B2Best Practice. Lead Scoring. Mild Warm Hot

Transcription

1 B2Best Practice Lead Scoring Mild Warm Hot

2 Lead Scoring Best Practices Getting Lead Scoring Right the First Time Lead scoring is a technology and business process used by B2B companies for the purpose of automating the ranking, grouping, routing and tracking of leads that are responding to campaigns and interacting with your corporate website. Lead scoring has become increasingly important for companies who are engaging in a moderate to large amount of online marketing activities. Offered as a module within the marketing automation system and integrated with CRM systems, lead scoring is designed to ensure your company has a consistent process for the management of leads as they move from the top of the lead funnel through CRM to opportunity stage. Lead scoring is an integral component of a marketing automation solution and is considered a must-have when integrating marketing technology and processes to your CRM and sales team. Getting lead scoring right the first time will depend upon several key factors and this B2Best practice document is designed to direct your company down the right path. A score-able attribute is one of several categories of data that is captured by the marketing Key questions you must answer before implementing lead scoring: 1. What are the score-able attributes captured? 2. Who owns the lead scoring model? 3. How many scoring groups will we monitor? 4. What are the scoring actions we will take against these groups? 5. How will we validate and measure the scoring model? 6. Should we have one model or multiple models? 7. How should sales be alerted when a lead scores high? 8. Have marketing and sales agreed on all aspects of the model? 9. How should we display scoring data in CRM? 10. Should scores degrade over time due to lack of activity? 2

3 What score-able attributes can be captured? A score-able attribute is one of several categories of data that is captured by the marketing automation system. The data captured in the marketing automation system is broken into distinct categories as listed below: Website Activity: Web activity scoring is based on the ability to identify an individual s website activity based on a first party cookie placed on their computer via web tracking software provided by the marketing software solution. A person is typically cookied as a result of clicking through a link in an campaign or visiting the website. Examples of web activity attributes are listed below: Recency: time of last activity, 30/60/90-days Visit depth: number of pages viewed in a single session Time on site: how long visitor spent on the site in a single session Key pages: have they visited pricing page, resources, etc. Generally speaking, website activity can be broken into general attributes (time on site) and specific attributes (downloaded particular asset on pricing page). Many marketing systems allow for a simplified general scoring Web activity falls into a category of activity known as implicit behavior. When combined with explicit activity such as form completions and click-through, the lead scoring model will enable you to better understand your prospects level of interest. model, wherein you can have one rule for general attributes such as visited a web page. Salesfusion offers a more granular approach to this methodology and allows for a combination of general attributes for web activity and more specific attributes for specific pages for specific time periods. 3

4 Campaign Responses: Scoring campaign responses means having the ability to score on an campaign open/ctr and a form and/or landing page completion. This explicit activity is important and made more valuable when the data is extended to implicit web activity. Score-able attributes are as follows: Opened Clicked through link in Completed form Registered for event Attended event Downloaded visible materials from the website Usage Tip: when setting up a scoring model that will look at responses to questions in a web form, you can automatically set up routing rules based on a product-related question. For example, if Salesperson A is responsible for Product B and the form contains a question referencing Product B, you can set an alert to go out only to Salesperson A when Product B is selected in that question. Campaign response scoring, like web activity scoring, may target general attributes (opened any campaign) or more specific attributes (clicked on THIS link in THIS campaign) or in the case of forms, you may score on the general attribute (completed any form) or score on a specific response to a specific question in a specific form. The combination of general and specific response attribute values will increase the accuracy of the scoring model and allow you to improve routing rules. Demographics: Demographics will allow you to score and rank leads based on key demographic information you are looking for in pre-qualification of leads. Key demographic metrics should be gathered from the sales team and will typically include the following: Title Business size and industry Location Department 4

5 Who Owns the lead Scoring Model? The next key step in setting up a lead scoring model and lead routing program is to determine who owns the process. In many companies, sales will collaborate with marketing to define the aforementioned elements of the scoring model and help establish the relative point values of actions and activities. At the end of the day, however, marketing should take full ownership of the lead scoring model because the lead score is the determining factor as to whether a lead goes to sales or stays within the control of marketing. In defining the elements to the lead scoring model, marketing and sales should set several meetings to review what is scoreable in the model and what the relative values are for the score-able actions. Creating the initial blueprint for the scoring model will force collaboration between marketing and sales, which is always a positive activity in any company. A good way for marketing to facilitate this initial step is to create a spreadsheet that includes how actions and attributes will potentially be scored. An example of this can be seen below: Score-able action Value Notes Page Visits > 5 Campaign A - - Lead visits more than 5 pages in a single website visit. Lead opens and clicks through target campaign in month. Recent Web Visit Title - - Has been on the site in last 30 days. Lead has title of CIO. 5

