Scoring: A Leading Priority for Marketers
August 07, 2008
By Lisa Cramer
Today, leads flow to marketing from ever-increasing online sources—including e-mail campaigns, the company Web site, Google AdWords and searches, Webinars, online advertising, blogs and virtual trade shows, as well as from traditional marketing activities such as print ads, direct mail, trade shows and networking.
The sheer volume of leads, or "suspects," can be overwhelming. How does marketing prioritize all these suspects?
Scoring Guides Marketing Action
Lead prioritization is a different discipline than the traditional "A-B-C" sales categorization. It's more attuned to marketing action and comprises a set of levels for suspects, leads and sales-ready leads. Of course, the final action is moving a lead to sales, a lead that has attained an appropriate score threshold. Your company's specific scoring scheme will vary depending on your needs and processes. A very basic scoring scheme might look like this:
• 20-40: Suspect, nurturing activities by marketing
• 45-55: Possible lead, move to telemarketing for qualification
• 60-70: Warm qualified lead, send to sales for timely action
• 75-100: Warmer qualified lead, send to sales for immediate action
Of course, there's setup work to determine the overall scoring scheme and what score and process is appropriate for each action. Those interactions would include:
• Clicks from e-mail campaigns, pages visited, time spent on each page;
• Clicks and page viewing from online ads;
• E-newsletter and survey responses;
• Downloads from your Web site (whitepapers, case studies, etc.);
• Blog entries;
• Telemarketing responses;
• Trade show visits;
• Direct mail responses; and
• Webinar attendance.
Next, determine how each interaction should be evaluated, what weight it deserves in the overall scheme. For instance, compare the scores below for someone who clicks a link from an outbound e-mail, views your landing page for 12 seconds and downloads a white paper, versus someone who clicks the link, views the landing page for 20 seconds, views three product pages then two case studies, downloads a white paper and remains on your site for five minutes.
Be Flexible and Adjust Based on Results
Success in lead generation does not end with lead volume. The metric that matters, for both marketing and sales, is results. It's about sales, not just the number of leads passed on to sales. Lead scoring and prioritization is the key moving the right leads to right stage at the right time, resulting in more efficient processes and, ultimately, more sales.
Lisa Cramer is chief sales & marketing officer for FirstWave, providing on-demand marketing automation solutions that generate, score and nurture leads for B2B marketers. For more, go to www.firstwave.net, or call 678-672-3102.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
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