Lead Generation Strategies That Start With "N"

Today we look at lead generation strategies that begin with the letter "N": Newsletter: Everyone talks about it, but more often than not what starts off as an ambitious projects often ends up in the project file that no one has time for. Finding new content, editing and layout all compete for precious time. How can you use Web 2.0 to make it easier to publish and make your newsletter more compelling at the same time? Audio and Video feeds. It is much easier to grab your CXO or customer and do a 5-10 minute interview than it is to ask someone to sit down and write an article. In this way, you make your newsletter more interactive and you don't have to spend as much time writing. A quick post to YouTube and setting up a podcast feed via feedburner and you now have a syndicated newsletter to start driving demand to your website. Add a little creativity and you can turn your monthly video newsletter into a tv or radio show, complete with themes and supporting story lines. Networking: Instead of going to shows and being part of the masses, join the boards. Many of these organizations are starving for volunteers and would welcome your contribution. Have all of your sales and marketing people join at least one association in their area and serve on the board. Now at events, people will come up to you instead of the other way around. You will get much better leads this way. If you can't find a suitable group to join, start your own and make all the rules. How about running an online networking event? Social networking via community sites accomplishes this very well. Stay tuned for the letter O

Lead Generation Strategies from A-Z: The Letter M

What are some ways to generate leads with the letter M?

Marketing Plan. Most marketers I talk to do not have a formal, written marketing plan or a demand generation plan. They have a budget, but there is usually not an overall plan to follow. A good marketing plan outlines the objectives and goals the team needs to follow that align with the corporate strategic direction. Things will change throughout the year, but just because you change direction doesn't mean you throw out the map. To drive sustainable revenue growth, your team needs to develop an annual plan with objectives, goals and tactics and then develop key performance indicators and controls to measure your performance. Your plan should be reviewed on a monthly basis with your team. It is too easy to get caught up in the daily grind and forget about all the other things you need to be doing. Sustainable revenue growth companies operate consistently from a plan.

Measurement. How do you measure your marketing performance? Hint: It is not the creative awards, # of impressions, or clicks you get. It is all in financial terms. Your CFO and board only want to know a few things: 1) What is your Revenue per Marketing Spend? For every dollar they give you to spend in marketing, how many dollars in revenue are you returning against that dollar? 2) Lead to Customer Conversion Ratio - How many leads does it take to generate one customer 3) Lifetime value of a customer - how much revenue and referral revenue will a customer produce over its lifetime, and have you stratified these customers into tiers based upon that return? 4) Lead Portfolio - what is the average rate of return per given lead and how much does it cost to take one lead through to a sale. By concentrating on these financial drivers and looking at how much revenue marketing is producing, not the number of leads, you will align your team much better with sales and endear yourself to the Board.

What Is A Lead Portfolio and How Does This Help You Manage Leads?

Many of you probably have a stock portfolio or some type of investment plan. Leads need to be looked at in the same way. Not all leads have the same value, risk, or rates of return. To run a sustainable revenue growth operation, you need to have a balanced lead portfolio of varying quality and rate of return. Start by scoring your leads with explicit and implicit criteria. Explicit criteria includes budget, authority, need, timeline and other relevant hard data. Implicit criteria is behavioral - it looks at website visits, content viewed, webinars attended, etc. Together with Explicit criteria, you get a much better picture of your leads. Once you have developed a scoring system, you can assign percentages - 80% and above are A's, 70-80% are B's, etc. Then, using your CRM system you can set up closed loop reports to look at how long A leads have taken before they convert into sales, how long it takes for a B lead to convert to an A, etc. In this way, you start developing a much more multi-faceted approach to evaluating lead performance. Your CFO will be very open to discussing this with you, and you will be on your way from talking about Marketing as an expense to Marketing as an investment.

Lead Generation Strategies That Begin With “L”

Today we explore several different ways to create demand with the letter “L”.