6 Determine the Value of Score-able Actions: After marketing and sales have agreed to build a model and the elements of the model are defined, you need to provide a value/weight to the individual data points. In this meeting, marketing should be prepared to show sales elements such as assets and pages on the website. Sales should provide some insight into what they think is high, medium, and low value. For example, a visit to the website in general may have a relatively low value (1-5 points) whereas multiple visits to the site in a fiveday period may have a much higher value (10-25 points). Sales needs to understand the rationale behind the model so they can understand and accept the higher-value leads once they begin to flow into CRM. In this step, marketing and sales work together to complete the values on the spreadsheet: Score-able action Value Notes Page Visits > 5 Campaign A Lead visits more than 5 pages in a single website visit. Lead opens and clicks through target campaign in month. Recent Web Visit Title Has been on the site in last 30 days. Lead has title of CIO. Creating scoring groups: Upon completion and mutual approval by sales and marketing of the actions and associated values, it is now time to create the scoring groups. Scoring groups are nothing more than a group of leads who have achieved the same scored value range. Ranges are typically +/- a certain number of points, depending on how you craft the values in the previous graph. What is most important 6

7 is to keep the number of groups to three or less, at least initially. Adding too many groups will create a confusing matrix for a novice in lead scoring to effectively manage, test, and track. What is also very important to note when creating scoring groups is that when someone enters or leaves a group, this may trigger a series of scoring actions we will discuss in the next section. Creating scoring actions: Once the scoring groups are created, it is now time to create the scoring actions and routing rules. Firstly, it should be understood between marketing and sales that when a hot lead is passed from marketing to the CRM that the sales team has responsibility to follow up with the lead. Systems like Salesfusion allow for setting scoring alerts so that the reps receive an alert outside of the framework of the CRM to notify them that they have a hot lead. There should be an established process for lead follow-up that the sales team agrees to be accountable for. This stage in the lead scoring process should involve a meeting between marketing and sales to map out the actual rules and actions that the company will take against leads when the score into or out of a particular group. Creating the feedback loop: As mentioned before, it will be critical to place the lead scoring name in a database field inside of the lead/contact entities. In doing so, marketing will be able to pull periodic reports on the health of the lead scoring model based upon the lead status disposition changes for hot leads passed to CRM. The report should show that if X amount of hot leads were passed to CRM, a fair percentage of these leads should move forward in the sales cycle (i.e. if less than 50% of hot leads are changed to qualified status in CRM, then the model needs adjusting). This type of reporting acts as a validation of the established lead scoring rule for both marketing and sales. Example of a Scoring Action: All hot leads passed to CRM will receive a direct phone call by the assigned sales rep within four hours. Conversely, there should be a routing model in place wherein warm to cold leads are placed into automated nurture campaigns (prebuilt, automated s over a certain time period). These nurture campaigns are designed to send highly personalized communications out to the leads to elicit additional interaction. From there, the lead s score will increase from engaging with campaigns, diminish due to lack of interaction, or get eliminated due to opt-out. 7

8 Testing and adjusting: A new lead scoring model should be tested for a period of about 90 days, during which time marketing and sales should meet periodically to review the leads and discuss the dispositions of the hot leads. Regular communication between marketing and sales during the initial release period for the lead scoring model will help both sides make the necessary adjustments and ensure the lead scoring model is accurate for the long term. Taking these key steps during the planning and roll-out of a lead scoring model will dramatically improve the overall lead-to-revenue cycle in your company. Salesfusion & lead scoring: Salesfusion s Lead Analyzer contains two modules. The first allows for the creation of scoring profiles that analyzes, grades and routes leads based on scoring behavior. The second module, event listener, connects to your CRM and allows you to set up simple rules to route leads back to marketing when values change inside of CRM. Key features of scoring profiles in Salesfusion: Create one of many scoring models - by geo, vertical, or product line Score on web activity, activity, forms activity, event attendance, demographics Auto-enroll leads into nurture campaigns Create a Hot-Leads view for telesales call-down activities alerts to Sales 9

9 Event listener ties it all together Event listener is a component within the Lead Analyzer module and provides a non-technical interface for marketers to create advanced workflow between marketing and sales. As the name suggests, this powerful tool within Salesfusion allows you to set rules for marketing to listen for changes in field values in CRM. When a change occurs, say when lead status changes from open to nurture, Salesfusion will hear this change and take action against the lead. Actions include task assignment, campaign enrollment, setup alerts, and much more. Event listener plays a big part in creating and executing automated nurture-based campaigns. Lead scoring integrated to your CRM Lead scoring is becoming a must-have for companies who are using CRM and marketing automation software. Lead scoring is the glue that holds your marketing to sales processes together. Gone are the days of simply throwing an Excel spreadsheet of campaign responders into CRM and hoping for the best. Deeply integrated to CRM, Salesfusion s Lead Analyzer will ensure a smooth process in transitioning marketing qualified leads to your sales team. 10

10 Salesfusion helps small and medium sized B2B organizations drive revenue with smarter marketing. With Salesfusion s smart marketing automation platform, marketing and sales teams are delivering lead-to-revenue results more effectively and efficiently than ever before. Contact Information: sales@salesfusion.com facebook.com/salesfusion plus.google.com/+salesfusion linkedin.com/company/salesfusion twitter.com/salesfusion youtube.com/user/salesfusionmarketing pinterest.com/salesfusion 2014 Salesfusion Inc.