Cash Flow Statement as a Metaphor: Sources and Uses of Leads

Earlier, we introduced the financial metaphors for balance sheet and income statement when looking at B2B marketing analysis. Following on the same financial metaphor, a “cash flow” statement can show valuable insights into the sources and uses of leads, allowing you to dashboard the lead flow within your organization in order to understand which territories, product lines, or business segments are seeing more lead flow than others, and whether the leads are being successfully converted into opportunities.

Understanding which sales teams are seeing the best sourcing of leads gives a good sense of whether there is any imbalance in the lead flows. For example, in the following data, you can see that although the West is generally getting more leads, they are of significantly lower quality. Similarly, while there are lots of leads for Widget B being generated, there is a significant imbalance in lead flow to reps in the East.





With this understanding of which territories, product lines, and salespeople are provided with leads, the next step is to provide insight into the outcome of those leads once they have been handed off to sales. Done properly, the disposition of leads by a sales team after they attempt to connect with them should not only trigger a marketing process to correctly handle the leads, but also provide clear insights into the quality of the leads. If the leads were unreachable, lacked interest, were not the right role, or only had early stage interest, this insight allows marketing to see whether there are potential quality issues with their leads.

Likewise, if certain sales reps are doing a poor job in following up with the leads they are given, this will also show up in the analytics of lead disposition. In the following lead disposition chart, for example, you can see that both Bob Clark and Jane Chen received a large number of leads, but failed to convert many of them to opportunities, instead resorting to voicemails or calling back in 90 days. This may be an indication of a performance or training challenge with these two sales reps.



The more visibility we introduce to our processes for building interest, qualifying leads, handing them to sales, and having sales connect in order to grow a revenue opportunity, the better we are able to improve those processes. The cash flow statement, as a metaphor, provides a great way to look at which sales teams are getting good sources of leads, and what the uses of those leads are. The ability to optimize this lead flow or guide the sales team's response lets us optimize revenue quickly and effectively. Read More...

Sales and Marketing Alignment: Operational Challenges Might be a Good Sign

I often get asked how one measures success in aligning marketing and sales. Alignment is a fairly fuzzy concept, so it’s hard to find a definitive metric to look at in order to determine alignment. However, there are some very interesting signs of great progress that I have seen a number of times that are worth highlighting. One of those signs is when the different operational styles of marketing and sales become an observed problem. That is actually a symptom of growing alignment between sales and marketing.

What does that mean?

Sales and marketing are very different organizations with very different natural ways of operating. Marketing, even in forward-leaning organizations that have invested heavily in lead nurturing, is often organized around campaigns or events. Sales, being very much a people discipline, is organized around sales people’s time.

This operational style become very apparent when your sales and marketing teams become very closely aligned around the sales lead handoff process. In this process, leads from marketing are handed to sales for follow-up, and sales calls in to those leads to engage with them and work towards an opportunity. However, the natural propensity of marketing to run campaigns or events, which generate a point-in-time spike in leads, begins to conflict with the sales team’s ability to follow-up on those leads, which is governed by the number of sales people on the team, and the number of hours in a day.

It is usually very difficult to make instantaneous adjustments in the number of sales people available to call hot leads, and the number of hours in a day is even more difficult to adjust. This leaves a challenging disconnect. As we’ve addressed earlier, the ability to connect with leads successfully is very dependent on the speed with which you follow up, so this disconnect has significant implications on sales success.

If a marketing campaign generates a spike of marketing qualified leads on a Monday, for example, and those leads are passed to sales, there will likely be an overwhelming number of leads for that Monday. The calls will spill over into Tuesday, and Wednesday, where the sales team will face declining success rates due to the elapsed time, and by Thursday, the sales team will be out of leads.

A far better solution would be to “throttle” marketing campaigns so that a more steady stream of leads flows to sales. Not all campaigns can be throttled, but many can. If there is to be an outbound email marketing campaign that generates leads, it is better to split it into 5 equal sections and spread it over 5 days than it is to send it all at once. Not only will the sales team not be overwhelmed with leads on one day, but the increase in successful connections they make will keep them busier with the same number of leads as in the original scenario.

