Real World Rules for Lead Scoring & Prioritization What Really Defines a “Hot” Prospect?
Real World Rules for Lead Scoring & Prioritization
Jan 12, 2015
Marketing: Do you feel like your leads are being tossed over the wall and you're not sure where they are going? Sales: Do you feel like the leads that you receive aren't targeted and "sales-ready"? If so, we can help.
Discover how lead prioritization and scoring can increase your sales. See real-world examples on how you can find your "sweet spot" and set up lead scoring that can drive superior results.
Discover how lead prioritization and scoring can increase your sales. See real-world examples on how you can find your "sweet spot" and set up lead scoring that can drive superior results.
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Real World Rules for Lead Scoring & Prioritization
What Really Defines a “Hot” Prospect?
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Welcome to today’s webinar “Real World Rules for Lead Scoring & Prioritization – What Really Defines a “Hot” Prospect”. Today’s session is brought to you by OneSource Information Services and LeadLife Solutions. Both organizations offer sales and marketing solutions that help boost sales and marketing program effectiveness, enabling you to generate more from your existing investment.
Today's Presenters
Sham Sao is Chief Marketing Officer of OneSourceMr. Sao is responsible for OneSource’s strategic marketing and global lead generation efforts.
Lisa Cramer President LeadLife Solutions, Inc.
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Our presenters for this session are Sham Sao and Lisa Cramer. As CMO, Sham Sao has global responsibility for Strategy and Marketing for OneSource. Prior to joining OneSource, Sham served as Global VP of Marketing & Business Development at Deploy Solutions, where he helped the company grow rapidly to win a place on the D&T Fast 50 list, ultimately being acquired by Kronos. He has held previous executive management positions in Marketing & Business Development and he also served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Lisa Cramer is president and co-founder of LeadLife Solutions. Prior to co-founding LeadLife Solutions, she was president and chief operating officer of Involve Technology, a Phoenix-based sales knowledge automation company, where she directed marketing, business development and product strategy. She has also held key positions with IdealHire, Viasoft, KnowledgeWare and IBM.
Today’s Agenda
• Finding Your Sweet Spot: How Do You Identify & Attract “Priority Prospects”?
• Not All Prospects Are Created Equal: Seeing the 360° Degree View of a Prospect by Appending Data
• The Case for Lead Scoring: Why Marketing & Sales Need to Find Common Ground
• Lead Scoring & Prioritization Real world rules for evaluating & scoring leads
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Today’s discussion is designed to offer insights about: How Do You Identify & Attract “Priority Prospects”? Seeing the 360° Degree View of a Prospect by Appending Data Why Marketing & Sales Need to Find Common Ground Real world rules for evaluating & scoring leads
Research Shows…
• According to Forrester Research 48% of B2B Marketers reported that lead quality is a top concern
• On average only 16% of the total leads that are deemed “sales-ready” opportunities actually close
• But many companies still not using lead scoring because…– Lack the expertise around lead scoring– Have incomplete information on leads (e.g., missing data such as
revenues, employee counts, industry, etc.)
Sources: Forrester Research, The Aberdeen Group – “2009 Lead Life Cycle Management Study” and “2008 LeadPrioritization and Scoring Study”.
The Challenge• Quality is #1, but Quantity is in the top 3 – need to deliver both.
