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By Geoff Rego
Managing Response
An efficient way to manage the responses you receive to your lead generation campaigns is to Qualify in Stages.
Qualifying leads is not a one-time activity. It begins with a prospect’s initial response when you reject certain responses based on basic criteria. For example, you can reject prospects who provide email addresses that have invalid domain names. You will also want to reject (automatically, if possible), fictitious responses such as “Mickey Mouse” and “Osama bin Laden” in the name field of a web form.
Next, suppress responses that are valid but obviously not potential customers. For example, you should identify and suppress responses from competitors. You might also want to suppress responses from people who have email addresses that indicate they are college students.
The remaining leads are the only ones you should score. The most effective lead qualification processes evaluate and score these leads by looking at a complex combination of attributes. For example, an “A” lead might be defined as someone who downloads three whitepapers, someone who downloads two whitepapers and attends one webinar or someone who downloads only one whitepaper but reports on a Web form that he has a budgeted project or some other meaningful combination of attributes. For each lead that meets the criteria you’ve set, make sure the prospect is not already in your sales database (de-dupe). If he is, update the existing record. If not, publish the information to your sales database and notify the sales team of the new lead.
Don’t lose any leads that fail to meet the criteria for forwarding to the sales team. Continue to stay in touch with these people, sending occasional email messages containing new offers of whitepapers, etc. And continuing re-score these leads so you’ll know when they’re ready for a sales call.
Get Help from Software
Performing the above steps (rejecting, suppressing, scoring, routing, nurturing, de-duping and publishing) with a large number of prospects can be challenging, if not impossible, without the help of powerful software. That’s why many companies find marketing automation systems to be of great value. Such software can also make it easy to analyze customer behavior so marketers can quickly revise qualification and scoring rules based on what the “A” leads actually do and say. And marketing automation systems make it easy for marketing teams to know exactly what happens to each lead after it goes to the sales team. Fortunately for small and medium-sized businesses, affordable marketing automation software-as-a-service is available with low start-up costs.
Implement Quickly
With a couple of hours of work, marketers can program marketing automation systems to constantly evaluate each prospect in the marketing and sales “funnel.” The best approach is to implement a new system quickly; over a period of a couple weeks, for example, rather than several months. Don’t try to get it perfect the first time. Get your lead qualification system up and running with a campaign and then analyze the results to tweak your qualification and scoring rules “on the fly.” Even with the most careful pre-implementation planning, most companies are surprised to learn what they thought they knew about their customers wasn’t completely correct. Fortunately, a good marketing automation system makes it easy to learn from the data and change the configuration as necessary.
As companies tweak their lead qualification and scoring systems based on actual data, they find that they can send a steady stream of highly qualified leads to sales teams, rather than large bursts of less qualified leads. The quantity of leads might be lower, but there will still be enough to keep the sales team busy and a much higher percentage of those leads will convert to sales.
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