When marketing and sales begin to get more closely aligned, the operational differences between the two groups become more apparent. Many of the challenges your teams will face in shifting their operations to be better in synch are actually signs of a growing level of alignment. Read More...

Evaluating Marketing Automation/CRM Integration

In a recent post, we talked about the three key elements in the Marketing Automation/CRM integration stack; data, activity, and process. This gives a good sense of the key elements that need to be integrated in order to have a seamless flow of the business process between marketing and sales. The next challenge in evaluating an integration between your marketing automation and CRM systems is understanding how to approach the integration. Depending on what systems you are using, and how complex your requirements are, this can end up in one of 4 buckets, each of which has its own unique characteristics.

The way to think about this is a 2X2 matrix. The first dimension is whether your Marketing Automation software is natively “aware” of the CRM system you are working with or not. The second dimension is whether your business processes for the integration are standard, or customized.

Native Support of Chosen CRM System

There is much confusion in the industry on this point, as the claim to “be able to integrate with” a particular CRM system leaves much to be clarified. There are, to significantly simplify, two main approaches to an integration. In one method, the marketing automation system itself is natively aware of the API calls of the CRM provider, and can update data, make notes of web activity, or create leads as appropriate.

The second method, however, is a more passive approach. Instead of taking care of the calls directly and natively, the information is provided through an API, and is available for integration as needed, but a third party integration tool would likely be required. This approach definitely allows integration, but requires a more technical investment on behalf of the organization looking to perform the integration.


Standard or Custom Business Process

When examining the business processes for the integration, many businesses will discover that they have unique requirements that are outside of the standard and typical business flows. Unique sources of data for segmentation, lead scoring criteria that come from your CRM system, novel lead handoff or claw-back processes with sales, or data requirements based on analysis needs can all drive custom integration processes.

Depending on your approach to integration – native support or non-native support – these custom process requirements can be handled in different ways.


Integration Scenarios, and Questions to Ask

Each integration scenario leads to different integration considerations. Each allows integration, and each can lead to a very successful and viable integration, but the difference are important to be aware of.

Standard Business Process, Native CRM System

This is the best available option, as it combines standard business processes with a known, and natively supported CRM platform. This should be a very quick process, and ideally will incorporate best practices and experience into the standard integration processes that are enabled. If this is the situation you find yourself in, ask questions around the marketing automation provider’s experience with that CRM platform:
- How many integrated clients do you have on that specific CRM system?
- Are you that CRM vendor’s recommended provider of marketing automation?
- If custom business process requirements arise down the road, is there the flexibility to customize?

Custom Business Process, Native CRM System

Either on initial engagement, or after the initial processes begin to show their success, there is often a need to expand the depth of the integration between CRM and Marketing Automation. As your lead scoring, handoff, and nurturing process grows in maturity, you will need to expand how the two platforms coordinate. As you are dealing with a CRM system that is natively understood by your marketing automation provider, the flexibility of your marketing automation provider is what will govern your success here. Ask questions both around the flexibility of individual calls into the CRM system, and the ability to customize the workflow that governs when those calls are used:
- What entities within the CRM system are accessible; contacts, accounts, tasks, activities, custom objects, etc?
- Can any updates (ie creating a task), be fully customized to control exactly what is written?
- Can a workflow process be created to give you as a marketer complete control of the update process?

- Do you have full decision/branching control in that workflow process


Standard Business Process, Non-Native CRM System

If the CRM system you are using is not natively supported by the marketing automation provider you are considering, integration will be possible, but there will be a significant amount more work to be contemplated. Essentially in this case, both your CRM provider and your marketing automation platform will expose an API, and you will need to use either custom code or an integration platform to build the integration.

If this is the situation you are looking at, a few key questions to ask your marketing automation software provider:
- How robust and deep is their API? Does it cover all of the key functions you will need to replicate a standard integration with your CRM system?
- How much experience do they have with integrations outside of their most familiar CRM system? (If they only have experience integrating with one CRM system, you will likely find that the flexibility to integrate with other CRM systems is not present)
- Will there be an experienced best practice team to help you with the business process aspects of the integration?
- Is there a deep partner ecosystem with experience in building integrations that you can rely on if needed?


