a learning process. Ask for feedback from your sales team to make sure you really are passing over hot leads and adjust your programs as necessary.  Happy scoring!

B2B Marketers have been going through big changes the last couple of years.  With marketing automation tools/platforms coming on strong, so are the questions of ROI and the effect marketing really has on the top line.

Our jobs have changed, we are no longer responsible for just general awareness and filling the top of the sales funnel.  Instead, we are tasked with moving leads from cold to close and building a closed loop feedback system with Sales along the way.

Eloqua, one of our partners, has a new whitepaper, The Springboard Effect, that does a great job of describing how our roles have changed and what is now expected of a best-in-class B2B Marketer.

Here’s a few interesting bites from The Springboard Effect:

• Jaap Favier, Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research, emphasized that intelligence will be a key differentiator in the way companies survive a downturn.  “The name of the new marketing game: targeting.”

We love hearing this, it’s what we’re all about here at ReachForce.

• Aberdeen Group says that “companies with best-in-class lead prioritization and scoring systems have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.”

• According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.  Of the remaining, 70% of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.

Ok – here’s the MOST INTERESTING part – SiriusDecisions goes on to say that 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

WOW – look at all of the opportunity lost!

Interesting stuff here, be sure to check out the rest for yourself.

This is the 7th in a series discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEITM) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback.  (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6)

Here is the outline we’ve been following:

1. CEI Initiative Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
4. Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
5. Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions
6. (We are here) Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting

So far we’ve gathered then used CEI response data for scoring to examine three existing customer scenarios as examples:

• An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
• Applying CEI-metrics for better account-by-account management planning
• Building CEI-lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.

Next on the list is to take a look at using CEI response data to help locate, target and engage with net-New prospects.

Reference Account Management

The most obvious and useful way CEI scoring benefits the new sales process is the buttoned down way it sorts advocacy dynamics and pinpoints which current customers would make the best references based on data analysis, not on someone’s opinion. There is nothing more powerful from a news sales perspective than having a well stocked supply of sales ready references. It happens every day across the world, thousands of times a day ― a sales person bursts into the marketing or account manager’s office needing three references to connect with their prospect. Not only is the list of needed attributes arms length, but it all needs to happen before tomorrow afternoon. Sound familiar? Yes it does.

This scenario takes us back to the first exercise we did for determining what a customer’s advocacy rating is. Remember it’s a matter of reading how a customer feels about their entire experience with your company using a scoring schema that takes metrics from both qualitative (loyalty) and quantitative (satisfaction) feedback into account. So if asked to produce recommendations about what customers should be the best sales-ready references we’d produce response scores rendered from a two-step lens build that would look something like this:

Step 1 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts

Once each row on the customer list has an assigned CEI Advocacy Score, simply sort this column in descending order and in combination with the column for customer response time to your survey plus overall satisfaction scores, plus Key Weight. This  (if you remember back to the 1st and 2nd posts in this series) is because the survey invitations were sent as an integrated campaign, i.e. first an email, then another, then a phone call reminder from the account manager, then another from an executive, then perhaps another email, etc., thus determining how quick to respond each survey taker was. It stands to reason that someone who responded quickly in combination with high scores from Advocacy, Satisfaction and Key Weight are going to be a good sales ready reference account.

Step 2 Top 10 Sales Ready Reference Accounts

So the above mentioned sort produces a top 10 list based on:

Next week we’ll cover ways to build rules-based profiles of your most successful customers and your relationships with them and then use the data to score how well new company targets match the rules.

This is the fifth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 4 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title and Predictable vs. Spray and Pray.

Deliberate Marketing doesn’t involve capturing any and all leads, then tossing them over the fence to sales. Deliberate Marketing is about engaging with prospects, understanding their needs and scoring them based on their interests and behavior to determine their stage in the buying cycle. It’s about nurturing them with targeted communications and offers until they are ready to engage with sales.

A prospect that downloads a whitepaper probably needs to be further nurtured by marketing before being passed on to sales, whereas a prospect that requests a 30-day trial can be immediately handed off to sales.  This is different for each business; be sure to have an agreement with sales on when leads should be handed over.