• Getting it right is critical because if the criteria is too loose, you get too much junk; if it’s off or too tight, you miss good leads
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Obviously today’s economy poses unique and largely unprecedented challenges to today’s sales and marketing professionals. What are you likely being asked to do? Generate the same, or larger, volume of leads with limited/diminished budget Run the marketing & sales team with smaller staffs Overcome increased resistance from prospects on commitment to purchase� And, as can be seen from Donovan’s quote, marketers are aware that metrics are more important than ever. There is more call for detailed metrics which demonstrate marketing ROI, and actionable customer insights. Sales and marketing executives are seeking to develop and refine processes to stop the “leaky bucket” effect that results in a relatively small percentage of leads generated being worked effectively. And all this is occurring as prospects are coming to the discussion better informed, more aware of their options in an increasingly competitive landscape…
Benefits of Scoring
• Enables Sales to close more good business
• Empowers Marketing to run the right campaigns
• Helps Sales and Marketing get on the same page
• Drives results for the business overall
Presenter
Presentation Notes
The latest CSO Sales Intelligence shows that the 54% of the 1,800 firms surveyed failed to turn leads into meetings. So, in many cases, an average sales and marketing organization may be wasting more than half of its budget on leads that will likely never convert to opportunities… The critical question, then, in this age of shrinking budgets and reduced staffing is this: how you can drive sales and marketing effectiveness? �Selling more effectively starts with understanding where, how and why you’ve been successful in the past. As you can see from this Aberdeen Group chart, improving the quality of leads in the sales pipeline was identified as the top strategy to improve sales effectiveness. Improving quantity was farther down on the list! Why is this the case? One of the most fundamental issues negatively impacting lead generation programs—and thus the quality of leads hitting the sales pipeline--is a lack of segmentation and effective targeting driven by fundamental insights into the “who, where, when and why” of your current sales success. Analyzing sales for a period of one, two, or more years, and identifying relevant lead generation and conversion patterns is a complex endeavor. However, a deep understanding of your sales and marketing successes and failures is critical to structuring lead generation programs that produce viable leads. Nurturing those leads—which Lisa will address later in this presentation—is the key to converting them. In order to undertake an analysis of sales data you must be able to do a meta analysis. Is this data captured in your CRM? Is industry, title, geographic, and other profile information associated with closed deals? Start there; see who is buying, see what programs brought them in the door…Can you replicate and scale that success?
Prioritizing by Objective
Goals by Product/Region:
• Grow revenues as quickly as possible?
• Maximize profitability by selectively focusing growth?
• Increase throughput by closing more deals, faster?
Presenter
Presentation Notes
We have a lot to cover in today’s discussion, so let’s dive right in… First we’ll discuss sales intelligence: �What is it, why is it important, and how are best-in-class organizations using sales intelligence to drive sales effectiveness?� First, a definition: sales intelligence is specifically that information which can be collected and employed to improve lead quality and sales performance. This chart is from the recent Aberdeen Group white paper: Sales Intelligence, The Secret to Sales Nirvana. As you can see, targeted company and executive information are cited as the two leading external sources influencing sales effectiveness. More than half of respondents also cited reporting on trends and technologies as significant. As we discuss the scope and utility of sales intelligence, it is important to note two things: first, there is an opportunity cost in gathering sales intelligence, and second, not all sources of sales intelligence are created equal. Understanding its bottom-line impact is critical in evaluating when, how and where you gather and use intelligence.� The Aberdeen Sales Nirvana research noted--and by the way, we’ll be very happy to email the paper to you; we’ll flash an email later in the presentation—”best-in-class” organizations are focused on good information and good process. �The data demonstrates that augmenting leads with sales intelligence pay dividends, however it is important maximize the return on your efforts, you must weigh the means by which you gather, share and employ this data. Is sales intelligence captured within your CRM system? Is data shared across departments—do sales and marketing talk about strategic accounts, for example, and discuss specific industry or company developments that impact lead generation? Offer opportunities for time-sensitive, or event-triggered sales and marketing efforts? �Inefficient prospect and account researching techniques with poor information retention drive down sales effectiveness. What contributes to inefficiencies in gathering sales intelligence? First, lack of a good, centralized information source…without a centralized source of sales intelligence your marketing staff and sales reps may be looking across the web for snippets of data, attempting to cobble together this information into a more complete industry, or company profile, or key executive list.� Second, if you are relying on the web for sales intelligence you should keep in mind that the quality of the information may be somewhat suspect—especially in these turbulent economic times when organizations are downsizing and reorganizing. It can be difficult to identify and reach the right prospects, at the right level of the organization systematically & efficiently if you are relying on reps to find information themselves, from many—and perhaps suspect-- sources. �The Aberdeen report specifically mentions data quality as having a profound impact on top line revenues; as we all know, “garbage in, garbage out”. Relying on a catch-as-catch-can strategy for gathering and employing sales intelligence can contribute to data quality issues in CRM and sales automation tools.
Getting a Clearer Picture
• Improved account planning
• More completed leads with shorter form (more leads)
• Better targeted marketing campaigns
• Lead prioritization
Prospect Supplied Info
Corp Family Tree Info
Appended Data
Rep Notes
Co. Profile & Industry News
Add to sales & marketing database or CRM system (Industry, Sector, Functional Area, Title, Geography)?
