Just like we discussed a checklist for nurturing there is an equally important checklist needed for lead scoring. So many prospects seem to wonder – “how hard can it be to give scores to leads?” They quickly decide that every action should be scored and then are surprised when they can’t discern and/or prioritize their leads. We actually see a lot of big mistakes made with scoring. It seems that just having a scoring mechanism available for the first time drives people to use it excessively. However, to get the most out of lead scoring, you should spend some time really thinking through how you want to score your leads. The following are some high-level items to consider before implementing a scoring system:
- Determine the objective of scoring. Is your objective to find “sales-ready” leads and to see how leads are progressing through your marketing efforts? If so, you need to determine what the definition of a “sales-ready” lead is (sales and marketing should determine this). What’s considered a hot, warm, and cold lead for instance?
TIP: Don’t make the mistake of scoring everything a lead does – it won’t help you really see true buying intent. - Determine what mix of demographics and digital behavior applies to the definitions above. Define what you would determine to qualify as a “sales-ready” lead. Is it a combination of actions, a specific action, and/or certain demographics captured over time?
- Determine a scoring scale – what make sense to your organization and the items you are scoring 1 – 10, 1 – 100, etc. Just stay consistent throughout or it won’t work regardless.
- Determine your scoring phases. We’ve found for customers who have never scored leads (not sales opportunities) this early in the funnel that they should start out simple and evaluate.
TIP: Expect to iterate through scoring after you find out what works and what doesn’t. - Make sure you measure your results. If a certain score determines a “sales-ready” lead – does sales agree?” How far down the pipe did these leads get? Are you measuring other leads that don’t make it to “sales-ready” status, but progress in marketing like hot, warm and cold leads?
Just like with lead nurturing, in order to get the power and insight from lead scoring, you need to prepare and think through a strategy and plan before implementing scoring. And just like with nurturing, start simple, evaluate, and revise as necessary. Don’t complicate scoring with attributing points to any behavior because that’s not going to help. Determine what your objective is with lead scoring and develop scoring rules based on that. If you are trying to help see and move “sales-ready” leads to the sales team based on score, then score just those demographics and/or digital behaviors that define that lead. Sit back and ask yourself – does opening an email really constitute buying intent?
Tags: Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation
Often we hear when marketers start using marketing automation tools that they can’t wait to get lead nurturing going, which is great. What isn’t great is that they haven’t done any prep work to make their nurturing effective before they’ve engaged with the tool. There are definitely some key things you should think through and do before deploying a nurturing program. Below is a high-level list of some things you should consider:
- Determine what you are trying to accomplish with each nurturing program. Different goals will dictate different nurturing strategies.
- Determine (based on number 1 above) if you have the content to support your nurturing program. And does the content represent each stage of the buying cycle (assuming that your nurturing program goes through those stages).
- Think about how targeted your messaging should be to accomplish your goals for that specific nurturing campaign. Is the message based on previous interest they showed (by what they viewed or downloaded), is it based on their title, industry, etc. or maybe a mix of all?
- Map out how you are going to move leads through the nurturing process. What’s the call to action at each stage that shows buying interest and what’s the cliff hanger that’s going to keep them wanting more?
- Are there additional components to the nurturing program that you should consider that would help conversion, such as landing pages or other complementary content?
- Do you have the tools in place to view the metrics of your nurturing programs while they are running? If you don’t see what’s working or not, what good is setting up the nurturing in the first place?
Technology will allow you to get very detailed and complex with nurturing programs, but beware that doesn’t mean that’s what will work best for your specific scenario. Make sure to determine what you are trying to accomplish first and then apply it to your marketing software – not the other way around. Additionally, we always see greater success in the long run if marketers start simple, understand what’s happening and grow in sophistication instead of trying to conquer all scenarios from the start.