With a Deliberate Marketing approach, B2B Marketers can ensure their leads receive the proper follow-up and that buyers are not discarded simply because they are not ready to make a purchase immediately.  Feedback loops between marketing and sales are necessary so that any leads that are passed to sales too early can be sent back to marketing for continued nurturing.

This is the second post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first post on Intention vs. Attention.

Sales teams are always clamoring for more leads but smart marketers know that what they really need to deliver are qualified buyers.  A lead status is often applied to anyone who fills out a form on your website or stops by your trade show booth.  Rather than tossing that list of names over to sales, marketers must nurture those leads and weed out the good from the bad, those with budget and need from those still in the education phase.

Deliberate Marketing ensures marketers can extract the most value from their marketing programs based on using the most cost-effective method to move prospects and buyers through the funnel. It is not focused on simply filling the marketing and sales funnel with contacts and expecting sales to follow-up on any lead that downloads a whitepaper.

Deliberate Marketing is about profiling the best possible buyers, recruiting more buyers that are just like them, and then executing the most effective techniques possible to move the prospect through each stage of the funnel.

If you’ve been doing B2B Marketing for any length of time you know who Brian Carroll is.  If you don’t know who he is, you should.  His eBook, Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation, is a must read for “lead generation specialists committed  to the long-term proposition that digging for leads, educating prospects, navigating the nuances of the complex sale and creating new, high-level return on investment is what has brought lead generation to the position it enjoys in the marketing hierarchy today”.

I read this eBook a couple of years ago but I was due a refresher.  While all 8 factors are important to lead generation success, I pulled out a few things we could all benefit from doing or ensuring on a more regular basis.  My summary and highlights by no means replaces reading the eBook.

• Remember you are creating conversations, not campaigns – “Companies don’t buy, people do.”  With each lead generation initiative we are developing an ongoing relationship with the prospect.  We are educating and providing value with each touch.  Or at least we should be.
• Be sure you have identified an Ideal Customer Profile before getting started – we’ve talked about personas many times on The B2B Lead. Building out the ideal customer profile makes everyone’s job easier.  Why wouldn’t you do it?
• Universal Lead Definition – it’s key that both Sales and Marketing agree on this.  “There is consensus that sales functionaries fail to act on nearly 80% of the leads they get, largely because most of the leads aren’t qualified, or because appropriate buyers haven’t been identified and targeted.”
• Your database – your most valuable marketing asset.  “The properly designed and well-maintained database is the hub of all lead generation activity and communication.”
• Lead nurturing – we all know it takes multiple touches to turn a contact to a lead and a lead to a real prospect.  “Lead nurturing is not a single marketing campaign, but rather a series of steps and communication tactics with the objective of developing and building a relationship with the potential customer.”  Automation tools make this easier than ever.  No more excuses to not nurturing.

This is only a few highlights from the eBook, now go read it yourself if you haven’t already.  If nothing else, the pictures/diagrams are worth your time.

Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, Inc. part of the MECLABS Group that owns MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw-Hill 2006) and the B2B Lead Generation Blog with expertise related to B2B marketing, lead generation and complex sales.

Once you’re done with this one go ahead and download next week’s eBook – HubSpot’s Get Found Online.  We’ll be chatting about it next Thursday here on The B2B Lead.

Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for marketing automation software company Marketo.

There’s always been a lot of drama around how marketing can best contribute to and improve the sales cycle. In fact, one common way to measure the effectiveness of a new marketing initiative is by looking for improvements in the sales cycle. Businesses have always focused on the sales cycle, so that’s the way to go, right? Wrong!

Companies need to stop thinking only about the sales cycle and instead focus on what I call the “Revenue Cycle,” which starts from the day you first meet a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. The old model of a linear handoff from marketing to sales must give way to an intertwined model where both organizations jointly own prospect relationships and coordinate their activities. To use an analogy, imagine a fighter jet that first ran with just the left engine, then turned that engine off and lit up the right engine. That’s pretty inefficient compared to lighting both engines and going full speed!

