According to Frost & Sullivan’s Global Marketing Automation Software Market research, global marketing automation software revenue is at $550.7 million and is expected to reach $1.9 billion by 2020.
Last week Joan Rothman posted the article A New Marketing Automation Benefit Emerges which prompted me to write about how I how help companies drive more qualified leads into their funnel with lead scoring.
Scoring leads has been around for a long time. Even before the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, where Alec Baldwin reserves the best sales leads for the best salesperson. Ask any salesperson, in any company, if some leads are better than others and I’m sure the answer will be “Yes”. But how do you put data behind your lead scoring program? The answer can be quite simple or it can be very intricate and complex. The best place to start is with your funnel data.
Start by looking for answers to questions like these:
What source (AdWords, email, etc) drives our leads with the highest close rate?
What are the titles or roles of our buyers?
What content or collateral really speeds up the decision process in our favor?
Sometimes the answers to these questions can be hard to find without sophisticated integrations with your website, marketing automation and Salesforce.com but you can still just ask the people qualifying the leads and selling the deals.
Then after gathering your data you can begin building workflows in Salesforce.com and/or your marketing automation platform to dynamically add points to a leads score when your criteria are met.
But don’t stop there. Incrementing the lead score will certainly help you, but you will also want to define a list of criteria that should decrease the score. For example, if a lead has not come back to your website in 6 months and you have a 30 day buying cycle you should probably subtract points from this lead until they come back and re-engage.
Starting as simple as possible is the best way to begin a lead scoring project. Having criteria to both increase and decrease a lead score will help ensure that your lead qualification and sales teams are always following up on the best leads for that day.
I am always interested in new ways of tracking online buying behaviors and would be interested in your comments. What lead scoring criteria have been successful for you?
To learn more about how Salesforce and Marketing Automation can help the collaboration between your sales and marketing teams, contact us at: sales@perficient.com
