Written by Cody Young, ReachForce Customer Success Manager

Lead Scoring appears to be the newest tactic Marketers are using to better identify warm to hot leads for Sales. Marketing vendors like Marketo and Eloqua are promoting lead rating and lead scoring as a means to increase sales effectiveness and accelerate typical sales cycles. Both are measuring a contact’s interaction behaviors with marketing activities. But should a contact really be considered a hot lead if they open a few emails and visit your website a time or two? I think our Sales team might disagree here.

At ReachForce, we are doing a little lead scoring of our own. Instead of analyzing prospect behaviors, we are going directly to them and asking them to participate in a survey. By gathering qualifying information directly from the prospect, our customers are able to better target their messaging at these new prospects. By enabling them to get to the right buyers, in the right companies, with the right message, they are seeing increased marketing results and sales conversions.

Here are few tips we share with our customers when we’re building out a lead scoring survey.

Lead Scoring surveys can quickly:

1. Qualify a company as a user of a certain technology or application – This type of question is to confirm if a prospect organization uses something that either compliments or competes with the survey sponsor’s offering.
2. Find out respondent status: decision maker, a part of a decision making team or a secondary influencer – This type of question is useful when setting the stage for a sales call or marketing campaign so messaging can be made as relevant and personalized as possible.
3. Find out how well the top 2‐3 product or service “key values” are recognized by each respondent – A “key value” is something that makes an offering better, unique or uncommonly relevant to the prospect. This type of question is used to find out if they will “get” your value proposition, or if education or special messaging is required.
4. Measure how important key values are to each respondent – This follow up to Q3 is used to find out how important the respondent thinks the sponsor’s key values are. Combined scores to this set of questions are used to determine degree of interest and help make sales and marketing messaging relevant and personal when following up on the lead.
5. Determine budget – This type of question is used to pinpoint how much the respondents’ organization spends (and by implication would expect to spend next time) on offerings similar to what the sponsor sells. Paying close attention to scores that are too low help sales and marketing teams prioritize.
6. Confirm plan – This type of question helps find out when or how often the respondent is in the market for what the survey sponsor is selling. Questions like this can also be centered on finding trigger events (audits, budget planning, corporate initiatives) that create sales opportunity.
7. Establish time line or “window of sales opportunity” – By combining the responses to “Confirm plan” and this type of question, the result is normally a reliable indication of when the respondent’s organization will begin the buying cycle for what the survey sponsor is selling.

The lead score you end up with for each prospect should help you to determine if the prospect can be immediately handed off to sales or put into a marketing campaign for further nurturing.

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Marketing’s number one job should be lead generation with measurable impact to top-line revenue, right? I bet that’s what most CEOs and Sales Executives would say. So why do other departments still think of us as the ones who order the t-shirts and go to cool events? And these are the nice comments made, ask a few sales guys what they think of marketing and I’m sure you’ll get a variety of not so nice answers.

According to the CMO Council, 38% of CMOs say that aligning and integrating sales and marketing is a top priority this year. But, only 30% have a clear process or program to make this priority a reality. I think the real question here is - why is it only a priority for 38%?

For Marketing to have a clear impact on revenue, they must be aligned with Sales. I believe there are three important factors for healthy Marketing and Sales alignment:

1. Marketing’s goals (and bonuses) are tied to the same goals as Sales – e.g. bookings and new customers acquired
2. Clear definition of a lead and when leads should be passed to Sales
3. A closed loop process that allows Sales teams to push leads not ready for Sales back to Marketing for ongoing nurture programs.

When Sales and Marketing share the same goals, they have to work together. Neither will be successful if they do not communicate openly and collaborate to reach their goals. The breakdown typically starts with the definition if a lead. With Sales constantly asking for more leads, it is no wonder that many Marketers are forced to get new contacts any way they can (website registrations, event attendees or just buying a list) and then just throw them over the wall to Sales. More is better, right? Not necessarily in this case. Instead, Marketers should warm all new contacts through an email, direct mail or webinar campaign to gauge their “sales readiness”. This enables Sales to focus on only the warm/hot leads while Marketing continues to educate those that aren’t ready to buy just yet. Through this process Marketing should also be able to weed out companies and contacts that are not a fit for the business allowing for more productivity and efficiency on your sales team.

