Posts Tagged ‘Lead Scoring’

5 Ways to Prevent Sales Funnel Leakage with Marketing Automation

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

In the b2b world of long sales cycles involving multiple decision-makers and influencers, sales funnel leakage is one of the most challenging issues Sales and Marketing face. It occurs when Marketing Qualified Leads are passed to Sales but do not actively enter the sales cycle, and as a result, fall out of the funnel. Why should reducing funnel leakage be a top priority for organizations? According to DemandGen Report, 80% of un-worked leads – those not worked by your sales team for various reasons - will buy from someone over the next two years.

Plugging leaks in your sales funnel can prevent you from losing un-worked leads to your competitors and significantly impact your bottom line. Below are 5 ways marketing automation can enable you to prevent sales funnel leakage:

  1. Create a lead scoring model to enable Sales to automatically prioritize leads.
    Lead Scoring models help your sales team prioritize leads that are ready for action. The total lead score is comprised of both a fit and interest score, and leads are automatically passed to sales once they reach a certain score. The key to creating a successful lead scoring model is getting Sales and Marketing to agree on what constitutes a qualified lead. According to a SiriusDecisions report, about 80% of leads are not followed up by on by Sales. This is probably because of a disconnect between Marketing and Sales.
  2. Use sales alerts to respond to high-scoring leads at the right time with the right message. Connecting with today’s crazy-busy buyer is incredibly difficult. If you are lucky enough to get them on the phone, you have about a 5-second window to say something valuable before you’re dismissed. Marketing automation provides your sales team with real-time sales alerts tracking when prospects enter your website and what pages they view – giving sales reps the ability to have a relevant conversation at the moment the prospect is focusing on you.
  3. Develop a lead nurturing process to engage decision-makers. According to a survey by American Business Media, 78% of business decision-makers say they are spending less time with sales representatives. Before scheduling a meeting, they want relevant information delivered to them. Content should be objective, personalized, and delivered in a simple, clean format. Each touch-point should provide more information and value than the last preparing them for the initial meeting with a sales rep.
  4. Close the loop between the sales and marketing process with tight CRM integration.
    In the long b2b sales cycle, circumstances, such as budget, role or need, are constantly changing. A lead that was initially qualified may become unqualified or not sales-ready. These leads should be passed back to marketing for continued nurturing. Tightly integrated CRM and marketing automation platforms, enable sales reps to enter those leads into a marketing-driven lead nurturing campaign directly from their contact records. Leads will continued to be nurtured by marketing until they are sales-ready – and when passed back to Sales, your company will be top of mind.
  5. Track your results and revise your process. Building a solid process to utilize your marketing automation solution to its fullest potential is a work in progress. You should constantly track and evaluate your results. Are there bottlenecks in your sales funnel? Does your lead nurturing process fizzle at a certain touch-point? Is your lead scoring model aligned with what Sales considers a truly qualified lead? Tracking your results and revising your process accordingly is critical to creating an effective sales funnel.

Plugging the leaks in your sales funnel can lower your cost of doing business and significantly increase deals closed per sales rep. Marketing automation enables you to plug those leaks and keep your hard-earned leads’ eyes on you throughout the sales cycle.

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Jeff Erramouspe

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Posted in Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation, Marketing Funnel, Sales | Comments Off

Q&A Excerpt: Driving Leads with Social Media

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

In Tuesday's webinar Social Media Integration into Marketing Campaigns – Does it Drive Leads?, Manticore Technology Demand Generation Manager Emily Mayfield examined her own successes and failures with social media in a recent, multi-touch marketing campaign featuring The Quintessential Marketing Automation Guidebook. In this Q&A excerpt, Emily Mayfield and VP of Marketing Christopher Doran will answer audience questions regarding integrating social media into a marketing campaign to successfully drive leads.
View the entire Webinar.

Question: How do you explain the importance of how social media generates revenue to someone at the executive level, who doesn’t know much about it or see the value of it?

Christopher: Buyer behavior has changed. Ten years ago, if you were planning on purchasing a new car, you might look in the paper or read consumer reports – now the first place you would probably go is an internet search engine. Social media is an important part of that shift. When a buyer is looking to purchase a product and goes to the internet for information, blogs, discussion forums, and online reviews (all social media outlets) are the results that pop up. Social media is just another tool in a marketer's tool belt. When a buyer is searching for your product or service, you want your company to be the first and most frequent result they see. Social media is another outlet to accomplish that – and it’s free.