Non-Standard Business Process, Non-Native CRM System

This is the most interesting and challenging of all the integration options. With both a non-standard CRM system, and a custom business process, your integration project will likely be more challenging than the previous options. It is important in this situation to accurately assess your integration plan in order to avoid surprises as you move forward.

Some important questions to ask of your marketing automation provider:
- Does their API cover all key areas of interest? Has there been a community of partners and developers working with the API for at least a year in order to ensure that the necessary depth and robustness is present?
- Is there a workflow engine within the marketing automation platform that can work seamlessly with the API in order to allow marketers to configure unique business processes which are then easily integrated?
- Is there a community of clients and partners who have built integrations with a wide variety of systems – data warehouses, business intelligence, purchasing, CRM, etc – whose experience you can draw from


Integration Between Marketing Automation and CRM

The integration between a marketing automation platform and a CRM system is the technological underpinning of the alignment between sales and marketing. As such, it is a key area to understand and investigate in thinking about a marketing automation investment. Whereas many things are possible in looking at integration between two systems, understanding the scenario you are in and what that means for integration can make your marketing automation journey significantly smoother.

Read More...

Loose Coupling and Analysis of the Marketing Process

When analyzing the flow of leads through your marketing organization, and into your sales organization, how you design the stages in the process has a significant impact on both how you are going to be able to analyze it, and how you are going to be able to optimize it in the future. Without the ability to both analyze and optimize a process, you will find that errors begin to creep into the process due to the lack of visibility, and your ability to adapt the process as your business changes or grows is minimal.

The best approach, when you have a hand-off between one team and another, is one that is “loosely coupled”. Your marketing team, for example, may pass marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to your sales team. However, what the sales team accepts should not be termed the same thing – MQLs – as this does not allow the system to account for, and measure, a drop-off in the acceptance rate. Instead, these leads that are accepted by sales should be termed differently – in this case Sales Accepted Leads – SALs.

Even in a system where your current design parameters state that 100% of MQLs should be acted on by sales, you should still name and handle them separately. The reason for this is two-fold. For one, no system involving people can ever operate at 100% accuracy. Some of your lead will slip through the cracks due to bad data, absent employees, or inattentiveness. Without having both MQLs and SALs to measure, and thus a SAL/MQL acceptance rate, it is not possible to measure how close to 100% your system is operating at.

The second reason to avoid the tight coupling that is implied by having the same name in subsquest process stages is that most marketing organizations will change their processes over time. Perhaps your current design specification is a 100% acceptance rate of MQLs within the sales team. This may change in a quarter’s time if you decide to open up the funnel a little bit, and pass more leads to your sales team, while allowing them to selectively choose. You may reduce the design parameter to 60%. Without the “loose coupling” that having unique naming provides, it will require a full change of your marketing funnel process just to shift this one parameter. Instead, build in the flexibility up front by having the pre, and post-handoff leads named separately.

The example of MQLs being passed to sales is an obvious one, but this becomes a more interesting challenge when the names are not as obvious. For example, if you have an inside team focused on lead generation. They would take a lead at some level of quality, place a call, confirm interest, perhaps budget and authority, and deem the lead ready for the field sales team. If this team is part of the marketing organization (in some organizations, this team is part of sales), then you might wish to call the output of this team’s work an MQL. However, the question is, what is the input to this team?

Obviously, you will be scoring the leads prior to handing them to this team, so you might call them “Qualified Inquiries” to differentiate them from the raw inquiries you see on your website. The Qualified Inquiries that are then picked up by the inside team might be called “Qualified Inquiries Accepted” in order to allow you to manage the handoff between your marketing campaigns team and the inside team and allow that handoff ratio to be adjusted as needed.

The loose coupling provided by having unique names for each relevant stage of the buying process allows you to both analyze the operation of your process and also make adjustments as needed. Some upfront planning to define sufficient handoff points to allow the right amount of adjustment later can save you significant future rework. Read More...