The ideal scenario is to build a funnel together with Sales and define the stages of it and the specific hand-off point of a lead – a unified funnel is the ONLY approach to creating a win-win for the business.

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During my short tenure in the marketing world, I have noticed several styles of marketing to drive leads into the sales pipeline. The most successful, by far, are multi-touch, multi-message email and direct mail campaigns that are complemented along the way by sales calls. The keyword here is COMPLEMENTED. I have spoken with several “marketers” who do no marketing programs….they simply buy lists and give them to the sales team.

Let me preface my next statement with this: I think all sales people should not rely solely on marketing for leads….they need to cold call and prospect on their own. With that being said….HOW DO SOME OF YOU HAVE A JOB??? If all you do is buy lists…not even role-based, highly targeted lists like I sell…but generic, crappy lists to hand over to sales for them to drive business, how do you have a job? Why couldn’t a 7th grader come over during recess and do the same thing for an ice cream cone? Forget wasted budgets, let’s talk about wasted salaries and benefits to employees who do nothing but spit out a lot of fluff at meetings and then go buy lists to give directly to sales. How is this marketing?

Do some webinars….drive traffic to events you will attend….send out white papers….do email and direct mail campaigns with altered messaging depending on the measured results of each touch….find out criteria about your current customers that you can use to identify “warmer” company targets….and lastly, send all marcom “stuff” to role-based contacts! Without the last step, everything, EVERYTHING, is wasted.

In conclusion, your sales guys need to be driving their own business through cold calls….but marketers need to incorporate multi-touch, nurture programs with measured results and calculated changes in order to not be a complete waste of a salary.

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I sat on a panel recently titled Austin AMA Executive Advisory Board Panel discussion: “Does Marketing Deserve a Seat at the (Corporate Boardroom) Table?”

It was interesting to note that we fundamentally in the business world don’t know how to define the role of a CMO/VP of Marketing. The best description was given by Mike Shultz CEO of InfoGlide, he said Marketing’s role is to explain to the company “where we are now and where we are going” and in his view, marketing leadership does not have to be a job but a role played by one of the key executives – CEO, VP of Products, someone or as he put it, “someone better play it” or we are in trouble.

It seems like a lot of people are stirring the debate on my favorite topic “revenue impact of marketing”:

• A piece on Marketing’s lack of impact on Sales that I read recently in AdAge
• Fast Company did the same, calling the CMO’s job the most dangerous job in business

So is it the measurement instrument or the person or the heritage of the marketing function to blame? What do you think?

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Note the perspective in this blog bite assumes the following: Lead generation is about delivering high quality targeted opportunities to sales to accelerate revenue.

I have spent several years people complain about the following:
Sales: Marketing does not know what they are doing, their leads are bad
Marketing: Sales is not smart enough to follow-up on our leads

The crux of the problem, in my view is the definition of a lead and metrics that are used to measure marketing success. My opinion 2 things you should consider:

1. Get WRITTEN down buy-in from sales on definition of a lead
2. Compensate marketing not on generating volume of leads but the number of leads that sales “accepts” – based on #1 (compensation tied to revenue is ALSO key)

So what is a lead?
I like this framework- one to start with then adapt for your business:

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Marketing Profs ran a great article yesterday by Russell Kern entitled “How to Solve Direct Marketing’s Five Biggest Problems” that struck a nerve with me as a B2B direct marketer. He writes “Salespeople love to receive a nice steady flow of leads that keeps them busy, but not too busy. When that’s not what you’re giving them, they tend to become, well, verbal. So what does Sales do? It cherry-picks the best leads, letting the surplus responses fall to the floor to rot. Within 45 days, they’re yelling for “fresh” leads.”

Wow, does that ever sum up the universal B2B Direct Marketer’s challenge! It’s either too many or too few. We can never win. ReachForce’s superbly targeted B2B Marketing Oh Crap day addressed this challenge brilliantly. I know we can all relate to the effect that the holidays has on our lead flow.