Presenter
Presentation Notes
When evaluating sales and marketing effectiveness, consider not only what your internal processes are—how much time is spent by sales gathering information, how is it used, etc.—but how sales intelligence influences external process, i.e. the dialogue with prospects and clients. That is, sales intelligence is both internally and externally generated. Sales data & lead generation = internal; company/executive info, news, analysis & financial info = external content sources. When you effectively manage both sides of this equation the result is a marketing team that can focus efforts on high-value targets and a sales force that can prioritize and work leads, closing opportunities at a higher rate. One important trend to mention: nearly half of Best-In-Class organizations cited the level of information that prospects brought to the table, and the corresponding level of “shopping” done prior to selecting a product or solution, as significant drivers behind sales intelligence initiatives. One other thing that I would note: we do find that our customers use our sales intelligence information not only to find and cultivate prospects, but to gain competitive advantage and inform their marketing and product development strategies, as well.
Poll Question
Have you analyzed what types of deals close the fastest, generate the most revenues, and drive the most profit by industry, size, region, etc…
A. Yes, we do this
B. No, we do it based on gut-feel
C. No, but we are planning on doing this
D. No, we are missing some of the data we need
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Before we continue, we’d like to take a moment to poll the audience regarding the use of Sales Intelligence. We’ll wait 20 seconds or so as you respond…
WARM
WARMCOLD
HOT
“Sales Ready”?
Nee
ds N
urtu
ring?
Lead Scoring & Prioritization
• Defining a “Hot” Lead
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Defining a “hot” lead can be a struggle in today’s world. Marketers must figure out how to sort through and find valuable leads while they’re “hot”. Lead scoring is a method used to determine what leads are hot and can possibly be passed to sales and which ones are not. For instance, we don’t want every inquiry that comes from a website to be passed to sales. Statistics show that 66% of leads that come to your website are not ready to buy, but that they will buy from someone over the next 24 months. Why waste a sales reps time and the expense on calling a lead that will not answer the phone or return the call? Why not allow automation to highlight the leads that are ready to buy and which ones are not. For the leads that are not ready to buy, the concept of lead nurturing can help your company to stay “top of mind” until they exhibit that they are ready to enter the buy cycle.
• Lead scoring has become crucial for marketers. Leads must be scored and prioritized for appropriate action. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting, time, effort and your budget.
Why Lead Scoring?
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Tracking and scoring are two separate things. You want to make sure all interactions of a lead are tracked. However score only the items that are important for your company. Scoring gives you the opportunity to start seeing which leads are progressing – which are interacting with your company and possibly entering the buy cycle. Make sure that scoring you define fits within your process – meaning score only the interactions that determine a sales-ready lead. Is it something in the behavior of the lead? – ie. what did they download, where did they visit, how often did they came back… and/or is it their title, industry, etc. that helps to determine if they are ripe and ready to be passed to sales. Lead score movement shows what is working and what is not. It’s important to see what leads are bubbling up to the surface – which nurturing campaigns are working, and with what messages, etc.
• Inquiries and suspects flood in to marketing from all directions:
o Emailo Websiteo Eventso Whitepaper Downloadso Google AdWordso Banner Adso Direct Mail
Leads Flow In
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Scoring and prioritization is particularly important these days with inquiries and suspects coming into your company through multiple online and offline mechanisms. As we comment though, these aren’t all leads and certainly most are not sales-ready leads. It’s therefore more critical than ever to track both the behavior and interactions of these suspects/inquiries over time and score their interactions with demographics and other characteristics so you can begin to see which are bubbling up to the top (moving into lead status and sales-ready lead status) and which are truly not ready to enter the buy cycle.
• What makes a good lead a “good” lead?
o Fits the criteria of a qualified lead defined by your sales and marketing departments.
• Title, size, industry, geography, etc.
o History and behavior. • What are they doing on your site? What are they downloading?
o Shows interest in what you are buying and selling.• They come back to your website repeatedly or respond to your nurturing
programs.
Bottom Line: A good lead is one that fits your company criteria combined with showing aninterest in what you are selling.
