Determining Where a Lead Is In the Buying Process
One thing we know with certainty is that all leads are not created equal, making lead scoring crucial for marketers so they can determine prospect readiness and take appropriate action at the right time. Increasingly, automation is key since spreadsheets and calculators can no longer do the job given the volume of leads and their varying sources, interactions and demographics. Marketers don’t have time to track leads and crunch complex numbers while also crafting innovative product campaigns.
Similarly, metrics used to track and evaluate marketing programs must change, since today a simple “hit” on a website might mean far less than a combination of hits or other actions by the same prospect over time.
This isn’t to say that metrics regarding hits on websites are unimportant, or that you shouldn’t track email clicks. However, they are no longer the endpoint; instead they are just the beginning of real marketing analytics used to determine where each lead is in the buying process, and how to respond.
As marketers, we must change how we track and score prospect behavior to determine when a lead is truly a lead and ready to be passed to sales. As part of this, we must also identify ways to nurture early leads into “sales ready” buyers. What this means is that marketing must be able to recognize which leads are ripe and which still need time on the vine—then grow those leads accordingly.
Lead scoring helps make an accurate determination of how ripe each lead really is.
Lisa Cramer is president and co-founder of LeadLife Solutions, a provider of on-demand lead management software that generates, scores, and nurtures leads for B2B marketers. For more information on lead management or best practices call 1-800-680-6292 or email info@leadlife.com.
Categories: Ask the Experts
Tags: lead scoring lead management marketing automation
In the interest of full disclosure, my company has its own lead management and nurturing solution LeadMaker(R).
Our experience has been that it's more conclusive to let leads self-identify where they are in the buying cycle, rather than scoring their activity from a sales or marketing perspective, and determining whether they're ready for Sales.
The process for accomplishing this involves utilizing a multi-touch approach, and a series of offers which map to the lead's buying cycle. This gets away from activity-based scoring and ranks leads based on responses. Lead interactions may be fewer, but they turn out to be more meaningful.
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Hi Lisa: If a company gets thousands of inquiries a month the marketing automation programs are great. What about the company that only get less than 100 a month? How do they afford marketing automation? Is marketing automation even right for them?
Let’s say a company has 10 salespeople, the average product sold is $50K, the sales cycle is 9-12 months. The number of touches is 8-15 to consummate a sale. What do they do?
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I think even a small company can afford marketing automation today. We're a startup and money is tight, but marketing automation was a priority. Especially in a long sales cycle of 9-12 months, you need a wway to automate customer touches.
Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net
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James, just as Lisa mentions that all Leads are not created equal, all Marketing Automation tools are not equal. The term 'Marketing Automation' itself means different things for various size businesses. Obviously, small businesses can not afford full fledged automation systems costing thousand of dollars a month. However, they can leverage parts and components of the marketing automation practices. For example, action / prospect behavior based automatic email messaging is a very powerful component. As far the small business can use an email marketing tool fully integrated with a lead tracking and management system, they can certainly leverage some of the marketing automation concepts. I am sure that they can afford this level of investment.
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