Lead Scoring. Not all leads are created equal. In many cases, inbound leads are being sent directly to the sales team. Whether they are web to lead, or call to lead, sales teams are inundated with a large quantity of requests. From marketing’s standpoint, this is typically considered good, but from sales it isn’t because the majority of those requests are not sales-ready leads. Enter lead scoring. Lead scoring is the process of automatically qualifying and screening inbound requests for the purposes of determining which requests are really leads and which ones aren’t. The sales ready leads are usually then sent either to the sales team or to an inside sales/telemarketing function for further qualification. Leads that are not ready to buy are held back in an incubation or nurturing program, until they exhibit signs of buying behavior. Lead scoring works by reducing the overall number of opportunities, but increasing the conversion rate, shortening the sales cycle, increasing average deal size and increasing overall revenue. The analogy is simple: give salespeople high quality at-bats, and more often than not will knock it out of the park. Lead scoring works best when you marry both explicit data such as budget, authority, need and timeline with implicity behavior such as website visits, downloads, and webinars attended.

Lead Nurturing. Lead Nurturing, Lead Incubation, Lead Harvesting is the process of continuously marketing to leads that are not sales ready. Many times after sales disqualifies a lead, it falls into a black abyss. Or worse, marketing spends more money and time to reacquire the same lead over and over again. With lead nurturing, you use marketing automation to leverage channels such as email, direct mail, microsites and telemarketing to send a continous series of messaging to your prospects. When the prospects display buying behavior, they are then routed to a salesperson for follow-up.

Linking. Linking is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and optimize your position in search engine rankings. Identify complementary partners, associations, industry boards and other websites where it would make sense to have a link pointing back to your site. You then reciprocate. You have now turned the power of the web to your advantage by leveraging everyone else’s position to amplify your own. This is easy to do and very cost-effective.

List Acquisition. Ideally, you want to grow your house list organically. But sometimes, it does make sense to acquire a list if you are just starting out or entering a new market. There are a number of good list brokers out there. Do your homework and try to use as much criteria as you can to build a highly targeted and relevant list. Keep in mind that even the best lists will never be more than 80% accurate due to shifting patterns. Leverage off-shore calling centers for a few bucks per call to validate the names on the list and obtain email permission (usually about 20% of the time).

Lead Generation Strategies That Start With “K”

Knowledge Center. One of the best things you can do for your visitors and customers is to provide them with a central place to acquire knowledge and make informed decisions. Over 70% of B2B Decision Makers are now doing their primary research over the Internet. Why should they go to other sites when you can provide them everything in one destination. You can use RSS Syndication to bring in relevant content that is complimentary to your offerings and add them into the Knowlege Center. Intersperse this with your own white papers, interviews, podcasts, analyst briefings, tools, benchmarks, research and anything else relevant to help your buyers make a more informed decision. Consider gating your content. For simply supplying their email address, visitors can get access to good content that is valuable. For filling out a more detailed form that better profiles their buying intentions, you give them access to even higher value content. This will also signal to your sales team which prospects are showing much more serious buying behavior and they can then prioritize their time.

Stay tuned for the letter “L”

Lead Generation Strategies That Start With “J”

Today we look at the letter “J”.

Join Professional and Trade Associations. As part of your lead generation strategy, you should map out all trade groups and associations that your target profile would be actively a part of. Look for niche organizations and other associations that your competitors wouldn’t necessarily be a part of. As you expand your sales and marketing teams, ensure that you have a local membership in every region that you have field personnel. Rather than just joining, consider offering your services as a board member. Many of these organizations are starving for people to help them out. A lot of times it is as simple as asking to be on the Board or to run a committee. Once on the board, you will have access to a much better network, and at events, attendees will seek you out rather than the other way around. If you can’t find a suitable association that meets your needs, how about starting your own? You get to call the shots and control the players and content. This is one of the most powerful ways to network. Why sit in the back of the room and fight everyone else for a valuable contact when you can stand up front and have people come to you?