Guidelines of a Sales Ready Lead
Presenter
Presentation Notes
A lead, inquiry, suspect, etc. are different than a sales-ready lead. A sales-ready lead is one that has already entered into the buy cycle and is a lead that your sales reps want to spend time following up on. These days with the Internet providing so much more information, it’s now more important not to waste valuable time trying to sell to people that are just researching and are not ready to buy. However, the Internet has allowed us to find the digital footprints of our leads and what their interests truly are. Define attributes of what a sales-ready lead is within your company by demographic info, BANT info. and/or behavior that describe whether the lead is truly sales worthy . This is a process where marketing and sales need to come together and define your prospect profile. This profile definition will be used for both scoring leads as well as setting the lead flow process – ie. What happens when a lead hits a certain threshold? It’s ypical for these items to change at the beginning – so you’ll need to define the profile, launch some campaigns, test, measure and revise if necessary. Don’t expect to get it right the first time and remember that practice makes perfect!
• Marketers must figure out how to sort through and find valuable leads while they are “hot”.
Lead Scoring & Prioritization
Presenter
Presentation Notes
You’ll want the help of automation that can evaluate the profile you’ve defined for your sales-ready leads and automatically move your leads to whatever CRM system or sales system your sales team is using. As well, different profiles can move the lead status to help marketers define how well their nurturing is performing… are leads engaging, are they moving from cold, warm to hot? You’ll also want a system that can easily track how leads are moving and what leads are being promoted to sales.
• The process by which marketing can distinguish (prioritize) leads that are “sales ready” versus those that should be nurtured further.o Method of assigning point values to different criteria for each lead that
comes into your organization. o By ranking and prioritizing leads you can decide the likelihood of that
lead becoming a customer.
What is Lead Scoring?
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Define what interactions determine interest as well you’ll need to determine a scoring scale… what items (demographic, behavior) weigh the most? Stay flexible and simple at first. You’ll define a point or scoring schema that associates a number of points for different activities or demographics. The scoring scale and schema is again dependent on your organization and its associated process. Make sure your scoring gives you complete flexibility – scoring each item but getting an overall lead score. Also, there is a concept of lead score decay where a lack of lead activity reduces its score and associated status… We suggest either way, stay simple – evaluate and change as needed. We’ll cover an example of a lead scoring in a few slides.
Types of Scoring
Demographics:Information about the prospect
o Ex: Company size, job title, geography, etc.
Behavior:Monitoring the prospects behavior
o Ex: Website visits, whitepaper and/or case study downloads, etc.
Demographics + Behavior =The complete picture of your lead.
Types of Scoring
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Scoring can be split among a number of factors – based on what you value as a company – you’ll need a way of defining each component to give you a complete overall picture. Did the lead? - Download whitepapers, case studies, etc. - Attend events – webinars versus offline events - Spend significant time on product pages of website over a series of dates - Define what demographics and other items help qualify - Title, industry, company size According to industry analyst The Aberdeen Group and they recent study on Lead Prioritization and Scoring – 77% of top performing organizations are leveraging form and survey tools to capture explicit (demographic) information from prospects.
• Lead prioritization is a different discipline than categorization, more attuned to Marketing action than Sales. It comprises a set of levels for suspects, leads and Sales-ready leads.
• A very basic scoring scheme might look like this:
Note: Do not expect to get your scoring scheme right the first time. It’s a process, so remain flexible to adjust based on experiences.
Lead Scoring Model
Presenter
Presentation Notes
It’s then very important for the leads to flow to the desired location/status depending on the score. Certain thresholds will define lead movement within a lead management system. Automation enables leads to move to the correct people as quickly as possible for the appropriate action. As you can see above… a score less than 40 stays in the marketing database for continued nurturing… 41 – 60 moves to telemarketing (in this example) and above 60 is sent to sales – probably to their CRM system.
• Look for “engagement” with the content before having any further conversations.
• How many points is that engagement worth?
o If/then statementso Is attending an event more
important than a Webinar?o How many activities need
to happen = engagement?o If nothing happens for 6 months do you reduce?
o Keep it simple
Customer Example
Presenter
Presentation Notes
BearingPoint, a LeadLife customer, associated most of their points to downloads of materials – whitepapers, podcasts, case studies, webinars, etc. They then combined this behavior with key demographics – industry, solution of interest, size of company, title, etc. They had one scoring scale and after about 9 months and evaluation by both telesales and sales, they were able to refine their scoring further.
