The road to sales hell is paved with good intentions – most of them innocently offered up by the marketing department. If marketing does a good job of selling the message, then a large response rate from one or more marketing activities seems like a victory.
The result, however, is that salespeople have to cope with a deluge of ‘leads’ which have not been vetted, filtered or ranked. How can sales teams differentiate between, say, a genuine lead who has had meaningful interaction with the company, and someone who has merely given their email address solely so they can download a piece of content from the business’s website?
The inability to segment and score leads is not just unproductive – it also alienates those who might one day be future customers. Naturally, good sales teams only want to target the most likely prospects; if they can’t tell the difference between a hot and a cold lead, then they spend much of their days wasting everybody’s time.
Lead qualification is always a subjective activity, yet in a world of big data, analytics and modern marketing technology, businesses are wondering why they cannot perform the similar yet simpler task of qualifying leads effectively.
The desire for a better, more effective way of qualifying new customers is the driving force behind the increasing popularity of lead scoring models, which are gaining popularity among marketers and sales teams alike.
There are two steps involved in scoring a lead. The first thing to determine is whether or not a lead fits your ideal customer profile (Do they have the right job title? Do they work in the right industry?). The next step is to collect the prospect’s behavioural information, which you can gather from his or her digital “body language”: the combined record of all and any interactions between the organisation and prospects. This can include visits to your web site, downloading content, opening and reading marketing emails, and so forth. With this insight into a lead’s personality and behaviour, marketers can ensure only the strongest leads get passed onto sales.
Clearly, this task is impossible to accomplish manually. Modern marketing technologies, however, enable businesses to analyse and process the full range of interactions very rapidly, and identify the prospects with the “body language” that makes them the most likely leads. By reducing the number of cold leads, sales teams can focus their efforts on genuinely engaged customers and on increasing revenue for the business. It also means less time wasted on ineffective and counterproductive tactics like cold calling, which can do so much to alienate potential customers.
Global security software firm McAfee gives a great illustration of how lead scoring strengthens the relationship between marketing and sales. The company’s marketing team had become so effective at generating responses to multi-channel marketing activity that its sales pipeline was overflowing and the sales team was overworked trying to sort out which leads were worth pursuing. After implementing a lead scoring programme the company saw a 35 per cent fall in the number of qualified leads sent to sales. As so often, less is more: the reduction in leads led to a fourfold improvement in its lead-to-opportunity conversation rate, since McAfee was better able to focus on those they were most likely to close.
Naturally, when introducing a modern lead scoring model marketers won’t necessarily get things right instantly. The process usually involves continuous testing and refinement with the sales team. Before embarking on a transformation project, there are several things to consider including:
- Getting buy-in from sales and other key stakeholders
- Securing agreement on what characteristics define different lead-classes and on how each of these types of opportunities will be handled. Otherwise, the handoff process will bottleneck and you will lose the benefits of speed and efficiency that automated lead scoring should bring
- Using software that can capture information on leads, facilitate the handoff to sales, and process feedback. While employees will shape and manage the lead scoring process, you need the technology to make that all possible
The benefits of automatic lead scoring – to the business, to sales and marketing departments, and to the prospects themselves – make this a very easy sell indeed. For businesses that have yet to implement modern marketing techniques, now is the moment to stop wasting everybody’s time.
By Sylvia Jensen, Senior Director of Marketing at Oracle Marketing Cloud.
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