Stay tuned for the letter “K”

Lead Generation Strategies That Start With “I”

Today we look at Incubation, also known as Lead Nurturing or Lead Harvesting. The challenge for most marketers, is what happens to the leads after the pass them off to sales. Many times, these leads fall into the abyss, never to be heard from again. Worse is when the marketing team spends more money and campaign resources to reacquire the same lead again and again.

Incubation takes leads that are not ready for sales and keeps them warm with a series of marketing messages over a period of time. Then, when the lead exhibits signs of buying behavior, marketing can move the lead back over to sales. Incubation can consist simply of a series of emails or phone calls over a fixed period of time. More experienced marketers use multiple channels such as direct mail and personalized landing pages to vary the pace and content of the incubation period. You will need a marketing automation platform to accomplish this on any type of scale. Companies such as Eloqua, Vtrenz, Pardot and Loopfuse all have technology that can deliver the goods to varying degree. Incubation ensures that all leads get followed up on and your conversion rates will be higher down the line.

Stay tuned for the letter “J”

Lead Generation Strategies That Start With “H”

Today we look at Hosted Wiki’s.

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is a group-editable website. Wikis are composed of web pages you can write on, enabling fast and easy collaboration. It’s as easy to use as email. You might be familiar with www.wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia. Wiki’s allow users to have socially revelant and contextual conversations. How does this help you build demand for your products and services? Hosting your own wiki around relevant industry information allows professionals within your space to network and collaborate with each other around specific topics. When you host the wiki, you have access to that network and are also viewed as a thought leader. People that end up using your wiki will be much more highly qualified than someone that just fills out a form for more information on your website. There are a number of free wiki tools out there like www.pbwiki.com, www.wetpaint.com and www.wikispaces.com. They are easy to set up and maintain and are also highly optimized by the search engines. Consider staring your own wiki today.

Lead Generation Strategies That Start With “G”

In my continuing series on lead strategies from A-Z, today we look at the letter “G”.
Games. We all love to play them and are captivated for hours while we try to win. Websites like Click Software’s Service Tycoon can help reinforce the benefits of your value proposition while holding the visitor captive.

Ideally, the game should be unique, relevant to your industry, and neither too simple nor too difficult to play. A competent player should be able to finish a complete game in about 10-15 minutes, preferably less. You have probably seen themed variations of first-person shooter or “whack-a-mole” games as they are fairly popular. If you do go this route, chances are your game won’t be too popular since it won’t stand out. The challenge here as with most things is to come up with something unique. Vodafone’s campaign is a good example of a unique twist.
An interesting variant of online video games is industry-related trivia games, with prospect-qualifying questions mixed in. These are unlikely to get wide viral distribution, but more likely to appeal to people within your target market. In addition, these have multiple uses; for example, they can be used effectively at trade shows to attract booth traffic while also pre-qualifying your show leads.Stay tuned for the letter “H”

What's Next In Lead Scoring?

2007 was a big year for many B2B marketers, as they developed processes and adopted automation that would score leads for their sales readiness and then distribute only the most qualified to sales while nurturing the remaining leads with marketing messaging until they were ready to buy. Prior to this year, most marketers relied on explicit data such as budget, authority, need and timeline to evaluate leads. This year, thanks to web and email tracking software, they were able to look at behavior data for the first time and add it to the mix to get a better understanding of their leads. Next year, leading marketers will adopt profiles and personas as part of their scores. In other words, an individual can be a partner, customer, and vendor all at the same time, or they can buy multiple products. How they are scored in one arena will not be the same as how they are scored in another. CRM systems will move from having a one-size-fits-all score per contact or account to a series of fields that represent the complexity and multiple dimensions of companies and people. It could look something like this:

Name: Category: Score:
Jane Doe Product A 92 - Hot
Product B 75 - Cold
Partner 85 - Warm

Personas will become more mainstream in targeting and messaging and marketers use today’s Web 2.0 mediums to personalize their messaging and market one-to-one. Lead Scoring, and subsequently Lead Nurturing/Incubation will also migrate to support this approach.

