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.

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

(+) 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

I think augmenting survey data with behavioral data will provide the best scores since actions will always speak louder than words.