Fit, Engagement, and MQLs: Mapping the Lead Handoff to Sales

Marketing organizations looking to only hand qualified leads over to their sales teams are faced with an interesting analysis challenge. Whereas it might seem to be a simple task to look at implicit data on a prospect and understand their engagement, or look at explicit data on a prospect and understand their fit, the reality is that this is often a relatively difficult task.

The first task is to look at the raw data in order to define a score between, say 0 and 100 points. This is not as simple as more activity leading to a higher score; some areas of activity may in fact be worth more score than others, and time needs to be taken into account in order to ensure that scores do not grow indefinitely over time. The machinations of this scoring algorithm, however should be kept separate from the sales organization.

For a sales organization to be comfortable building a process, they need a stable definition to be applied to the leads that are sent their way. This is where the fit/engagement matrix is highly useful. A value for the lead’s “fit”, in other words their title, industry, and size, can be mapped to a standard definition of A, B, C, D, where A is a high fit, and D is a low fit. Similarly for a lead’s “engagement”, or their activity on the website, a standard definition of 1,2,3,4 can be applied, again with 1 representing high engagement and 4 representing a low engagement.

The sales team can then understand leads as A1s, C3s, or B4s. The underlying scoring definition of what earns a lead points, how those points are adjusted over time, and which range of points maps to the each rank, does not need to be visible to the sales team at large. A core group of key individuals within sales and marketing can debate the definitions and make necessary adjustments each quarter.

With a clear definition of what makes each lead rank, the discussion can then progress to which leads should be passed from marketing to sales, and to which sales team if there are multiple teams involved. A1 leads will obviously be passed directly to sales, likely to a field sales force, but a mapping is needed for where each other lead rank goes. Some may be passed to an inside sales team, some may be passed to a partner channel, and some may be held back to be further nurtured. The set of leads that are passed to sales from marketing are deemed marketing qualified leads (MQLs). This higher level definition is useful in looking at a higher level view of your marketing analysis.

There are two key questions that these efforts in lead scoring allow you to tackle in analyzing your marketing programs:

Does our scoring accurately correlate to a higher propensity to purchase?
- A lead scoring algorithm should be continually revisited in order to ensure that a higher score actually correlates with a higher propensity to purchase, based on both fit and engagement.

Which leads are worth sending over to sales based on the sales team’s ability to engage them in relevant conversations?
- Adjustments in your marketing, sales, and channel mix can mean that you may
wish to send more leads or less leads to sales. This adjustment comes into play
as you adjust which leads, A1, B2, C3, etc, are sent to sales as Marketing
Qualified Leads (MQLs)


In order to better enable analysis of what is working and what is not, it’s a good idea to keep the lead score and lead rank tracked. As these are values that change with time the best way to do this is to stamp the values at the point in time that the lead is passed to sales. This value pair can then be analyzed against later in order to understand whether the score and rank at that moment in time accurately indicated an intent to purchase.

Setting up a lead scoring and lead handoff process in a way that allows you to both analyze and adjust it as you learn and your business grows, sets you up for long term success.

Lead Handoff and Sales Measurement - Video

Scoring leads to determine which are qualified for sales is only valuable if the sales team works with those leads appropriately when they are handed off. This is complicated by the fact that in many cases, a sales attempt to connect with a lead can result in ambiguous outcomes, like leaving a voicemail, or discovering that the prospect is interested, but suggests speaking again in three months.

In this quick video, Eloqua’s Director of Marketing Operations, Chris Petko maps out the key elements of a process for handing leads to sales, providing sales with a way to easily take action on a lead, and then automatically handing each of the lead dispositions that are likely to happen.



(if the above video doesn't load, please click here for the lead handoff and sales measurement video)

The ability to select which leads, by both fit and engagement, are qualified for sales allows very flexible control of the flow of leads to sales, so the flow can be increased or decreased based on the propensity of the leads to close and the size of the sales force. Similarly, creating a task for sales for each lead allows very rigorous management of the overall process, as the task completion can be managed and measured very carefully.

This all follows from effectively defining which leads are truly ready for sales. This was covered very well in a recent video on lead scoring best practices that is worth watching if you missed it.