Lead Generation Strategies That Start With “F”

In my continuing series on 60 ways to generate leads from A-Z, today we look at lead generation methods that start with the letter “F”:

Feed Management. Today, it’s all about syndication. With so many people tuning in to get their information from the Internet, you can’t afford not to distribute your content. Services like Feedburner, Attensa, Blogbridge, and more can help you package your content and distribute it to multiple audiences. The best part is most of these services don’t cost anything for you to leverage. The more people that see your content and why you are different, the more people you will be able to attract to your website. Good use of links within your content and feeds will also strengthen your position in search engine rankings.

Flywheel. In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins describes the flywheel effect, which is a metaphor for how big companies were able to achieve momentous growth. The concept of a flywheel is that it takes a while to get started, but once it gets rolling, it is almost unstoppable. Demand generation is the same thing. There is no one magic bullet that will help you generate leads, but if you build an ecosystem with multiple programs running that support an overriding objective, you will be able to significantly outperform marketers over time, especially the ones that are principally relying on email to accomplish their lead generation objectives.

Stay tuned for the letter ”G”

Lead Generation Strategies That Start With “E”

How can you drive revenue with the letter E? Let’s take a look at some of the strategies:

Email. I know, this is kind of like “duh”, but it is amazing to me how poorly email is used as a medium. For starters, many marketers are still using either no permission or opt-out as the preferred subscription management, as opposed to double opt-in, the gold standard for list quality and performance. Marketings working with better permission and quality lists outpull their counterparts by more than 4 to 1 in response rates. Hardly anyone is doing testing. No one says you have to do something complicated like multivariant, but at least do an A/B split test with subject lines and calls to action on every email campaign. It doesn’t take much longer and can improve your performance by up to 400%. How about just good copywriting? With the ubiquity of blackberries, most executives are reading their email on mobile devices. That pretty HTML template with endless copy isn’t going to cut it any more. The best thing you can do with email is get the respondent to the website as quickly as possible where you can engage and lead them through a more interactive experience. What about how you are using email? Are your autoresponders optimized to have additional calls to action and relevant messaging, or are they just an afterthought? Are emails being used only for new prospect acquisition, or are you also leveraging them for customer education, knowledge management, lead nurturing, or a host of other options? Email is a very powerful medium, and when used to its fullest extent, can be a very valuable part of your Web 2.0 marketing mix.

Executive Briefings. Whether they are breakfast meetings, teleconferences, hosted summits, or a variety of other approaches you can take, executives like to network with other executives and learn from their peers. If you do not have some kind of high-level educational or thought leadership program that is targeted at senior level executives, consider adding one today.

Stay tuned for the letter “F”…

What Is A Smarketer?

You may have heard this term before. Ellen Reid first coined the term to describe her approach to publishing and used the moniker to name her company. Omniture uses it to describe a world-class Search Engine Marketer. Perhaps the way I heard it used best was by my good friend, Debbie Qaqish, VP of Strategy at Knowlagent. She was describing the ideal marketer for today’s demanding B2B environments. Someone who has experience in both sales AND marketing. A marketer who realizes that their job is to produce revenue. Not just fill the top of the funnel with high quality leads, but stay active in the pipeline with sales ready messaging and real-time marketing that helps the sales team shorten the sales cycle and increase close rates. A Smarketer bridges the gap between sales and marketing because he/she knows to embrace both functions in proportion to what the prospect needs at any given time during the sales cycle.

There are certainly a lot of good sales and marketing people out there that can perform the traditional roles well. But the Web 2.0 world demands smarketers. Perhaps that is why the marketer’s job span is so short today. Are you a Smarketer? If so, you are in high demand.

Please let me know who you are.