Resource constraints, constantly trying to drive leads with limited budgets to stay above water, moving of leads between systems (email, CRM, etc.) and manual tracking, trying to track various spreadsheets, CRM mixed systems, multiple departments to satisfy, sales/business demands, cost center not profit center, and so on…
Yes, these are many of the reasons marketing is still so manual today. Really, this needs to stop because the marketing function is evolving and it has to stay current in today’s business. Now it’s less about the brochures and vibrant colors, but more about the metrics and mapping marketing spend to revenue attained. To accomplish this without an army of people, marketers must start relying on marketing automation, simple processes and less manual work between systems.
The majority of prospects that we talk to have multiple databases, spreadsheets, and/or tools that give them views into their leads – what they did, where they are going, what type of quality they are, etc. And come to find out that most marketers don’t have visibility to the information they really need – why?
Why are marketers satisfied with this outcome? – They shouldn’t be. Marketing today is drastically changing and it’s up to you to take the appropriate steps in order to make the change. The systems available today allow you to see all lead interactions with your company over time, track metrics from start to finish, easily move “sales ready” leads into your CRM system, nurture leads through drip marketing based on specific conditions, score and prioritize leads based on behavior (online and offline), and get views into revenue attained by campaigns and more.
You can’t and shouldn’t keep doing what you are doing because you think it’s cheaper – because it’s not – not in the long run; and as a matter of fact it could be very costly in the end.
Keeping with this theme of simplicity, it’s time to get down to the guts of nurturing programs – the content. The two essential elements for content are personalization and relevance. Personalization means that you tailor the content to the specific prospect – for instance, start out the email with the person’s name. You should also be able to merge in other fields, such as placing the company name within the text of the email. Personalization helps in engaging prospects and gaining their interest, since it makes them feel as though you are talking specifically to them.
Relevance is the other required element, and it’s about delivering text and images that have real meaning to the email’s recipient. It can be as simple as displaying a graphic that is relevant to the prospect’s own industry (e.g., showing a hospital instead of an office building). Or, relevance can be more complex and deliver content specific to the prospect’s title or captured interests/behaviors. Some marketing automation tools provide rules for dynamic content that allow you to deliver this type of customization via a template.
There is not a “one size fits all” nurturing campaign. Not only does effective nurturing highly depend on your business – i.e., the length and complexity of your sales cycle, your target audiences, who within the prospect organization buys and who influences, and more – it also depends on your ability to provide content. While we all strive for the most sophisticated approaches in nurturing, such as targeting the right content to the right contacts at exactly the right time, the reality is that many of us simply don’t have the resources to produce all the content we need. However, do not fear – having some nurturing is certainly better than having none at all. And it’s actually good to start out simple when implementing nurturing campaigns for the first time. Once you figure out what prospects are engaging with and what they aren’t, what timing works and what doesn’t, you begin to see your own best practices emerge. The good news is that it’s not necessary to spend a lot of time and resources mapping out complex nurturing programs.
Everyone knows that marketing analytics are important. However, we find that most organizations are only scratching the surface when it comes to measuring their marketing efforts. Website hits, email clicks and opens are no longer adequate metrics – they are merely a starting point. Real marketing analytics provide visibility into how your campaigns are impacting revenue and ROI.
Many of our clients and prospects tell us they’re not sure how to get started. We often get the following questions:
– What should I measure?
– How can I interpret and use the data?
So let’s start with the first question – what should you be measuring? Below are a few key metrics you should be analyzing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing:
1. Qualified Leads Sent to Sales
How many qualified leads is the marketing department sending to sales? To get started, meet with the sales team to define a qualified lead. Then, make sure you set up a process to get feedback from sales on either a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis depending on the length of your sales cycle. Just make sure everyone focuses on numbers – and not anecdotal feedback. This can be easily measured by integrating your marketing automation software with a CRM system.
2. Conversion Rates
How many of the leads from marketing converted into sales? Again, integrating your marketing automation software with a CRM system will create a seamless process for capturing this data. After a deal is closed it gets updated in the CRM, and then the information can flow directly back into your marketing automation system. Now you’ll be able to see where the lead came from (Google AdWords, webinar, tradeshow, etc.) and what types of marketing communications they received.
