Pop Quiz: Time To Test Your Company's Lead Effectiveness Quotient

More leads, more leads, more leads. Every day B2B marketers are continually under pressure to produce more leads to help the sales organization meet its quota. But are more leads the right answer? In an ideal world, you would generate one lead that would convert to a customer. While this may not be possible, generating a consistently higher quality of leads will ensure that the sales team gets a better swing every at bat, and you won’t see those leads coming right back at you or just ignored.

To produce higher quality leads on a consistent basis, your company may need to implement a lead scoring system that can act as a filter between all the leads that you do generate and the ones that end up in the hands of the sales team. Those leads that are not ready to be passed over should be incubated in a lead nurturing program until they show signs of being ready to buy.

It could be that your organization actually needs fewer leads that are truly sales ready. Take the following quiz and use the matrix at the end to determine what next steps you should take.

1. Do you currently have a formal methodology for scoring leads?
a) No process
b) Manual Process, Inconsistently Enforced
c) Manual Process, Consistently Enforced
d) Automated Process, Consistently Enforced

2. Which factual/demographic attributes are you using to help score your leads?
a) None
b) 1 or more of the following: Budget, Authority, Timeline, Revenue, Industry
c) Business Need
d) B and C

3. Which behavioral attributes are you using to help score your leads?
a) None
b) Email Opens and Clickthroughs
c) Website Activity – 1 or more of the following: Key Content Pages, Visits, White Paper Downloads, Form Submissions, Trial/Downloads
d) B and C

4. Which statement most closely pertains to your organization?
a) No leads are distributed
b) Most to all leads are distributed to either a single person or a lead queue
c) All incoming leads get distributed to the sales team
d) A and "B" leads get distributed to the sales team, and "C" leads get nurtured by marketing
e) All "A" leads get distributed to the sales team, and "B/C" leads get nurtured by marketing

5. How would you describe your lead management process?
a) We do not know what happens after leads are handed off to the sales team
b) We can manually review lead status in our CRM system and use that data in our marketing analysis
c) We have an automatic reporting process in place that lets us know when leads are followed up on
d) Answer C plus a mechanism to reassign leads that aren’t followed up on within a specified time period to someone else.

6. Your organization uses the following lead scoring scale:
a) No scoring scale is used
b) A/B/C or How/Warm/Cold based on criteria
c) Numerical score based on criteria
d) Numerical score and Grade Ranking based on criteria

7. You adjust and modify your lead scoring scale:
a) Never
b) Annually
c) Monthly
d) Quarterly

8. Once you have scored a lead, your organization:
a) Never changes it
b) Changes it when the lead moves forward in the funnel
c) Changes it when the lead moves backward in the funnel
d) Changes it based upon your nurturing and prospecting criteria dynamically

9. With your lowest scoring leads, your organization:
a) Discards them and/or never uses them
b) Distributes them to the sales or inside sales team
c) Nurtures them for up to 6 months
d) Nurtures them for up to 1 year

10. When building your lead scoring model, you solicit input from:
a) No one
b) Marketing
c) Sales
d) Sales and Marketing

11. In your lead scoring model, you:
a) Have None
b) Score leads but don't weight them
c) Weight each criteria equally
d) Weight each criteria differently based upon historical conversion rates and available information

12. Your organization separates incoming leads:
a) It doesn't separate leads by any distribution method
b) By Direct Channel Only
c) By Direct and Channel
d) Direct, Channel, Named and Non-named Accounts

13. Does your marketing/sales organization look at past interest and changes in baseline activity to prioritize follow-up?
a) No, our team doesn't do this
b) Yes, Sometimes
c) Yes, Most of the time
d) Yes, Always

14. When aggregating lead data, your company:
a) Has no way of aggregating lead data
b) Can aggregate data by campaign and provide score
c) Can aggregate data by campaign, division, and product line and provide score
d) Can aggregate data by campaign, division, product line and company level and provide score

15. Your company follows up on new leads within what time period?
a) 1 week
b) 1 day
c) 4 hours
d) 1 hour

SCORING GUIDELINES
Give yourself 1 point for every A, 2 points for every B, 3 points for every C, and 4 points for every D answer. After totaling your scores, use the matrix below to see how your organization compares.

49 – 60 – World Class Lead Effectiveness. You have a great process in place and should be using automation to get consistent results. Next Steps: Look at doing Company Level and Profile-Based Lead Scoring. With Company Level Lead Scoring, you can aggregate all of the individual scores into a composite score. For those of you engaged in complex sales, this is invaluable as the sum of the parts is greater than any one individual. Profile-Based Lead Scoring establishes different scores for a person based on the role that they occupy. A given individual can be a partner, a vendor, and a customer of one or more products. A score for one product or role can be completely different for another product or role based upon the key requirements for any given situation.

37 – 48 – Very Good Lead Effectiveness. Your systems are fairly well defined, but you can optimize and improve them in several areas. Key Considerations: Are you consistently automating the process? Do you have a closed-loop process in place with your CRM system to provide you with the feedback you need to continuously make adjustments? Are you tracking both explicit and implicit criteria? Once you can get consistency and automation in all facets, you can explore Company Level and Profile-Based Lead Scoring.

25 – 36 – Good Lead Effectiveness. You have some scoring in place, but it is mostly manual. Chances are, you are not tracking both explicit and implicit criteria and you don’t have a weighting system in place. Next Steps: Begin by developing a scoring model that looks at both explicit and implicit criteria. Next, look at ways you can automate the process. Examine your distribution and assignment rules – can you hold back some of the leads and develop a lead nurturing program that will market to them? After this, look at how you can integrate your CRM system with your marketing system to give you better closed loop analytics. Once you have taken these steps, continually optimize and make adjustments over a 4-6 month period until you have a consistent model in place.

< 25 – Poor Lead Effectiveness. You don’t have much of a model in place. You are most likely sending all inbound leads to sales with little or no filtering and this is affecting your conversion rates down the pipeline. Next Steps: Begin by setting up a manual scoring system that both sales and marketing can agree to. Have your inside sales or telemarketing function use this criteria consistently and record the results in your CRM system. From there, you can look at ways to automate the function. Take some time and examine your marketing campaigns and how visitors are behaving on your website. Can you extract some key observations and turn this into a consistent behavior score? Once this is in place, you can look at fully automating the function and investing time into developing a lead nurturing program.

The job of the B2B marketer is harder today than ever before. Don’t let the company view your department as an expense. Expenses get cut, investments get nurtured. Help sales close more business and be accountable for driving revenue. Do this with an effective lead scoring system. It is an essential tool in your arsenal and will help you and your company grow consistently over time.