Lead Generation Strategies from A-Z: The Letter D

Direct Mail. An oldie but a goodie, many marketers have moved away from direct mail since email has become so cost effective. To make direct mail work for you in a Web 2.0 world, make sure that you add a personalized URL to each DM piece that takes the respondent to their own personalized microsite. Once there, you can tailor content based on title, industry, behavior and other characteristics to create a more compelling experience. Most marketers I have worked with see a 3-5X lift over their normal response metrics using this approach.

Deminar. At the end of the day, we still need to sell and people will want to view your products at one time or another. A deminar is a webinar that is exclusively focused on demoing your products and services. Make sure your marketing communication clearly outlines this. Those that attend will be a very targeted and segmented group. You can pre-record parts or all of this and then take Q&A live at the end to aid in scalability.

Database. What is 2.0 about your database? For starters, many of us are still at 1.0 with duplicate and stale data that is not properly segmented. The average B2B list turns over at least 25% per year. First, put a process in place that will continuously update and cleanse your database. Once that is complete, you can use your database to develop key buying personas. Personas are representations of your ideal buyers and are easier to build marketing strategies around. You can then develop your website and supporting materials around those personas and track how each segment performs.

Stay tuned for the letter E…

60 Ways To Generate Leads from A-Z: The Letter C

How many ways can you generate demand with the letter C?

1. Customers. We often concentrate so much on new logo acquisition, that we forget about our most cherished asset - our customes. Studies like Reicheld’s Net Promoter concept clearly show a direct correlation between loyal customers and long term profitable growth. Most companies I talk to do not have any formal ongoing marketing programs that deal specifically with their customers. Instead, they are concentrating all of their money and attention on getting new customers. It is so much easier to focus on your existing customer base as a channel. Turning your customers into advocates will do a lot more for your net growth than any lead generation campaign.

2. Content, Content, Content - as long as you continue to produce timely, relevant content that helps your prospects and customers stay informed and make better business decisions, you will continue to generate new leads. Where do you get good content? It is all around you. For starters, you can set up an aggregation of all of the industry feeds right on your site. Everything that the analysts, industry pundits and third parties write can be showcased on your site for convenient access. Instead of always writing your content, consider a podcast series where you interview your customers, executives, industry luminaries. A 10 minute interview that can be streamed via your website will have lasting value. What about hiring college interns or developing a program with your local university’s business or journalism department? They get real-world experience and you get a slew of writers for no cost.

3. Community - Some communities you may be very familiar with - eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook. Once just limited to B2C and personal relationships, many B2B marketers are now creating vertical communities that directly target their market and serve their customer base. Companies like Neighborhood America have software and services that help you establish communities pretty quickly. This strategy is rapidly gaining ground with many marketers who are trying to deliver relevant content to the right people at the right time.

4. Co-Registration. Easy and cost-effective, co-registration is the process of having people sign subscribe to your list when they sign up forl another list. You may have seen these checkboxes from time to time when you have signed up on a particular form. They ask you if you would also like to register for another newsletter or list. By developing 10-12 good co-registration partners, you can build your list through the efforts of others that are going after the same market. Ideally, find partners that complement your products or services. Of course, if you are really daring, you could partner with your competitors and help each other share the burden in acquiring leads. This lowers the cost of lead acquisition while helping to build a highly targeted and relevant list. I’m not sure of how many people would go for this, but it is a thought.

5. Conferences. Conferences can be a great way to network and develop new sources of leads. Instead of sponsoring, see if you can get one of the speaker slots. If that is not an option, come up with a highly impactful and relevant giveaway, like a wheel chart that you can distribute along with your business cards. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

6. Chat. Many B2B marketers are starting to warm up to the idea of using chat or Instant Messaging on their website. Not all people respond to email or phone. A chat window is another way to interact with your visitors in real time while they are on your website and showing interest. You can staff the function with your inside sales team, who in many cases would be qualifying the leads anyway.