Fit, Engagement, and MQLs: Mapping the Lead Handoff to Sales

Marketing organizations looking to only hand qualified leads over to their sales teams are faced with an interesting analysis challenge. Whereas it might seem to be a simple task to look at implicit data on a prospect and understand their engagement, or look at explicit data on a prospect and understand their fit, the reality is that this is often a relatively difficult task.

The first task is to look at the raw data in order to define a score between, say 0 and 100 points. This is not as simple as more activity leading to a higher score; some areas of activity may in fact be worth more score than others, and time needs to be taken into account in order to ensure that scores do not grow indefinitely over time. The machinations of this scoring algorithm, however should be kept separate from the sales organization.

For a sales organization to be comfortable building a process, they need a stable definition to be applied to the leads that are sent their way. This is where the fit/engagement matrix is highly useful. A value for the lead’s “fit”, in other words their title, industry, and size, can be mapped to a standard definition of A, B, C, D, where A is a high fit, and D is a low fit. Similarly for a lead’s “engagement”, or their activity on the website, a standard definition of 1,2,3,4 can be applied, again with 1 representing high engagement and 4 representing a low engagement.

The sales team can then understand leads as A1s, C3s, or B4s. The underlying scoring definition of what earns a lead points, how those points are adjusted over time, and which range of points maps to the each rank, does not need to be visible to the sales team at large. A core group of key individuals within sales and marketing can debate the definitions and make necessary adjustments each quarter.

With a clear definition of what makes each lead rank, the discussion can then progress to which leads should be passed from marketing to sales, and to which sales team if there are multiple teams involved. A1 leads will obviously be passed directly to sales, likely to a field sales force, but a mapping is needed for where each other lead rank goes. Some may be passed to an inside sales team, some may be passed to a partner channel, and some may be held back to be further nurtured. The set of leads that are passed to sales from marketing are deemed marketing qualified leads (MQLs). This higher level definition is useful in looking at a higher level view of your marketing analysis.

There are two key questions that these efforts in lead scoring allow you to tackle in analyzing your marketing programs:

Does our scoring accurately correlate to a higher propensity to purchase?
- A lead scoring algorithm should be continually revisited in order to ensure that a higher score actually correlates with a higher propensity to purchase, based on both fit and engagement.

Which leads are worth sending over to sales based on the sales team’s ability to engage them in relevant conversations?
- Adjustments in your marketing, sales, and channel mix can mean that you may
wish to send more leads or less leads to sales. This adjustment comes into play
as you adjust which leads, A1, B2, C3, etc, are sent to sales as Marketing
Qualified Leads (MQLs)


In order to better enable analysis of what is working and what is not, it’s a good idea to keep the lead score and lead rank tracked. As these are values that change with time the best way to do this is to stamp the values at the point in time that the lead is passed to sales. This value pair can then be analyzed against later in order to understand whether the score and rank at that moment in time accurately indicated an intent to purchase.

Setting up a lead scoring and lead handoff process in a way that allows you to both analyze and adjust it as you learn and your business grows, sets you up for long term success.

Read More...

Sales Enablement: A Key Goal of B2B Marketers

As B2B marketers, many of us have mainly focused on lead flow to sales as our key driver. Lead flow is definitely an important and vital part of good B2B marketing and sales alignment, but it is not the only area that should be focused on. Marketing can also bring insights, process, and relationship-building tools to the sales teams they serve, and by doing so, give their sales teams a better ability to understand, manage, and close deals with their prospects.


In a new eBook - "Beyond Lead Flow - Enabling Sales Through Marketing Automation" - 5 main areas that marketing can enable sales are discussed.


The 5 main areas where marketing can enable sales are:

1. Understanding Individual Prospects - their areas of interest, level of engagement, and hot buttons



2. Understanding Accounts - who the key players, who are your internal champions, and who still needs to be engaged in order to move a deal forward



3. Understanding Territories - which accounts are actively engaged in buying processes with your company within each salesperson's territory



4. Building Relationships - providing your sales team with a strong relationship with prospects through personalized marketing to their prospects



5. Maintaining Top-of-Mind Presence - assisting sales with any sales calling campaigns by actively maintaining top-of-mind presence of your brand with prospects

The Sales Enablement eBook is free, with no registration required. However, if you enjoy the content, my only ask is that you share it with others:

Share this eBook on Twitter.