Marketing automation is of course a key element in handling the lead dispositions, as Chris highlights in the video. For each disposition option on the task presented to sales, a marketing automation program can handle the lead, nurture them as appropriate, and monitor them for signs of renewed activity.

Enjoy the video, Chris lives and breathes marketing operations, and truly knows his stuff.

Is Good-Enough-Marketing-Automation Really Good Enough?

Today's post is a guest post from Paul Teshima, Eloqua's Senior Vice President of Customer Service. Paul is the person responsible for the team that drives the success of our clients, and is very hands on in working with clients big and small.

As such, he has been the brains behind many of our innovations on how to tackle various business processes, new approaches to scoring leads, and innovative ways to manage global deployments.

I'm thrilled to have Paul post as the insights he brings are without parallel.

Steve

=====================================

There is a lot of activity and discussion today on best practices in demand generation and marketing automation. Marketers are now realizing they don’t have to build the perfect campaign or program to generate value from marketing automation.

So on one side I am very happy that we are seeing rapid adoption of marketing automation, but on the other side, I know that we need to do more. Marketers may have become happy with “good-enough-marketing-automation”, which is a great place to start, but you need to continue to improve to get the most out of these programs.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

1. From Auto-Responders to a Warm Welcome
Many marketers have seen good results with targeted auto-responder emails (not just "thanks for downloading") once you fill out a form. this is a great tactic and can drive high response rates. But you would be surprised to know that on average 15-20% of your new leads in a quarter receive no communication in the first 60 days outside of an auto-responder.


This is largely due to the fact that your list pulls don't always account for "new leads", but rather focus on specific profile information (e.g. CIO, in New York, in Financial Services).

We have seen rapid adoption of what we like to call a "Welcome Program". This program targets new leads that for one reason or another don't receive any marketing communication due to your segmentation strategy. It can be as simple as 3 emails over 3-6 weeks that provides value-add information on why you should stay interested in your business.

Customers have seen great results with these types of programs as these leads have already raised their hand. Welcome programs can generate qualified leads at a rate of 10-15%. This is the first nurturing program every customer should have.



2. From Lead Qualification to Strategic Account Management
Many companies, small and large have targeted account or vertical strategies that involve lists of thousands of named or strategic accounts. When implementing a scoring program often this targeted list is ignored because how do you setup scoring rules for 3,000 company names, when often the field data varies by record (i.e. IBM, I.B.M. IBM Corp., etc.).

But these leads are actually some of the best leads from an Explicit or Ability to Purchase perspective. You would always call them back. So it is imperative that you include them in your scoring program (note: this may involve data tools and some complex deduplication.)

In fact we have found that 20% of all of our customers use a Named Account List in their scoring program - and many of them also route these leads directly to field sales - reducing delays in the right follow-up, and also cost of generating the quality lead.

It is important to understand that starting simple with marketing automation is definitely the way to go. But instead of thinking of it as a one step process, think of it as an effort in continual improvement. I believe that marketers who take on this challenge, will have more effective campaigns and drive significantly more value for their business.

Trucks and Conveyer Belts; Lead Management in a Manufacturing Metaphor

(David Armano wrote an inspiring post last week challenging us to "Think Visually" - http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/01/thinking-visually.html. He makes a great point, so I exhausted my very limited artistic talents to come up with visuals for this week's post. Hope they make the point clearer)

One of the things that I often discuss with B2B marketing clients is the details of the process for handing leads from marketing to sales and then bringing them back again if sales is not interested. It's an area not to take too lightly as it can derail a tremendous amount of great work in both sales and marketing if the handoff is not done extremely well.

The most common handoff I see is the Excel spreadsheet of leads. This terrifies me.


I liken this to a manufacturing operation where the production is done in two separate buildings, and half way through the manufacturing process, the product is shipped, via truck, from one building to another. It functions, sort of, but will not give you a strong business.


First of all, speed is critical in responding to leads. This has been talked about many times, including my post a month ago here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/high-noon-at-web-form.html. The essence is, you have a very limited amount of time (hours, not days) to act on a sign of buying interest, before your chance of connecting drops precipitously.


So, why does the truck (Excel spreadsheet) model fail?

