Using Surveys for Lead Scoring - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #99
Written by Cody Young, ReachForce Customer Success Manager
Lead Scoring appears to be the newest tactic Marketers are using to better identify warm to hot leads for Sales. Marketing vendors like Marketo and Eloqua are promoting lead rating and lead scoring as a means to increase sales effectiveness and accelerate typical sales cycles. Both are measuring a contact’s interaction behaviors with marketing activities. But should a contact really be considered a hot lead if they open a few emails and visit your website a time or two? I think our Sales team might disagree here.
At ReachForce, we are doing a little lead scoring of our own. Instead of analyzing prospect behaviors, we are going directly to them and asking them to participate in a survey. By gathering qualifying information directly from the prospect, our customers are able to better target their messaging at these new prospects. By enabling them to get to the right buyers, in the right companies, with the right message, they are seeing increased marketing results and sales conversions.
Here are few tips we share with our customers when we’re building out a lead scoring survey.
Lead Scoring surveys can quickly:
- Qualify a company as a user of a certain technology or application – This type of question is to confirm if a prospect organization uses something that either compliments or competes with the survey sponsor’s offering.
- Find out respondent status: decision maker, a part of a decision making team or a secondary influencer – This type of question is useful when setting the stage for a sales call or marketing campaign so messaging can be made as relevant and personalized as possible.
- Find out how well the top 2‐3 product or service “key values” are recognized by each respondent – A “key value” is something that makes an offering better, unique or uncommonly relevant to the prospect. This type of question is used to find out if they will “get” your value proposition, or if education or special messaging is required.
- Measure how important key values are to each respondent – This follow up to Q3 is used to find out how important the respondent thinks the sponsor’s key values are. Combined scores to this set of questions are used to determine degree of interest and help make sales and marketing messaging relevant and personal when following up on the lead.
- Determine budget – This type of question is used to pinpoint how much the respondents’ organization spends (and by implication would expect to spend next time) on offerings similar to what the sponsor sells. Paying close attention to scores that are too low help sales and marketing teams prioritize.
- Confirm plan – This type of question helps find out when or how often the respondent is in the market for what the survey sponsor is selling. Questions like this can also be centered on finding trigger events (audits, budget planning, corporate initiatives) that create sales opportunity.
- Establish time line or “window of sales opportunity” – By combining the responses to “Confirm plan” and this type of question, the result is normally a reliable indication of when the respondent’s organization will begin the buying cycle for what the survey sponsor is selling.
The lead score you end up with for each prospect should help you to determine if the prospect can be immediately handed off to sales or put into a marketing campaign for further nurturing.
6 Responses to “Using Surveys for Lead Scoring - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #99”
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May 14th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Survey information can be a great way to get invaluable information for scoring, so thanks for this post. Just keep in mind that the data can be notoriously inaccurate. A MarketingSherpa study asked how often do people give accurate answers to these kinds of questions. Only 29% said always and 39% said sometimes; a full 32% said rarely or never.
I think augmenting survey data with behavioral data will provide the best scores since actions will always speak louder than words.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I love this idea. I just spoke with our marketing manager and I think we are going to try it out. Thanks for the post.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:01 am
Well agreed on both points–the positive and negative aspects of using surveys.
(+) Surveys are a wonderful way to get useful marketing information, including lead scoring…
(-) BUT, like the study said, survey information can be notoriously inaccurate.
As a survey consultant, I’ve approached this crux time and time again. How does one gather ENOUGH information? How does one gather ACCURATE information? Better yet… how do you get BOTH?
Getting ENOUGH? It boils down to some marketing 101. Make sure your survey tool follows the canonical practices of targeting, segmenting, automating, etc. etc. etc. Getting ACCURACY? Surveys, like every lead generation form, webinar signup, email collection device, etc…. work better when they’re short. There’s a ton of other best survey practices too (like using advanced logic, customization, brand extension, etc.) that’ll help you get more honest answers.
The survey solution I use, Cvent web surveys, to work with my clients is great for scoring — drop me a note if you’re interested. I’m relatively new to the blogging world, but I’ll try to include great content.
Here goes nothing — good topic for a first post.
ClassDC.COM
May 29th, 2008 at 9:24 am
Hi Cody!
Yes indeed, lead scording makes sense. But the adjectives most often associated with scoring are detrimental. Specifically, I urge marketers to lose the words “hot, medium, and cool” because no one believes them anyway. Likewise, lose “A, B, C” for the same reason. And above all, lose the terms “qualified” and “unqualified” because most leads are not one or the other, but are analog based on prospect circumstances, our efforts, and time.
What to do instead? Get marketers and sales people in the same room and hash out the genuine criteria for a viable, “sales-ready” lead. Rate the most important criteria and set a release threshold. Example: 28 point scale, leads release from marketing to sales at 20 points. No ambiguity, no wild goose chases.
Does it work? Oh my yes. My clients sales have increased as much as 31% with this approach. Sales and marketing get along much better, too.
Michael A. Brown
http://www.michaelabrown.net
May 30th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Thanks to all for the feedback on scoring database contacts with online surveys. Jon Miller’s post regarding the MarketingSherpa “study” (presumably a survey?) about 32% of survey respondents rarely or never telling truth when taking surveys presents quite a paradox, yes? But the point is well taken. I agree that a mix of different scoring approaches is essential, as long as the scoring methodologies and assigned values being used from one technique to the next produce “scores” that are apples to apples (subject of a whole post to be sure).
But this is a great opportunity to delve into the importance of subject matter relevancy when designing the survey campaign (or any campaign for that matter). My experience is that bogus responses usually come from people who have been wrongly targeted in the first place. It’s the “garbage in – garbage out” syndrome.
Doing a survey campaign using junk lists that are rented or downloaded from mass produced commercial databases is going to attract a lot of people who don’t see the questions as meaningful. Just like any other type of communications effort, the real key to success is approaching only those who see the encounter as highly relevant to their day-to-day role at the organization they work for. In other words, good targeting + good questions = good answers. High relevancy factors also produce high survey response rates. Please take a look at: http://www.reachforce.com/solutions/discover.jsp for more information about how “role-based” versus “typical title-based” database development can increase the relevancy of your overall marketing approach.
Using short surveys with simple, straightforward questions that leverage drop down or bulleted multiple choice responses help to avoid the “Q&A fatigue” that drives a person to provide bogus data.
I agree with David Chung that in most cases if you make it easy for a person to be honest they will be. If you make it hard, long, boring and irrelevant, they will just point and click and type anything to get through the survey and collect their reward.
Also, it should not be overlooked that the most simple truth being revealed when a person takes a survey is that they are demonstrating a propensity to be responsive. In this day and age I think we can all agree that this type of responsive behavior – as long as you have properly targeted (again, from a relevancy perspective) those you are sending the survey invitation to – is golden.
This segues to Michael Brown’s spot on comments about what it takes to gain agreement between sales and marketing about what a genuine, viable, “sales-ready” lead really is. Despite my original use of the term “hot lead,” I couldn’t agree more with his remarks. As a person who has worked on both sides of the sales and marketing fence, I propose that any methodology used to score and nurture a potential sales contact is – at the core - a function of developing a mutually agreed to, criteria-based view of what an “Ideal Client Profile” really looks like. I would like to discuss this important subject in another post, so stay tuned.
Again, thanks to you all for your feedback.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Cody, do you do guest speaker appearances for webinars? Can you let me know if this is possible?