• An example of what you can score…
2
Scoring from an Email Campaign
What Do I Score?
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Determine how each interaction should be evaluated, what weight it deserves in the overall scheme. For instance, compare the scores for someone who clicks a link from an outbound email, 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 3 product pages then 2 case studies, downloads a white paper, and remains on your website for 5 minutes. Clearly, these two visitors demonstrated different levels of interest in what you have to offer. Based on the LEAD PRIORITIZATION chart, the lead management system could automatically move Visitor 1 to Telemarketing or sales for further qualification/action and keep Visitor 2 for nurturing activities. But, if Visitor 2 had scored a 25 from previous interactions, their accumulated lead score would be 45, and Marketing would also move it to Telemarketing. Leads move to Sales only when they reach your sales-ready threshold. Or, depending on circumstances, your process might dictate that leads with scores just below the threshold. Leads in the lower scoring ranges are continuously engaged through e-newsletters and other Marketing activities to nurture them toward the sales-ready threshold. This type of scoring and prioritization is for all interactions over the life of the lead – whether online or offline. Think about whether the same lead that downloaded a whitepaper from your website has been to one of our trade show booths lately, or a seminar that you hosted? If you don’t know, you should, and those interactions should all be scored. This is the only way for you to fully judge if a lead has interest in your company’s products and services.
Increase in qualified leads by 78%
Decrease in sales cycle from months to weeks
Increase in first call contact success rate from 12% to 85%
Decrease in cost of sales by 10%
Improved conversion rates up to 3x
Increase in quality of leads going to sales
By implementing a lead scoring and nurturing process LeadLife customers have found:
Metrics that Matter…
Presenter
Presentation Notes
If you increase the number of qualified leads sent to sales, revenue will increase – that’s the definition of lead management and its been proven by LeadLife customers. Of course in the end this is about the metrics. Increasing the value of the lead generation dollars your spending, moving better qualified leads to sales, helping sales sell more…. With lead management, the metrics and evaluating progress throughout the lead management process is critical – you can use scoring, number of leads and other metrics to start analyzing the success of your campaigns – no longer is it just about hits on website, but really the number and quality of the leads even before they are handed off to sales.
Lead Scoring Poll
Q: Do You Currently Have a Formal Lead Scoring Process?
A. Yes, we have an automated lead scoring process in place
B. Yes, but we do our lead scoring manually
C. No, but we are moving towards a manual lead scoring process
D. No, but we are considering an automated lead scoring solution
Presenter
Presentation Notes
At this time, we’d like to take a moment to poll the audience regarding the use of lead scoring and whether you have a formal process in place. We’ll wait 20 seconds or so as you respond…
Want to Learn More?
To request a Product Demo from LeadLife [email protected] or
Call 1-800-680-6292
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1-866-632-1910
To request the slides from today's presentation please email [email protected]
Questions & Poll Results…
Poll Question
Have you analyzed what types of deals close the fastest, generate the most revenues, and drive the most profit by industry, size, region, etc…
A. Yes, we do this
B. No, we do it based on gut-feel
C. No, but we are planning on doing this
D. No, we are missing some of the data we need
Lead Scoring Poll
Q: Do You Currently Have a Formal Lead Scoring Process?
A. Yes, we have an automated lead scoring process in place
B. Yes, but we do our lead scoring manually
C. No, but we are moving towards a manual lead scoring process
D. No, but we are considering an automated lead scoring solution
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About LeadLife SolutionsOverview:
LeadLife Solutions, Inc. is a provider of on-demand lead management softwarethat enables B2B marketers to automatically track, score, prioritize and nurtureleads. With LeadLife’s flexible and intuitive software you can increase the value ofyour lead generation dollars online/offline, qualify sales leads, shorten sales cyclesand increase your marketing ROI. At LeadLife it’s not only about leveragingautomation, but also delivering lead management best practices to increasemarketing and sales success.
For more information on lead management and our best practices, please visitwww.leadlife.com or call 1-800-680-6292.
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