Before defining the revenue cycle in more depth, it is worth examining why the traditional “sales cycle” is the wrong model for businesses to follow. The primary reason is that the sales cycle looks at only a portion of the complete revenue process, and this presents two main problems:

• Looking at sales alone as the predictor of revenue is misleading – with sales only, companies can’t manage and guide growth beyond the current or subsequent quarter. The Sales cycle can usually predict revenue in the short term, but because the sales forecast is based on what a specific account will do at a specific time, it becomes increasingly inaccurate for predicting future revenue. Asking the sales organization — which by definition is focused on revenue in the near term — to predict revenue in future quarters is typically highly misleading. For this, a company should look to the function that is inherently focused on the long term: the marketing organization.
•  Inefficiencies are killing productivity and marketing budgets – without the right processes in place, sales is less effective and companies are wasting marketing budgets. The traditional model of a sales cycle that begins when sales accepts a marketing lead or contacts a prospect directly results in waste and inefficiency. It means as much as 50% of sales time is spent on unproductive prospecting, while reps simultaneously ignore 80% of marketing leads. We’ve estimated that the resulting lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget costs companies at least $1 trillion a year. The sales cycle mentality also ignores the fact that throughout the customer lifecycle (before, during, and after sales interacts with a prospect or customer), marketing has been and will continue to touch the prospect with marketing messages via the website, campaigns, advertising, and PR.

So how do you start driving your business by managing the Revenue Cycle? The Revenue Cycle requires coordinating marketing and sales activities throughout the entire cycle to generate maximum impact. The key is to realize that marketing and sales bring different strengths to the process. Marketing brings a long-term view, sales brings an action-oriented view. Marketing is good at one-to-many communications, automated processes, and dealing with lots of data; sales is good at building personal relationships and leveraging the human touch.

The Revenue Cycle must start from the day a company first meets a prospect and continue through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. As marketing and sales coordinate their activities as part of a unified Revenue Cycle, companies will get better at lead scoring and properly identifying and prioritizing opportunities. That creates better quality leads that result in easier and better quality sales cycles, with more wins and ultimately more revenue. While there will still be a time when primary ownership of a lead shifts, the Revenue Cycle eliminates the “handoff” from marketing to sales. Instead, both functions should be engaged in the right way throughout the entire Revenue Cycle: lead nurturing campaigns can come on behalf of the sales rep, marketing messages and the website can continue to support the sales process once sales does engage, and sales leads that go cold can be recycled back to marketing. With marketing and sales acting as equally important drivers of revenue, companies can gain a picture of the complete revenue process, ensuring that leads are properly nurtured and do not fall out of the cycle midway and get lost.

Of course, truly replacing the sales cycle with a coordinated Revenue Cycle is easier said than done, but the benefits are clear: increased sales productivity, greater return on marketing spending, and better visibility into the long-term performance and health of the business. What company doesn’t want to be able to better predict revenue and grow their business? The shift won’t happen overnight, but the first step is changing our thinking and embracing the new model: the Revenue Cycle.

For more tips like this one, download ReachForce’s eBook on 10 Tips for Marketing and Sales Alignment co-sponsored by Marketo.

B2B marketing is all about driving sales, right?  The most effective teams know that alignment of marketing and sales is a requirement for productive lead generation and customer growth.

We’ve had sales pipeline metrics in place forever, I sometimes wonder why we as Marketers got to skate along all this time with no accountability…that’s a post for another day maybe…

With today’s sales force automation and marketing automation solutions, we as Marketers are now able to prove our worth with every campaign or program we launch.

Here’s a few metrics we here at ReachForce track to ensure we are driving valuable sales activity and customer growth.

• # of net new companies from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of net new contacts (right role, not just anyone) from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of contacts being touched with a marketing message each week; net new contacts vs. those in nurture programs (and of course, we track opens and click throughs)
• # of inbound requests
• # of people hitting a landing page, then jumping to corporate site for product/service info.  (we do newsletter and search engine advertising driving people to best practice content accessible via a landing page)
• # of people originating at The B2B Lead (ReachForce blog) and jumping to the ReachForce corporate site (product pages, solution pages)
• # of new sales meetings set from marketing lead generation programs
• # of marketing leads moved to the qualification stage of our sales pipeline
• # of marketing leads moving to a proposal, and of course closing

Once a new customer is onboard I then go back and identify what activities were involved in moving this lead to being a new customer so I can be sure to do more of it.

Now of course there is a list of metrics similar to this for each initiative you take on.  It’s always important to outline goals and expectations of each program so that you are sure to spend your time and resources on the best producing programs.

Do you measure anything not on this list?  If so, please share.