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Lead Scoring Best Practices

I sat down with various folks on the Eloqua Customer Success team to hear their experiences on what it took to build out a highly successful lead scoring system. Jocelyn Brown (@jocebrown), Chad Horenfeldt (@chadhorenfeldt), and Adrian Chang (@adrianchang) are the folks who help clients with implementing lead scoring at organizations of various sizes and within a variety of industries, so they have the experience to know what it takes to achieve success. Here is their take:




Some key takeaways:
- get buy-in from sales management in order to best align goals
- use a matrix of A-D for fit and 1-4 for engagement
- define what will happen with each lead, based on that matrix, from lead nurturing to sales hand-off
- define an SLA with sales on how long is allowed for follow-up
- don't be shy about lead clawback if too much time passes
- sales cherry-picking leads is a sign of mis-alignment between marketing and sales
- lead scoring is one of the most valuable things a B2B marketing organization can do

I hope you enjoy the video, I always learn a lot chatting with people like Jocelyn, Adrian, and Chad, as they deal with organizations who are wrestling with these challenges on a daily basis. Read More...

Lead Scoring: Eight Critical Questions to Consider

Much of the conversation around how best to set up lead scoring tends to focus around the aspects of the buyer's digital body language that are most interesting. What whitepaper, excerpt, or download they last looked at, and what this means in terms of their propensity to purchase.

These are all great discussions to have, but there are eight critical questions that need to be contemplated and discussed in order to build a lead scoring algorithm that will truly work in a business environment:

1) What are Your Outputs?: are you using lead scoring to determine who to hand off to sales? what message to communicate to them? who to nurture further? which accounts to get deeper visibility into? all of the above? Understanding your lead scoring outputs first is key in understanding how you want to approach the scoring of leads.

2) How does Time affect your Scores?: it's necessary to think through how the relevance of your prospect actions, and hence their lead score, degrades over time. An action 6, 12, or 18 months ago will likely not have the same relevance as the same action last week. For scoring interest level, this time factor is crucial, whereas for scoring on buyer role, this may not change as rapidly over time.

3) What Dimensions are Critical?: In lead scoring, it is important to clearly define what the question is that you are asking, and to build your scoring algorithm to match that question. If multiple lead scoring dimensions are merged into one, you will likely run into a challenge. Two of the most commonly used scoring dimensions are who the prospect is (explicit data like title, industry, and revenues) and how interested the prospect is (implicit data like web interest, search, and downloads).

4) How do you Cap and Bucket Scores so they are manageable?: When building a lead scoring algorithm, there are often a few buckets of data that come into play. For example in scoring the lead explicitly (who they are), you may look at title, industry, and revenues to determine whether the individual is highly qualified. To do this, it is often best to cap the scores available for each individual bucket. For example, if you are looking at the title to find an executive responsible for content strategy, you may give 10 points for "VP", "Content", "Digital", "Media" or "Production". However, would you want to give 50 points for a "VP of Digital Content and Media Production". Likely not, so this is where caps are needed. 10 points for any of the key terms, up to a maximum of 20.

5) Are your Scores Loosely Mapped to the Ranks that Determine Follow-Up?: If you are going to teach sales to follow up with leads that are defined as "A leads", you need to build in the flexibility to slightly adjust the bar on what makes a lead an "A lead" over time, without retraining sales. The best way to do this is to have both a lead score (a number such as 0-100) and a lead rank (a letter or grade such as A, B, C). Mapping the lead score to the lead rank allows you to adjust your criteria while sales does not change their process.

6) Do you Allow Sales to Cherry-Pick More Leads?: In many environments, especially when lead scoring has been implemented and only good leads are passed to sales, the sales team will feel as though they need more leads. They will ask for the lead funnel to be opened up to them so that they can "Cherry Pick" leads that they deem to be good. Allowing sales to cherry pick has opportunities as well as significant risks, however, and should be discussed carefully upfront.

