Poor conversion, waste of resources, tension between sales and marketing... this is what you face if you do not understand your leads' value
In our digitalized environment almost anyone on earth can show interest in your products and become your lead. Digital buyers are choosing the moment and channels they prefer to interact with your offerings. And the first contact between your company and new customers is very likely a digital one.
This means that you cannot control the flow of digital leads interacting with you. A good fraction of them are clearly not immediate business and even not potential customers at all. But there is definitely substantial business in your overall flow of digital leads. Especially the inbound ones.
What happens if you are unable to measure leads’ readiness to buy your products as well as their relevance for you is quite common:
- One of these scenario generally takes place:
- Marketing sends ALL the leads to the sales for qualification, resulting in a huge loss of resources on low value leads, which drives to an interest drop of the sales team towards digital leads
- The organization does not follow-up on leads, meaning that it is not only losing the resources invested in generating them but also creating a negative impression to these leads that often feel neglected
- The organization only follows up on requests, which is not the ideal approach either, as not all requests are "in-target" and there is no business value extracted from the rest of the lead flow.
- Misalignment between sales and marketing cause demotivation and even conflicts in some cases. Who has not heard phrases like "Sales are not interested in new business" or "Marketing is only sending us crap"
- High risk to see the entire digital strategy fail, as leads are at its very core
Lead scoring principles: process design, automation and continuous improvement
Lead scoring is an automated calculation that computes specific demographic and behavioral information about leads to identify their business potential and their relevance for an organization.
As lead scoring is a huge topic in itself, read this other article to know more about how to score your leads.
Here are the main characteristics of lead scoring:
- The whole point is to transform "raw" leads into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and then route them through different paths based on objective criteria
- The in-target score is generally based on demographic information extracted from your lead generation forms
- The intent score is generally coming from computed behavioral data corresponding to meaningful digital events
- Lead scoring needs to be automated as much as possible. You must reduce the manual and human decisions that slow it down
- Use Marketing Automation systems as much as you can to structure optimized forms and capture the relevant events that will be transformed into meaningful data and then trustable intent score.
- Marketing automation tools are great to trigger secondary programmed interactions that will help you collect missing demographic information and more behavioral intent data
- You define the threshold scores and the routing process that determine what leads go to sales and what leads stay with marketing
- Ideally you could introduce a new role between marketing and field sales -- call them inside sales, digital sales reps, sales development reps -- that will enrich and complement the scoring system
- You constantly measure conversion rates and speed to improve these KPIs over time, with the input of all stakeholders, and perfect your overall scoring system
Better conversion, aligned teams and boosted trust in digital
- You identify new business with a much greater probability, especially those first successes that are so important to communicate on internally
- You create commitment: as marketing transfers to sales reps less raw leads but only the "high quality" ones, sales can commit to follow-up quickly and systematically
- You extract much more of the business value contained in the leads flow
- You are not disturbing the leads which are not interesting for you nor interested in you. They do not feel pressured nor "hunted"
- You increase conversion speed thanks to prioritization of the “hot” leads and the augmented automation of your processes
- You build trust by aligning your sales and marketing teams that see themselves more as a united "revenue team"
- Analyzing the lead flow by group of scores will enable your organization to systematically learn from the market and identify future business opportunities
- You build trust into "digital" and convince further the entire organization that digitalization works
Going Forward: Scoring calls for nurturing. Stay tuned!