Stay tuned for the letter D…

60 Ways To Generate Leads from A-Z: The Letter B

Today we look at some of the ways we can generate leads that start with the letter B:

1. Blogging: This has become a must-have for any serious B2B marketer. Once considered a fad, or something too difficult to control, marketers now recognize the power in giving key stakeholders a voice and leveraging the internet as a platform. Blogging helps you reinforce your brand, develop your people as brands within your corporate structure and a useful medium to deliver targeted messaging. When combined with RSS, podcasting, and other Web 2.0 conventions, Blogging becomes a great way to generate demand. Makes sure every post has a relevant link, like this: www.pedowitzgroup.com/blog so that you can track how effective your blog is at driving traffic back towards your website.

2. Banner Ads: Typically these deliver less than a 0.5% response rate, but depending upon the site and the cost of the ad, they may be useful in reinforcing a targeted campaign. Again, make sure the landing page URL is unique to support the ad. Don’t send the respondent to your home page.

3. Benchmarking Assessments: Everyone loves to be benchmarked and see how well they stack up against the competition. When you can deliver a valuable assessment that rates a respondent in a critical business area, you build trust and confidence as a thought leader and then you can use that data to build a master database of highly relevant market data that you can repurpose. The people that fill out the assessments also generally provide much more information than just a white paper download, so you can feed this into your lead scoring program to determine how to handle. Most of your competitors won’t do this type of service, so if you are looking to distinguish yourself, this is a great area to do it.

4. Breakfast Meetings: The power lunch has moved to the power breakfast. Most executives are too busy to take long lunches, but getting an exclusive briefing first thing in the morning before the crazy day starts is always a good play. When you can have an analyst or top name customer join you for the breakfast, you should have no trouble attracting some of those executives you have been coveting.

Stay tuned for the letter C…

60 Ways To Generate Leads from A-Z: The Letter A

I was thinking the other day of all the ways you can generate leads. We are all probably doing some of these, but can we do more? Which are the most cost effective? Which get the best results? Over the next few days, I will present my thoughts on the various ways to generate demand in alphabetical order. Some of these letters were tough (like Q ) If anyone has any more suggestions, please feel free to post!

The Letter A

1. Autoresponders. We all know what they are, but do we always use them? Typically, this is a text email that your receive after you submit a form, but it can do so much more. This is a great chance to reinforce your brand and use some of your better templates along with strong calls to action. Many marketers view this as just a formality, but it is an excellent way to get another message across to someone that just expressed interest in your product or service. The best part is it doesn’t cost anything but the time to set it up initially and then you are set.

2. Adwords. Given a choice, and please don’t kill me Google, I would rather see marketers focus their efforts on search engine optimization first. Most of the heat map studies done by Marketing Sherpa and others show that the attention is being paid to the top few listings returned from the query. Seldom if ever do searchers go to page 2 or even view on the right. First, concentrate on getting the top listing for keywords in several categories. Once you have that down, it does make sense to invest in some highly targeted Adword campaigns. Before you begin, ask your customers what words they use to search for your products and services. You may be surprised to find out they are quite different from the terms your marketing team uses.

3. Analysts. As respected third party advisors, analysts can be very useful in writing about your firm and getting you in the door with new prospects. One of the best ways to use them is to pay them for co-sponsored webcasts, webinars, or even paid interviews that you can podcast. That way, you can reuse the content repeatedly and make your website much more engaging.

4. Awards. How many of you are sponsoring awards for the markets you serve? Everyone loves to receive awards and sponsors will gladly pay premium dollars to be part of an event where their key target market is. Consider developing your own industry focused awards and then invite people to submit nominations for various categories. This is something that the press will pick up on as well and help you contribute to your Thought Leadership position in the marketplace.

5. Advertising. An oldie, but a goodie. Targeted ads in key industry verticals, both online and offline, especially when they can support a bi-line article or case study pack a good one-two punch. Instead of just putting the ad in, make sure you put a targeted URL in the ad so you can track which people came to your site as a result. For example, www.pedowitzgroup.com/wallstreetjournal [ed. note - this link won’t work] is much better than www.pedowitzgroup.com
Stay tuned for the letter B…

How To Set Up A Lead Scoring System in 7 Easy Steps

Yesterday, I wrote about a new study by Eloqua showcasing how effective lead scoring really is in helping companies drive revenue. Today I am going to outline 7 steps to set up a lead scoring system for your company.

