These days, customer journeys look less like a yellow brick road and more like an endless maze with numerous possibilities. Different channels, multiple devices and a slew of sources can create countless non-linear paths. As B2B marketers, our great task is to leverage and measure these journeys to maximize sales opportunities.
Therefore, marketers must be vigilant about lead scoring and which leads they are sending off to sales.
In most cases, we see that many of the leads forwarded to sales are bypassed or completely ignored. Why? Salespeople feel that the leads are not qualified, and they can’t afford to waste their time focusing on “marketing” leads when they can find hot leads elsewhere. So, what can marketing do to create a more effective alignment with sales?
One possible answer is lead scoring.
Lead scoring is used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value of each lead. The resulting score is then used to determine which leads the sales team will engage, in order of priority.
Lead scoring is about qualifying prospects so that salespeople can do their job more efficiently. It also aids in ensuring that marketing will focus their effort toward generating the right leads.
As a result, sales should be able to turn their attention to higher-quality leads and reduce the lead response time. Simultaneously, this will increase the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate. This is the true measurement of success when it comes to building lead scoring models.
Current marketing and sales challenges
While many claim to recognize the importance of sales and marketing alignment, most companies still struggle with it.
You’ve heard it before. The sales team complains that marketing is just spending money and working on campaigns that don’t scale. Marketing claims they’re generating the right type of leads because the score says so and they’re taking every lead through the nurture process. When this type of disconnect arises, it’s time for marketing to understand the sales perspective and build a methodology that works collaboratively.
Other times, the sales team feels they need more leads, and marketing may think the leads they’re delivering aren’t being followed up. Marketing believes they’re delivering the highest-quality leads.
Then again, it isn’t like all the value can be found through a single channel. It’s about testing every channel through the ROI path. In the end, all the channels work together to deliver success.
For example, think of a green energy company focused on Google AdWords, Facebook advertising, Twitter advertising and guest blogging. If all four channels collectively bring value, it would be tough to omit one and narrow the focus to a single channel.
That type of scenario deals with budgets and leads for the sales development reps (SDRs). As budgets increase, the quality of leads that come in through the pipeline will diminish. As the lead quality diminishes, the SDRs become less driven to call the leads. Hot leads become cold leads, and a vicious cycle begins. Then the conversion rate plummets, and we’re back to square one again. So what’s the solution?
Service-level agreements that actually scale
The ultimate “win-win” happens when sales and marketing work together to build a cohesive experience that will in turn generate more sales. Marketing and sales can be powerful when they focus on the three basic processes:
Define the leads.
Establish the handoff process.
Set goals.
Define the leads
The term “lead” is one of the most generic of all terms, and it’s all too often used rather loosely.
Some companies go out and purchase lists of people based on certain criteria like job titles, industries or interests in certain subjects or technologies. They import them into their CRM (customer relationship management) tool and call them leads.
This is not the definition of a lead. It’s far from the yellow brick road or even a well-designed maze — it’s more like a carpool lane in which you and a bunch of other suckers are together in a van, beelining towards ice-cold leads that are likely still annoyed by the last set of marketers that bombarded them. This is epic demand generation failure waiting to happen.
Names and emails that have simply been purchased or rented from a list broker — no matter how well they match specific criteria — are not leads (even if that’s what the list brokers call them).
What are they? These records don’t even have an official term in marketing parlance. Some people refer to the records in these lists generically as “contacts,” but since the term “contact” has a very specific meaning within CRMs (people who are associated with existing accounts), using this term to refer to these non-leads can cause confusion. Instead, we’ll just refer to them as “records.”
Rather than records, you want to find MQLs. What’s an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)? The answer depends on your specific criteria. How can you separate out leads and contact the highest-quality ones first? By setting some criteria that make sense for your particular business.
For example, some typical criteria that can factor into qualifying a lead as an MQL include:
requesting a demonstration.
requesting a free trial.
requesting certain types of content.
viewing certain web pages.
opening on or clicking emails.
following or engaging on social media.
having specific job titles.
working for specific types of company.
sustained interest in the company or products.
You will want to define your SALs (sales accepted leads) and SQLs (sales qualified leads) as well.
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