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Welcome to Lead Scoring, Prioritization, Routing and Nurturing.
minutes you will
What is a qualified lead? Here are the 5 basic questions every business needs to ask and get
answered in order to determine if a lead is qualified: Does the individual have a need or an
application for your product or service? Pretty straight-forward – if the
answer is “Yes”, move forward. If the answer is “No”, ask if they know someone that does and
move on. What is the individual’s role in the decision- making process?
they have the authority to make the purchase, great! If they are involved in the decision,
good. If they are gathering information for others, find out who those other people are
and get on their radar! What is the individual’s timing for purchase or implementation?
Based on your typical sales cycle – simple purchases can be accomplished in a day or less,
while complex sales can take months, if not years. Where are they in the process – do
they have a firm date? What is the status of the individual’s budget? Do they have an
approved budget? What is it? How does it compare to the price for your solution? What is the
size of the opportunity? This question typically results in someone focusing on the
specific opportunity that came through the door – but it should focus on a larger, long term
opportunities for additional products, services etc.
A Simple Scoring and Prioritization Process You have identified the questions and
possible responses, now assign point values so you can focus on those that score the highest
(greatest potential)! Here’s a first pass What’s the individual’s role in the
decision process? · Decision Maker: 5 points · Influencer: 3 points
0 points Is there a clear need for the product/service?
points Has a budget been approved? · Funding is in place: 5 points
approval process: 3 points · Funding process not started: 0 points What is the
timing for the decision? · To buy within the next 3 months: 5 points · To buy within 3 to 6
months: 3 points · To buy within 6 to 12 months: 1 point · No specific time line
in place: 0 points What is the estimated size of the purchase?
a large order: 5 points · What you consider a medium order: 3 points · What you consider a
small order: 1 point Now, anyone that earns 20 points or more can be
ready’ lead and should be immediately handed over to the sales team. What do you think?
A little messy? Noticing ways tweak this for your own situation? Good – because this
isn’t an exact science. You will need to personalize, customize, monitor, analyze and
modify. And if you happen to use lead scoring and prioritization, please share
your experiences so the rest of us can learn!
Successful nurturing programs are 5 times more likely than less successful programs to tie
lead nurturing content to the buyer’s position in the buying cycle. These are the typical
stages of the buying cycle – and as you can imagine, the buyer needs different
information in each stage so an effective lead nurturing program will make certain that
the right information is delivered at the right time! What to Say, When to Say
It During the Interest and Search stages, the focus should be on problem/need
identification. The Buyer has identified a need and is beginning the research
phase—what options exist in terms of types of solutions, and what products or services
are best suited for their needs. What you want to accomplish is help the buyer
wrap their heads around a need or want – so don’t push “Buy now!”, but focus on information
that helps identify problems and needs. The Evaluate stage is where the buyer begins to
evaluate the information gathered in earlier stages and prepares to make the decision so
you should introduce delivery, installation, training and after sales support. These are the
topics that should help further differentiate your solution from others because few
organizations think about emphasizing these points. (Most stop short of these
topics and remain focused on feature-benefit, feature-benefit…buy, buy,
buy.) This is also the stage when the buyers starts to speak directly with those vendors
that they feel offer the best solutions. Now you need to focus on features, benefits and
key differentiators. This is where you start introducing promotional offers. The
Purchase stage is where the buyer makes the actual commitment to acquire the
product or service, and the Re-evaluate stage is the timeframe immediately following
the Purchase when the buyer begins to second guess their own decision to buy. During the
Re-evaluate stage, you will want to consistently remind the buyer about the reasons your
products and services were selected—and begin to deliver on the promises made so that
you exceed expectations.
What kind of content will you need to succeed? Educational materials including
whitepapers, webinars and on-the-ground events, product and service information, news
about the company, promotional offers and marketing messages about the product/service. You
will want a mix of off-line and on-line – email and direct mail, webinars and face-to-face
events, telephone calls and more. Remember to ask how the individual prefers to receive
information, then make sure you have the information in that format!
The Importance of Lead Routing Buyers needs will change – so when sales
identifies a buyer that is no longer planning to buy NOW, sales should be able to hand
that lead back to marketing for nurturing until the need to buy becomes more immediate. That’s
why it’s key to have sales and marketing working together – in many organizations, the
friction between these two areas would prevent the lead from being placed in the
nurturing program (if one existed) – and the sale would be lost (or at least it would
be placed at great risk). Get sales and marketing together. Let them come to an agreement on
the definition of ‘lead’ and ’sales ready lead’. And let them identify how buyers will
be handed back and forth between sales and marketing. Finally, the content
you develop for lead nurturing should be developed to help turn first-time buyers into
multi-time buyers, and multi-time buyers into multi-product buyers. After
all, you need to nurture customers in order to ensure higher lifetime value.
Double and Triple Conversion Rates Setting up the right processes for scoring and
prioritizing. Getting sales and marketing working together and clearly defining ‘lead’, and
’sales ready lead’. Segmenting the buyers based on needs, wants, buying process,
motivations. Making the right information available at the right time to the right people
via the right channel. Do all that and you should see the payoff in terms of higher
conversion rates, shorter buying cycles, higher average orders and order frequency.