If you are struggling with too many leads or too few fresh/high quality leads, then Kern advises:

• One of the fastest and least expensive methods to improve your results is to eliminate poor targets and increase the number of look-alike suspects.
• Here is a simple exercise to perform when putting together a lead generation mailing: Have your data-processing vendor run a count, by title, of your mailing list. At the same time, run a count of your customer titles.
• Now, compare the results. How many of the titles in your suspect mailing list are not in your customer file? How many titles like “administrator,” “consultant,” and, yes, even “inmate” have somehow slipped into your mailing list—people who will respond for the sake of it, but never, ever buy your product?

Once you’ve taken the important step to better target your campaigns, you should also consider a great automated scoring and lead scoring and nurturing program as we wrote about in The B2B Lead and our ebook on the topic Funnelnomics. If you have some time to sit down and study up on database marketing fundamentals this holiday season, I encourage you to take a moment to download the book and put a few of the lessons into action in 2008.

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I spoke at the Eloqua Marketing Effectiveness Summit last week up in Dallas (http://summit.eloqua.com/) – strangely enough as I write this I am back in Dallas on a trip to the east coast and my flight is cancelled (another blog, another story) and since I am here for 3 unplanned hours, how better to spend my time then to blog!

As the session started and the discussion leaders engaged the attendees (lead generation folks from companies like National Instruments, Vignette, FuelQuest, Paymetrics, etc.), I felt like the session was going to be a support group with 2 major glaring issues:

1. Sales and Marketing Relationship/Rules of engagement
2. Data Issues – New data (lists. Leads) sourcing, working with internal data (house lists, customer data, support data, cross selling, up selling).

On number 1 above I believe (and did pontificate at the session) that marketing and sales have to co-exist in harmony or the business loses. I also recommend a formal legally binding (not really) contract between marking and sales on the definition of a lead. As one marketer said, working with sales or empowering them with information to market to their customer base was “like giving the devil a soul” – lady calm down, maybe you need to talk this one through. Hey Psychiatrists out there, there is a new form of couples therapy needed on the planet – B2B marketing and sales.

In terms of data issues, I have been frustrated for the last 10 years on the poor quality of lists and also the lack of analytics available to marketers (and hence we launched ReachForce) but did not realize the gravity of the problems/issues and ongoing struggles. Some interesting points of note were:

• We are all stuck in a B2C world of thinking and need to think about B2B marketing differently – it is different and more complicated from a sales process perspective
• Internal company data is suspect at best – how do you define rules of engagement between sales and marketing on when or when not to touch a prospect / customer
• How do you keep internal data (in the CRM system) refreshed/updated as it’s touched by different people at different stages of a sales (and post sales cycle) – who is the MASTER owner of the data and defines the different roles of people by stage of marketing sales/cycle
• Data visibility – how do you think about direct visibility of service and support data (the instance was a support ticket) associated with a customer as a flag to marketing and sales before that person/company is touched/messaged next
• And on and on … enough that I think we will start B2B Marketing support group in Austin as a start in 2008!

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I’ve just begun working on Part II of the Funnelnomics book I co-wrote with ReachForce CEO, Suaad Sait. The new section is on B2B market micro-segmentation. Specifically, I want to detail the possibilities and a process for using automated pipeline analysis to slice your target market into smaller and smaller markets with common interests/needs. Then use marketing automation to deliver more relevant messages to those markets to drive Marketing ROI. Sort of like Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (http://www.longtail.com/) for B2B Marketing. (Still not totally sure this analogy applies, but you get the point, I hope.)

In a recent post on The B2B Lead (Get Real-time Insight into Your Marketing and Sales Funnel) I wrote about how I am using ReachForce’s new salesforce.com add-on to get real-time insight into my funnel or pipeline. Initially, I used it to spot our top vertical markets and then identify other companies that met our target market criteria. Now, I’m experimenting with using it to conduct some experiments in micro-segmentation. So, I want to see how I can use it to…

1. See which campaigns are producing high velocity leads—those leads that move through the funnel fastest and invest more marketing dollars in those campaigns.
2. Drill into the pipeline to identify trends in certain geographies and then identify additional opportunities within those geographies.
3. Identify bottlenecks—stages of the funnel where leads from a particular campaign are stuck so that I can move those leads along with tailored communications or timed offers.
4. And, last—perhaps—but not least, I recently realized that I can now spot gaps or “problem spots” in the funnel so I can actually tell Sales reps in a particular territory that they don’t have enough leads to meet their revenue number. Imagine that! Marketing telling Sales that they don’t have enough leads.