1. Trucks work best when they are fully loaded. You would not send a spreadsheet with one or two names in it, any more than you would ship a truck with one or two parts in it.


2. Too many trucks clog the roads. In the same way, tt becomes unworkable to be emailing back and forth more than a few (2 or 3) spreadsheets of leads.


3. Trucks are loaded by people. People have other things on their plate, they take breaks, they take vacations, they get distracted. The same thing holds for Excel spreadsheets

All three of these problems lead to a similar trend. The Excel spreadsheet of leads becomes less frequent and larger. The exact numbers vary, but a once-per-week distribution of leads is not uncommon in many organizations.


The problem with this is that it becomes a downward spiral. We send the leads over to sales, and whereas they might have been well qualified at the start, now that a few days have passed, the prospect's interest has moved on to other things, and the chance of connecting with them has decreased. As sales tries to connect with these leads, they realize that they are not getting through, and therefore sales treats the leads with less urgency adding even more delay to the process.


The only way to break this cycle realistically is with automation, in much the same way that conveyer belts revolutionized manufacturing. The lead qualification, handoff, and clawback must be done with the appropriate sense of urgency. Marketing and sales need to work together to build the agreements, SLAs, and processes so that a prospective buyer is responded to quickly and efficiently. To do this requires allowing each lead to flow through the process as soon as they raise their hand. This requires removing any trucks (Excel spreadsheets) from the flow, and replacing them with conveyer belts (automation).


Automating your lead routing may seem like a small optimization, but like in manufacturing, changing the way a process is managed can have a massive impact on bottom line success. Dell and Toyota demonstrated this with electronics and automotive manufacturing. Now, this operations mentality has shifted to Marketing, where the organization who can best serve the needs of the prospect will win.

High noon at the web form

Quickest draw wins... well not quite, but speed is more important than many B2B marketers realize (or at least act upon). Fine tuning your response to inbound inquiries can have a significant impact on your success without requiring much of an investment.

Leigh Anne Wallace at Reachforce had a blog entry recently that was a good reminder for all of us of the studies that show the real benefits to responding quickly to inbound inquiries: http://blog.reachforce.com/sales-and-marketing-tips/what-is-your-web-lead-response-time-b2b-marketing-and-sales-tip-177/. From the original report:

"The speed of first attempt (time to first dial) to a newly generated web lead
correlated with a significant increase in the number of qualified leads. For
each tier of delayed response in the survey question (for instance, responding in 30 minutes rather than 10 minutes) the percent of leads qualified dropped 4.3% and close rates fell nearly 2%."

It's more difficult than it seems as you need to put three basic processes in place to have it make sense, unless your flow of inquiries is small enough that you really can follow up with every inquiry. You need:

1. a basic call/no-call qualification process
2. the basics of routing to the right rep
3. a quick notification process
   

For the lead qualification process, I'd hesitate to call it lead scoring just yet, because you many want to lower the bar a little bit and follow up with most inquiries, even those that would not pass as A leads. There is a strong argument in favour of automating most of this process because it's all too easy to come up with an "I didn't call because..." reason after the fact if you leave it to the individual callers. You'll likely need to manage and measure follow-up speed in a hands-on way, and if it's open to loose interpretation, that process might fall apart quickly.

For lead routing, again, simple is best. The best I've seen had a very small dedicated person/team on it, rather than distributing more broadly. It's likely that your first call outcome goals are relatively simple in nature (more details, setting a meeting, etc) and can be managed by someone who is not that territory's sales rep.

For notification, once you know you're going to call them, and you know the right rep to make the call, email is usually quickest and easiest. Its main drawback is that it's more difficult to close the loop and monitor response times, but to get a process up and running quickly it is the easiest bet.

It doesn't take long to get a feel for what your actual response times to inbound marketing inquiries are, and if it's not what you'd hoped, there may be an easy way for you to improve your team's performance. A quick "mystery shopper" inquiry or two can give you a good idea of how you're really performing. In fact, I might try that with the Eloqua team right now...