1. Criteria.

Most of us are familiar with BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) criteria for evaluating leads and have been using it for years. This is called explicit criteria. But since most “buyers are liars” today, this data isn’t always the most reliable. More marketers are using implicit or behavioral data as an additional gauge. Criteria such as website visits, email clickthroughs, white paper downloads, etc. can be more indicative of true buying intent, and when married with explicit data, provide a more well-rounded view of the value of the lead. To get started, sit down with your sales team and come up with a written definition of a lead that everyone can agree on, using the above criteria.

2. Weight Attributes

The next thing you need to do is weight the criteria. Since not all items should be given equal consideration - for example, the decision maker might have more value than the buying timeframe - you need to set up a weighting system. The easiest way to do this is by leveraging a LIPERT scale of 10 points. Give 10 points to the criteria deemed most indicative of buying intent, and 1 to the least. If title is one of your categories, you can assign 8 points to the decision maker, 7 points to an executive, 6 to a manager, and 5 to a gatekeeper.

3. Develop Rating System

The next thing you need to do is build your scale and determine your rating system. The easiest way to do this is to take the high end of each of your criteria from step two and add them together. For example, say you had 5 criteria, worth 10, 9, 8, 7 and 6 points respectively. You would add them all up to get a total point value of 40. Next, determine what percentage are your “A” or “Hot” leads. Usually, the top 20% is a good start. So, leads from 32-40 points would be a “A” lead. Keep going until you get to your C leads. Anything below that should go straight into lead nurturing programs.

4. Determine Actions Based On Rating

The next thing you need to do is determine what actions should be taken for each type of lead. “A” leads can go straight to the sales team, while “B” leads go to inside sales and “C” leads go to nurturing. Or, you can have the “A” leads go to inside sales for further qualification before they are routed to sales. The possibilities are endless, but once you define them, ensure you have a platform in place to apply the rules consistently.

5. Monitor and Adjust

No lead scoring system will be 100% accurate right off the bat. It takes many companies 6-9 months of continuous tweaks to get it right. Communicate regularly with your sales team and monitor your conversion rates once the system is enacted. Whatever you do, don’t make too complicated of a system with loads of criteria. It will be too difficult to manage and maintain. Start small and incrementally add criteria until you have a system that both sales and marketing are completely confident in.

6. Build Your Porftolio

Once you start scoring and distributing your leads, maintain a portfolio, similar to a stock portfolio of how well your leads perform. Monitor length of time it takes for different rated leads to move through your funnel and convert, along with the corresponding dollar values. This will help you maintain a holistic view of your lead performance. Just because leads are B’s, C’s, and D’s today, doesn’t mean they won’t turn into ‘A’s somewhere down the road and convert into revenue.

7. Report on Financials

Your CRM system is the best vehicle for this. Monitor your lead to opportunity, lead to close, opportunity to close and average revenue per deal both before and after lead scoring starts. This will be the truest gauge on how well lead scoring is performing for your organization.

Lead Scoring: Fact or Fiction?

Over the last year, Lead Scoring has been gaining in popularity among B2B marketers as a means of screening off most of the inbound leads they generate and ensuring that the sales team only works with the most qualified leads. Now that companies have had these programs in place, the question many are asking is, does this actually work? Eloqua recently surveyed 10 of their customers who had used the lead scoring program for 6 months or more to find out what kind of impact lead scoring was having on revenue and opportunity conversion. They found that the number of opportunities sales worked on went down by 22.9%, while close ratio increased by 30.5%, average revenue per deal increased by 17%, and overall revenue increased by 17.8%.
Clearly, there are benefits to organizations that implement lead scoring. In my next posting, I will outline several recommendations on how you can get lead scoring up and running in your company.