How to implement lead scoring for a small business
You probably already know this but….
- More customer buying research takes place ‘up-stream’ on the company web-site. Salespeople are most likely to be called in when your customers are ‘ready to buy’. This means Marketing needs to put in a bigger shift when it comes to progressing sales opportunities
- Downloading a whitepaper from your web-site or signing up to a webinar does not signify ‘hot-prospect’. This is a lead but it’s not a sales qualified lead (SQL). If you keep supplying your sales-team with these kind of ‘opportunities’ they’ll soon be ignoring you and everything else you send them.
- The reality is:
- They don’t have the band-with to call every prospect
- Priority is usually placed on ‘closing’ especially in the last month of the quarter
- The ‘belief’ is often that leads supplied by Marketing are duds anyway.
This means the best B2B marketers should:
- Capture and retain potential customers interest until they are ‘ready to buy’
- Pass ‘sales-ready’ leads over to the sales team
The common approach to knowing when a lead is ‘sales-ready’ is the implementation of a lead-scoring mechanism. For a big-business with hundreds of moving parts there are teams of people who manage that process. However, small businesses can’t easily build lead-scoring processes.
- Not enough time and resource within Marketing
- Cumbersome in-house systems
- Marketing is often 1 0r 2 people with not enough of the right skills
- Assistance required from IT is not available or provided in a timely fashion ( to help make web-changes/report creation/landing pages blah blah)
Faced with these challenges here is how to create a lead-scoring process quickly, cost-effectively and without the need for IT resource (internal or external) or an army of external consultants.
1. Put your company data on a good CRM system.
- My preference is salesforce.com which I consider to be the best of the bunch. I’m often told about cheaper and ‘free open source’ options. However, thousands of businesses already entrust their data to Salesforce.com I believe in the ‘wisdom of crowds’. Buy it – it works. Simple
2. Use a free status ‘Lead-Scoring’ application
- Salesforce Apps offer an ever expanding list of ‘free’ or low cost apps that support sales and marketing activities.
- I found an app that calculates a ‘status-score’ for your whole database. The criteria you can select is flexible but I’m using ‘Job-Title’ and ‘Company-Size’ to drive this part of the scoring.
3. Integrate and use a SMB Marketing Automation software with your CRM for ‘activity’ lead scoring.
- This application provides the ‘dynamic’ lead-scoring piece of the puzzle. (Dynamic being who is coming to you site, how often and what are they doing when they get there). Points awarded for form-filling, web-downloads and clicking on links. Biz-Builders uses Act-On Software and there a few other SMB choices available (e.g. Pardot) depending on your requirements.
3. Check-in to see what’s happening
- Act-on and Salesforce.com talk to each other while you are not around
- Reports are easily created in Salesforce which you then distributes to sales
Benefits
- Weekly/monthly reports showing which of your ‘best-fit’ prospects have been most responsive to you marketing activities
- Send sales-team a list of ‘active’ prospects which they should call. Since these contacts have already been busy on your web-site they either need something or will certainly be happy to chat.
Resource
- All the above can be set up in less than a day
- Total investment of £500-£700 per month gives a marketing automation system that integrates with salesforce.com and enables b2b sales and marketing alignment.
Oh and remember sales and marketing alignment is only a little bit about technology but mainly it’s about this. Click here
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