Lead Scoring; Points, Ranks, and Sales Handoff

Everyone uses the term "lead scoring" in demand generation. It's definitely a foundational concept for the industry, but under the covers, there are (or should be) two things happening, only one of which is scoring. The goal, of course, is to look at your prospects, and understand whether they are the right person (explicit scoring) and/or are showing the right level of interest (implicit scoring). But, implied in this is the assumption that you will do something different with those that score high from those that score low.



If that's the case, and you are looking to do something different with some leads than others, you need to think about "lead ranking" as a core part of lead scoring. Let's look at an example. Say you want to divide up your leads using explicit (fit) criteria into As, Bs, and Cs, and then divide your leads using implicit (interest) criteria into 1s, 2s, and 3s. Then, the A1s would be passed to sales, the A3s would be nurtured, the C1s would be cultivated by inside sales to get to the right contact, and the C3s would be dropped (obviously the other categories would be dealt with also, but for the sake of simplicity bear with me).



Here's the challenge. We're now looking at two distinct undertakings:

1. Finding the right mix of criteria to score the leads in order to determine whether they are A, B, C, or 1, 2, 3. (See http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/dimensions-of-lead-scoring.html for a discussion on why you really need both dimensions of scoring)



2. Building the business process for appropriate follow-up, nurture, or cultiviation of the leads once it has been decided that they are an A1, A3, or C1.

These undertakings are actually very separate, and both will need a lot of tuning over time. As your website changes, you launch new marketing campaigns, or you tweak the relative weights of one criteria over another, the scores of leads will change. Likewise, as you add sales people, change territories, or alter quotas, you may wish to send more leads of lower quality, or less leads of higher quality.

Separating the "lead scoring" - ie assigning 0-100 points based on activity - from the "lead ranking" - ie determining what is ranked as a 1, 2, or 3 - lets you build your business processes independent of any tweaking and optimization. Your field sales team may get A1 and B1 leads, your inside sales team may get A2, B2, and C1 leads, and you may route A3, B3, and C2 to your nurture marketing programs. Regardless of what you do to change your approach to scoring, or what the thresholds are for each rank, your team knows what to do when they see an A1 lead coming their way.

Not only can you better build your sales or nurture marketing follow-up processes based on abstracting the lead score from the lead rank, but you can look back at your sales successes after a few quarters, and by comparing the underlying score against the sales success rates, you can get good insights into whether you are able to loosen the ranking criteria and have more leads flow through to sales, or would be best to tighten the criteria and have less leads of higher quality.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.

Dimensions of Lead Scoring

I get asked very frequently how marketers should think about lead scoring... how do you come up with a rule that scores leads based on "explicit" things like title, industry, and company size, while at the same time counting "implicit" things like what they've done on your website.

The way I see it, you don't. The two don't really mix. One of them, the explicit criteria, is about whether the lead is the right person, in the right role, at the right company at the right company. It measures ability to purchase. It's a key thing to measure, certainly, but it's not the whole picture. You also have to understand whether a buying process is actually happening in that company, and for that person.

The way that's measured is another dimension - intent to purchase. For this, you look at much more implicit information; web activity, searches, repeat visits, deep dives into specifications, response to marketing campaigns, etc. This tells you whether you are looking at a person who is actively considering your solution based on what is happening in their business.

Without looking at both of these dimensions, you're not able to tease out the right prospects for your sale team to focus on. Looking at the four corners of this chart, you can see why, it all comes down to what you'd want to do with each lead type:

• A1: Great leads; the right buyer and showing a lot of interest. Sales needs to call them right away
• A3: Right person, wrong time; this is a prospect who is the right role in the right company, but they are showing minimal interest. Calling them aggressively is wasting your time and theirs. They need to be nurtured over time until you see them showing the signs of being truly interested.
• C1: Not the right person, but excited; lots of interest, but minimal ability to purchase. Perhaps their interest can be leveraged into an introduction to the right people. Or, perhaps they are a student or a job seeker, and will never be a buyer.
• C3: Not the right person, and not showing interest. There's not much point marketing to these people or trying to call them.

Lead scoring needs to look at both of these dimensions, but trying to merge them into one will always risk confusing the keen student with the mildly interested CEO. Obviously you want to communicate with them very differently, so you need to separate the dimensions you score on in order to differentiate between them.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.