I’m absolutely fascinated by the possibilities of using automation to deliver more targeted/relevant campaigns to smaller and smaller markets. This would improve your response rates since the message and the offer would be more relevant to the market. It should also enable you to dramatically improve the efficiency and velocity of the funnel (ie. my funnelnomics). You could conceivably manage your funnel almost like a manufacturing process squeezing out inefficiencies as they became obvious. Plus, the reduced costs required to deliver more targeted messages—instead of spraying them to a broad audience—should ensure Marketing ROI will be higher.

So, these immediate rewards are pretty obvious. But what about the longer term effects of smarter, more relevant Marketing techniques on the practice of Marketing as a whole? Is it possible that this approach will take some of the heat off of today’s B2B Marketers who are criticized for being self-important Spammers who spray their messages out to target markets without bothering to understand what is appropriate for the buyer? I mean this video (B2B Marketing WTF: The Breakup) says it all, doesn’t it?

It remains to be seen if taking this type of approach can help Marketers penetrate the Teflon-like resistance of most buyers toward traditional marketing efforts. But Facebook, for one, is already unveiling its own version. Should be a good barometer to watch to see how actual users are reacting to this newly introduct ad targeting concept http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/22/facebook-experiments-with-ads-targeting-peoples-interests/.

It seems to me that if the content B2B Marketers deliver is truly relevant, it could become welcome content. However, if the ad platform enforces a sort of intimacy—yet the “content” still resembles advertising—it puts everyone in a very uncomfortable position.
Esther Dyson made a great point about this at the Defrag conference when she proposed that Marketers give users disclosure messages that are personalized http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6892 . She said that she wasn’t sure about personal rights, just that individuals have the right to demand to be made happy by whatever service they use.

Will micro-targeting make users happy? Will Facebook’s ad platform actually add value? Those are the real questions for Marketers to figure out. But I, for one, am excited by the possibilities. Stay tuned for more developments on the subject. Or, better yet, share your 2 cents.

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You know you have to have metrics to show value in marketing programs but are you tracking the right metrics? Can you track value added to top line revenue? Check out this article from Customer Think about aligning sales and marketing metrics.

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The folks at ReachForce have produced some terrific white papers and an ebook on the importance of Marketing and Sales funnel analysis. Now, the company is moving beyond just “talk” with a  new software-as-a-service product that helps B2B Marketers analyze Sales wins to identify top market segments and target their campaigns at those segments. They are calling it ReachForce Insight, because it integrates with Salesforce.com to provide Marketers, like myself, with instant insight into the flow of “deals” through the Marketing and Sales funnel or pipeline.      

In the interests of full disclosure, I am an advisor for the company, in addition to being a long-term customer. One of the perks associated with this role is that I get early access and input into new products. I’ve been beta testing the product for about a month now and (as I said in the quote included in the press release) I’ve found this product to be an important tool for aligning my Marketing programs with Sales.

I  used it initially to identify the vertical markets in which Sales is closing the most deals, and then to build a list of other companies in those markets who are not currently my customers. I then selected the “Add Contacts” button in the product to initiate a contact discovery project to cleanse and augment that list. Less than a week later, I had my list and am using it for a very targeted multi-modal campaign.

The jury is still out on whether these leads and this campaign will perform better than other types of campaigns. Both our Sales and Marketing groups are keeping a close eye on them as we hope to use ReachForce to keep a steady lead flow in the pipeline, to ramp up new territories quickly, and to replace some other  more costly, less-effective campaigns.

And, kudos to ReachForce. It’s nice to see a company walk the walk, instead of talking the talk.
 

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