7) If Sales Does Not Act, do you Claw Back the Lead?: In an ideal world, sales follows up with all leads. However, this is not the reality that most organizations live in, so a process is needed for automatically clawing back the sales lead into marketing if it has not been followed up on in a short time period. Once the lead has been clawed back, it can be re-allocated to another sales person, re-entered into a nurture program, or passed to a partner channel.

8) Have You Provided Sales with Disposition and Nurture Options?: If leads are not being followed up on by sales, it is difficult to adjust your processes unless you know why. Providing sales with options for lead disposition, including automated nurture programs that will continue to educate the lead until it is again ready for sales, can provide both great insight into reasons for lead rejection and foundation for better nurturing of leads.


By thinking through these eight critical factors up front, your lead scoring process will avoid a number of challenges on its road to adoption and success, and will succeed in driving revenue for your organization. Read More...

Lead Scoring - Providing Disposition Options

Handing scored and qualified leads to sales in order for them to follow up is an inexact science. Continual optimization of the process is necessary in order to understand what aspects of a buyer’s digital body language are key to understanding buyer’s intentions. One of the best sources of this information is the sales team themselves. However, as any marketer knows, getting information out of a sales team can be challenging. On a topic such as the quality of an individual sales lead, it may in fact seem almost impossible.

Recently, we talked about the need to implement a claw-back system for scored leads that are passed to sales and show no sales activity. This approach is useful, but is a black and white system. Either a lead is good and is worked by sales, or it is not good and is ignored and quickly clawed back. There is no opportunity for middle ground, and no opportunity for feedback from sales.

If, instead, the sales team is presented with disposition options for the lead that feed directly into appropriate lead nurture campaigns, the best of both worlds is achieved. By having an option to pass a lead back to marketing, with a specific disposition that guides what will happen next, the sales person is able to maintain ownership of the lead. However, by carefully constructing the set of disposition options, marketing can learn much more about why the leads were not accepted by sales than they ever would have by asking sales to fill out a feedback form.

For example:
- If a lead is deemed by sales to be slightly too early in their buying process, they might enter the lead into a “Late Stage Buyer Nurturing” lead nurture program that provides case studies and ROI analysis to guide a prospect towards buying

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be too junior to make a buying decision, they might enter the lead into a “Convince Your Executive Team” nurture program that provided key information to make an internal business case for your solution

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be more interested in an alternate product (Product B), they might enter the lead into a “Product B Nurturing” program

These are only a few examples, each organization will have different options. The technique of providing these “lead disposition” options to sales in order to provide sales with a “middle ground” option, while at the same time providing rich insights to your marketing team as to why a lead is being rejected is extremely valuable.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system. Read More...

Trucks and Conveyer Belts; Lead Management in a Manufacturing Metaphor

(David Armano wrote an inspiring post last week challenging us to "Think Visually" - http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/01/thinking-visually.html. He makes a great point, so I exhausted my very limited artistic talents to come up with visuals for this week's post. Hope they make the point clearer)

One of the things that I often discuss with B2B marketing clients is the details of the process for handing leads from marketing to sales and then bringing them back again if sales is not interested. It's an area not to take too lightly as it can derail a tremendous amount of great work in both sales and marketing if the handoff is not done extremely well.

The most common handoff I see is the Excel spreadsheet of leads. This terrifies me.


I liken this to a manufacturing operation where the production is done in two separate buildings, and half way through the manufacturing process, the product is shipped, via truck, from one building to another. It functions, sort of, but will not give you a strong business.


First of all, speed is critical in responding to leads. This has been talked about many times, including my post a month ago here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/high-noon-at-web-form.html. The essence is, you have a very limited amount of time (hours, not days) to act on a sign of buying interest, before your chance of connecting drops precipitously.


So, why does the truck (Excel spreadsheet) model fail?

1. Trucks work best when they are fully loaded. You would not send a spreadsheet with one or two names in it, any more than you would ship a truck with one or two parts in it.