3. Sales Cycle Time
How long does it take to close a lead? Lead nurturing campaigns can significantly shorten sales cycle times by moving prospects along the buying cycle. By the time the leads are sent to sales, the close time should be much shorter since they’re already qualified. This increases the efficiency of your sales team, and therefore decreases their costs.
4. Return on Investment (ROI)
This is the big one – proving a strong ROI is the ticket to ensuring your marketing budget doesn’t get slashed by the accounting department. Marketing automation software lets you track ROI by an individual lead, not just a campaign. This will give you visibility into the financial costs and benefits of your marketing programs.
So now that you know what to measure – how should you use all the information you’ve gathered?
First, these metrics can tell you whether or not your lead nurturing is effective. If the majority of the leads you send to sales are not qualified, then you might need to refresh your content, adjust the frequency of emails, or segment your audience differently. These analytics may also indicate whether you’re sending leads to sales to early in the sales process. You may need to adjust your scoring rules and/or the process of when to send leads to sales. And finally you’ll understand which types of campaigns are most effective by tracking ROI. For example, if you discover that Google AdWords are performing better than banner ads, you can adjust marketing budget to focus on the tactics that yield the greatest return.
We’ve outlined just a few ideas to get you started. Don’t get nervous if the results aren’t initially what you expected – the important thing is to measure everything you do. That way, you can take appropriate steps toward making improvements.
Chances are your company has come up short on a sales forecast or two during the past year. Challenged by cautious buyers who have strung out purchase plans, managing the pipeline has become increasingly challenging for organizations. Therefore, in many cases, the four or five deals forecasted to close in the last quarter often resulted in only two or three signed contracts.
By taking a few simple steps to improve conversion rates, you can make a big impact on your organization’s revenue.
Below are 3 simple and practical ideas that you can start implementing immediately to drive short-term results.
1. Make Your Message Personal:
According to the Aberdeen Group’s study titled, Email Marketing: Get Personal with Your Customer, companies saw the following performance variations after personalized email campaigns were implemented:
– Click through rates improved 14%
– Open rates improved 6%
– Conversion rates improved 11%
It’s a simple, yet powerful concept that marketers can sometimes forget. To get started, segment your leads and create content that speaks to their unique pain points. Make sure it’s brief and conversational – as if you’re writing an email to a business colleague. Also keep in mind people buy from people, not corporations, so send your emails from a person and not your company. And also remember to test different subject lines and content to determine which strategies yield the greatest results.
2. Make it Easy to Engage:
In order to collect a prospect’s information, it is critical to make the engagement process as painless as possible. By optimizing landing pages with the appropriate number of fields to match the offer, marketers greatly increase the odds that a prospect will complete the form and begin the first phase of engagement.
Why is this important? You and your sales team need as much information as possible in order to fully qualify a sales lead. And the more qualified your leads are, the better your conversion rates will be.
Start by building a tiered approach to data collection. In other words, don’t ask for a complete background when a lead downloads their first whitepaper – they’ll get turned off. Get the basics first and then ask for more information as they advance through the buying process.
3. Close the Loop & Re-Nurture:
Research from SiriusDecisions has shown sales typically disqualifies 70% of leads due to lack of budget, timing, etc. An additional 10% of leads are never even contacted. Therefore, only 20% of leads are followed up on.
If that’s not alarming enough, consider the fact that the same research discovered that 80% of those “bad leads” go on to buy a solution within 24 months.
To make sure your company doesn’t lose out on this enormous opportunity, you can implement a process to ensure any unqualified leads are re-nurtured. This keeps your company top-of-mind among your prospects so when they are ready to buy, they think of you first. To get started, meet with your sales team to establish a process for moving leads back into lead nurturing campaigns. Then develop content that targets their specific needs and concerns.
