Keeping Score: When Processing Leads, Remember Not All Customers are Created Equal
When a company employs a marketing automation system to score its incoming leads, it begins assigning points to prospects based on their activity. But, not all the activities of all your prospects should be given equal weight.
“All things are not equal, and you need to look at things on different levels,” says Chris Parisi, vice president of technology for Austin, TX-based Bulldog Solutions. For example, while it makes perfect sense to give prospects points based on whether they clicked on a link or opened an email, consider what link led them to click and which email they opened, and award points accordingly.
Give and Take
M.H (Mac) McIntosh, partner of North Kingston, RI-based AcquireB2B, suggests employing a multidimensional lead strategy that not only gives points, but also takes them away. “If someone looks at a whitepaper, give points. If they attend a webinar, give points. But, if they go on your site and look at the job listings page, take points away.”
“You need to look at the signals customers are giving you based on what they’re clicking on or downloading, and then weight that,” agrees Amy Bills, director of marketing for Bulldog Solutions.
One thing that would make that process easier for marketers would be the ability to better integrate their content management and marketing automation systems — something Parisi doesn’t really see happening yet. This would allow marketers to see an asset and what product family it belongs to, and to make sure the metadata about prospects’ activity surrounding that asset made its way into the marketing automation tool. But for this to happen, the process of tagging that content when someone visits a page or URL and shows their interest must be an easier. “Right now, it’s a lot of [usually manual] maintenance,” Parisi notes.
Product Level Scoring
Another trend Parisi sees: companies coming up with multiple scoring models based on specific product lines. When a company first sets up a lead processing automation system, it makes perfect sense to group everyone together at launch, to make your efforts more robust. But as time goes on, that might not be the best strategy.
“A lot of people using automation technology are now past the pilot phase and paying a lot more attention to detail and fine-tuning their efforts,” Parisi says. “If your company has 10 distinct product lines, it makes sense to come up with multiple models and then score and route leads [to the sales force] on a product level.”
Develop Personas
Marketers naturally want to gather as much information as they can in the lead generation process. But consider progressive profiling, rather than asking for the world up front, says McIntosh.
This means asking people for information gradually as you get to know them, adds Will Schnabel, vice president of business development for SilverPop. For example, when someone first visits your site and downloads a whitepaper, don’t ask a dozen questions. Rather, just get what’s essential right then — the person’s name and email address. When the person comes back, you can ask for a little more, such as job title and company name.
By going slowly, you help the prospect develop a sense of trust in your company. And that means that when you ask for more detailed information, like phone number or company size, you’ll be more likely to get an accurate answer, Schnabel says.