Question: Have you discovered any variances in social media success by audience type?

Emily: Yes, social media success does tend to vary by industry and audience type. Typically, marketing and communication roles in industries, such as high-tech, retail, and business services, are more active social media participants than other audiences, therefore those target audiences may produce a better response.

However, as noted in the answer above, modern buyers across industries and roles use search and the internet as their number one source of information. Social media – blogs, discussion forums, twitter feeds, reviews – shows up in search results. Participating is these outlets will increase your exposure and drive leads across all industries and roles.

Question: Based on the results you showed earlier - where most of the opportunities (deals in the pipeline) were driven from social media – would you say that your target audience CMOs and directors of marketing ARE using social media heavily?

Emily: The results of this case study certainly point to that. Last year, Business.com published B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study – a report which analyzed the use of social media across roles and industries. The results of this study point toward the same conclusion - marketing and communication professionals at the executive and senior management level are the heaviest users of social media.

Question: How did you convert blog visitors to leads for this campaign?

Emily: For this campaign, we posted a summary of each section of the eBook and did follow-up interviews with the authors. Visitors could download the section without registering on a landing page. In each section, we embedded a link to a Manticore Technology prospect page (our term for landing page). The reader had the option to download the complete 50-page eBook in exchange for registering on a prospect page and providing us with their demographic information – name, title, phone number, company, revenue, etc. We used the information entered to assign the registrants a lead score, and if their score was high enough, they were passed to sales as a lead.

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Jeff Erramouspe

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Posted in Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation, Marketing Metrics, Social Media | Comments Off

Decreasing a Lead Score: They’re just not that into you

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Many of you have seen the 2009 film He’s just not that into you. For those of you that haven’t, bravo – it was terrible. However, the premise of the movie resonates with most of us because we may have been on one side or the other. The film goes through a list of dating scenarios, in which one person should get the hint the other person is blowing them off but doesn’t. Similarly, in the sales process, there are often telltale digital signs that a seemingly viable lead is just not that into you.

Lead Scoring models help your sales team prioritize leads that are ready for action. The total lead score is comprised of both a fit and interest score, and leads are automatically passed to sales once they reach a certain score. To keep lead scores accurate over time, they should be decreased based on certain activities and have a depreciation component, which automatically lowers the score if no activity occurs over a certain period of time. Here are a few activities that should signal that a once “hot” lead is just not that into you:

1. No activity. A lead that downloaded a whitepaper and took a demo six weeks ago but has since shown no activity should not have the same score as one that took those calls to action more recently. Adding depreciation to your scoring model will automatically decrease the lead’s score based on the amount of time that’s passed with no activity. After it drops past a certain point, the lead should be removed from the sales pipeline and passed back over to marketing for lead nurturing.

2. Change in Purchase Timeline. Budget and priorities change for organizations all the time. If the project status changes, the lead score should reflect it. As the lead’s timeline changes, so should your lead management process. Decrementing lead scores that indicate a project is on hold or pushed back will enable you to assign them to the correct process rather than keeping them in the sales pipeline.

3. Website activity reflects non-product related interests. Web visitors viewing career pages, press rooms, leadership pages or investor information are most likely not interested in purchasing your product or service. Visits to these pages should negatively impact the lead’s score so Sales does not waste time following up with them unless product-related page views outweigh their visits to other pages.

4. No progression in the buying cycle. This is not the same as a lead not responding or showing a lack of activity. A lead could attend webinars, download whitepapers, and visit your blog every few days; however, if their interest never escalates into viewing product information or responding to a sales rep’s inquiries, chances are they are not yet sales-ready or are doing research for another purpose. Decreasing their score by placing a negative value on repeats of the same activities will separate the researchers from the truly qualified leads.

Adding depreciation and negatively valued activities to your lead scoring model ensures your sales pipeline stays up-to-date with qualified leads.  When a lead’s interest begins to wane, or it’s unlikely they intend to purchase your product, it should be reflected in the lead score allowing your sales team to focus on the leads that are truly interested – if only we had a tool like this for dating!

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Jeff Erramouspe

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Posted in Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring | Comments Off
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