2. Too many trucks clog the roads. In the same way, tt becomes unworkable to be emailing back and forth more than a few (2 or 3) spreadsheets of leads.


3. Trucks are loaded by people. People have other things on their plate, they take breaks, they take vacations, they get distracted. The same thing holds for Excel spreadsheets

All three of these problems lead to a similar trend. The Excel spreadsheet of leads becomes less frequent and larger. The exact numbers vary, but a once-per-week distribution of leads is not uncommon in many organizations.


The problem with this is that it becomes a downward spiral. We send the leads over to sales, and whereas they might have been well qualified at the start, now that a few days have passed, the prospect's interest has moved on to other things, and the chance of connecting with them has decreased. As sales tries to connect with these leads, they realize that they are not getting through, and therefore sales treats the leads with less urgency adding even more delay to the process.


The only way to break this cycle realistically is with automation, in much the same way that conveyer belts revolutionized manufacturing. The lead qualification, handoff, and clawback must be done with the appropriate sense of urgency. Marketing and sales need to work together to build the agreements, SLAs, and processes so that a prospective buyer is responded to quickly and efficiently. To do this requires allowing each lead to flow through the process as soon as they raise their hand. This requires removing any trucks (Excel spreadsheets) from the flow, and replacing them with conveyer belts (automation).


Automating your lead routing may seem like a small optimization, but like in manufacturing, changing the way a process is managed can have a massive impact on bottom line success. Dell and Toyota demonstrated this with electronics and automotive manufacturing. Now, this operations mentality has shifted to Marketing, where the organization who can best serve the needs of the prospect will win. Read More...

Lead Scoring; Points, Ranks, and Sales Handoff

Everyone uses the term "lead scoring" in demand generation. It's definitely a foundational concept for the industry, but under the covers, there are (or should be) two things happening, only one of which is scoring. The goal, of course, is to look at your prospects, and understand whether they are the right person (explicit scoring) and/or are showing the right level of interest (implicit scoring). But, implied in this is the assumption that you will do something different with those that score high from those that score low.



If that's the case, and you are looking to do something different with some leads than others, you need to think about "lead ranking" as a core part of lead scoring. Let's look at an example. Say you want to divide up your leads using explicit (fit) criteria into As, Bs, and Cs, and then divide your leads using implicit (interest) criteria into 1s, 2s, and 3s. Then, the A1s would be passed to sales, the A3s would be nurtured, the C1s would be cultivated by inside sales to get to the right contact, and the C3s would be dropped (obviously the other categories would be dealt with also, but for the sake of simplicity bear with me).



Here's the challenge. We're now looking at two distinct undertakings:

1. Finding the right mix of criteria to score the leads in order to determine whether they are A, B, C, or 1, 2, 3. (See http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/dimensions-of-lead-scoring.html for a discussion on why you really need both dimensions of scoring)



2. Building the business process for appropriate follow-up, nurture, or cultiviation of the leads once it has been decided that they are an A1, A3, or C1.

These undertakings are actually very separate, and both will need a lot of tuning over time. As your website changes, you launch new marketing campaigns, or you tweak the relative weights of one criteria over another, the scores of leads will change. Likewise, as you add sales people, change territories, or alter quotas, you may wish to send more leads of lower quality, or less leads of higher quality.

Separating the "lead scoring" - ie assigning 0-100 points based on activity - from the "lead ranking" - ie determining what is ranked as a 1, 2, or 3 - lets you build your business processes independent of any tweaking and optimization. Your field sales team may get A1 and B1 leads, your inside sales team may get A2, B2, and C1 leads, and you may route A3, B3, and C2 to your nurture marketing programs. Regardless of what you do to change your approach to scoring, or what the thresholds are for each rank, your team knows what to do when they see an A1 lead coming their way.

Not only can you better build your sales or nurture marketing follow-up processes based on abstracting the lead score from the lead rank, but you can look back at your sales successes after a few quarters, and by comparing the underlying score against the sales success rates, you can get good insights into whether you are able to loosen the ranking criteria and have more leads flow through to sales, or would be best to tighten the criteria and have less leads of higher quality.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.

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