Tags: Lead Management, Lead Nurturing
We are often asked what companies can do to get business in the pipeline now that we’ve entered the 3rd quarter. You can jump start finding prospects through your current systems, use accumulated information to segment the leads, and nurture them to stay top of mind. Read our 4 steps and learn how to get started…
Step 1: Something we’ve found very useful is to turn to your CRM system and find those leads/opportunities that weren’t won, weren’t lost and are not being actively worked. Often companies find they have hundreds or even thousands of leads/opportunities just sitting in their database. Sales reps don’t have the time and/or ability to continue to reach out to the number of leads/opportunities and spend their time on real opportunities that can close in the near term. So many companies can find these contacts as a starting point for a revitalization project.
Step 2: Use the most recent candidates, leads/opportunities that have interacted within your company (through sales, website, etc.) within the last 3-6 months, and put them into a revitalization nurturing program. These are leads and opportunities that aren’t currently being worked by sales actively (not in the forecast) but were at one point passed over to sales.
Step 3: Next see what kind of interaction and how much opportunity might still exist with these prospects. Create messaging that is tailored for a specific group of prospects. In the case of leads/opportunities that were already worked by the sales force, sometimes this is about reading the notes accumulated by sales or information further filled in by sales about the prospect (industry, product/service interest), etc. By speaking the prospect’s language (via industry-specific text or images, or specific products promoted), you have a better chance of catching their interest and getting them engaged in what your company has to offer.
Step 4: Measure the success of your nurturing campaigns by using lead scoring in the interim so you can clearly see which leads had the best interactions with your company. Obviously, the most important metric of success is revenue. How many of these revitalized (currently dead) leads/opportunities pulled out of the CRM database end up closing?
Hopefully, you’ll be able to pick up some prospects that are further along the buy cycle than they were originally when they first interacted with your company and get more qualified “sales-ready” leads into the pipeline.
Tags: Lead Nurturing
The age old question – is it better to provide more leads to sales or less leads that are better quality? Well it really depends – is your company meeting and/or exceeding its revenue numbers? Are your sales reps hitting and/or exceeding quota? If you are like the majority of companies out there, the answers to these questions are “no.” If they are not, then something needs to change. How many of the leads that you send to sales are closing? If that’s a good percentage of the leads, then it sounds like the issue is to just pump up the volume and more revenue will close (of course we are assuming you are measuring ROI on your campaigns so it’s profitable revenue). However, if you are like the majority of companies out there, sales is closing somewhere between 2 – 10% of the leads that marketing is generating. That’s not a particularly great stat. So what’s got to change? Well, if you could provide better quality leads to sales, would the close percentage get better? It certainly should. Better quality not only leads to better close rates but can reduce the cost of sales (sales reps spending time calling people that aren’t qualified) and increase your marketing ROI. So, based on the questions above, it seems like a pretty easy question to answer – quantity versus quality – if you are like most of us, we’ll take quality any day.
We tend to speak to two types of prospects – those that have been given the order from management to get Marketing Automation and those that know they need Marketing Automation, but aren’t getting support from management. So, we often hear the comment – how do I get management to buy-in to Marketing Automation?
We actually have a full whitepaper on the subject, but Marketing Automation is really a pretty easy thing to justify in today’s day and age. With the analyst numbers and customer statistics of the impact of Marketing Automation on their business, it’s hard not to see how it benefits each company. We help our prospects group the benefits in three main buckets – increase the value of marketing dollars you are already spending, lower sales costs and increase revenue. Again there’s detail on each one of these buckets with our Cost of Not Nurturing Whitepaper, but the fact is Marketing Automation enables companies to market and sell in today’s Internet-driven buy cycle. The old process, which is to throw more reps and leads at the problem, is broken and costly. Take some of the numbers that we and/or others are providing and apply it to your current sales and marketing metrics and see the possibilities. And if you don’t have the baseline numbers then you really can get immediate benefit from Marketing Automation.
