The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring Brought to you by © 2010 ELOQUA CORPORATION The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring 01 The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring What’s a “Grande Guide”? marketing group. How do you send all those leads to sales? > We know what the typical day is like for marketers. After Most marketing organizations simply hand-off a huge list of all, we are marketers ourselves. Between brainstorming names, or upload them to the sales database, then sit back and strategy sessions, last-minute requests and and expect sales to call them all. After a few calls, most impromptu meetings (“It’ll just take a minute, really!”), salespeople give up, deriding the leads as “junk.” And so the and trips to meet customers, you can barely find time to finger pointing begins. breathe, never mind keep up with the latest marketing trends. That’s why we’ve developed the Grande Guide > This kind of interaction is counter-productive and causes series. In the time it takes you to drink a cup of coffee, enormous inefficiencies across the organization’s revenue- you can become proficient in a key marketing topic, in bearing teams. It can put enormous strain on sales this case, lead scoring. productivity. As your sales reps work furiously to stay afloat, they’re becoming inefficient in their daily tasks … undermining What is Lead Scoring? the goal of doing more with less. > Lead scoring is an objective ranking of one sales lead According to Aberdeen Research, companies that get lead scoring right against another. This not only helps align the right have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not. follow-up to the corresponding inquiry, it also helps marketing and sales professionals identify where each Performance Metrics Average Performance prospect is in the buying process. Best-in-class All others > The process of defining lead scores improves alignment Lead qualification rate 35% 22% and collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Forcast accuracy 32% 21% After all, by jointly establishing an objective definition of a quality lead, sales and marketing can exchange better Marketing effectiveness 31% 21% feedback on the quality of leads being passed to sales. Sales effectiveness 30% 15% Plus, lead scoring helps ensure the best leads are Lead conversion rate 28% 19% followed up on immediately by prioritizing leads according to revenue potential and buyer readiness. Response rate 27% 20% Pipeline thickness 27% 12% Why Lead Scoring Matters Today An Aberdeen survey measured the change in key metrics after implementing lead scoring. Best-in-class companies are those that > Doing more with less has become a corporate mantra – reported, on average, the highest increases in revenue growth, lead conversion rates and decrease in cost per lead. and its rippling effects are felt at all levels of an Source: Aberdeen Group, Lead Scoring and Prioritization. organization. Consider the demand generated by your > In the meantime, dozens of hot leads – legitimate opportunities – are being thrown away simply because they’re on the bottom of the pile of “junk” leads. > With fewer deals available, your sales reps need every Lead scoring enables organizations to advantage to get in front of active opportunities first, and move lead prioritization from a largely subjective process, to an analytical, develop latent opportunities earlier than the competition. To do scientific approach that can be managed that, they need to be working with prioritized leads. easily and cost-effectively. 02 The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring www.eloqua.com The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring > You can help direct the efforts of the sales team in the most > Moreover, an established lead-scoring practice gives efficient and cost-effective way through lead scoring, which you greater control of your pipeline. The better you prioritizes leads based on prospects’ profile fit and level of measure and know the quality of your leads, the more interest. predictable your pipeline and revenue forecasts become. It become easier to see projected shortfalls > But the benefits don’t end there. The concept of scoring can be in revenue by territory, product line or business unit. applied throughout the integrated sales and marketing funnel. This allows marketing and sales teams to react Forward-thinking companies are applying scoring algorithms to appropriately by focusing resources where they will account scoring, opportunity scoring, and other stages in the have the biggest impact. buyer’s journey. As a result, they’re able to focus their efforts where they’re bound to see the most bang for their buck. Lead Scoring Basics > The overall goal of lead scoring is to look at your leads and understand whether they are the right person Why Do I Need to Understand Lead (explicit scoring) and/or are showing the right level of Scoring Personally? interest (implicit scoring). With this information, you > It’s a no-brainer: the more you as a marketer can be tied to any can treat leads accordingly. revenue-related activity, the more valuable you are to your Performance Metrics Average Performance organization. Lead scoring fosters better relations between sales > The key to effective lead scoring is formulating a way and marketing because it allows both teams to work more to capture information, score it, and measure it. Best-in-class All others efficiently and improve close rates – both of which increase Winning approaches address the three areas of Lead qualification rate 35% 22% revenue. Not only does lead scoring help sales zero in on the people, process, and technology. In the people area, most promising leads, it provides an objective measure of which you need an executive-level champion and sales Forcast accuracy 32% 21% prospects need further nurturing, enabling marketing to involvement. For the process portion, marketing and Marketing effectiveness 31% 21% intelligently concentrate its efforts. sales needs to agree on the definition of a lead and how leads will be handed off from marketing to sales. Sales effectiveness 30% 15% When it comes to technology, you need software that Lead conversion rate 28% 19% Why Does My Business Need to can capture information, facilitate lead handoff, and Response rate 27% 20% Understand Lead Scoring? process feedback. Pipeline thickness 27% 12% > Lead scoring is more than just a means for ranking leads. It is a contract between sales and marketing. It’s a mutually agreed- upon process for defining lead quality, sales follow-up, and cross-departmental collaboration. The act of collaboratively developing a lead scoring model helps your marketing and sales teams arrive at a common definition of a truly hot lead. Plus it enables your organization to develop a system for ranking that prioritizes quality interactions or activities that demonstrate Two Reasons for Lead Scoring > In a study of 10 B2B organizations high prospect interest. using lead scoring systems, Eloqua found that, on average, deal close rates > With a clear definition of what constitutes a priority lead, the increased by 30%, company revenue discussion can then progress to which leads should be passed increased by 18% and the revenue per deal increased by 17%. from marketing to sales, and which should be nurtured further. > According to Aberdeen Research, When leads sent to sales have an objective quality rating, it companies that get lead scoring right becomes easier to measure how good your sales team is at have a 192% higher average lead engaging prospects and closing business. qualification rate than those that do not. © 20102009 ELOQUA CORPORATION The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring 03 The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring Lead Scoring Evolved > The main focus of lead scoring is to generate a sales-ready lead. > If you ask sales and marketing Once you’ve generated qualified leads, you need to pass them to executives at 100 companies telemarketing for further qualification, such as by determining today how they score their leads, authority, need, and timing. Once a lead becomes sales- 99 will answer with the acronym, “BANT.” That is, to qualify accepted, sales determines if it’s a sales-qualified opportunity. opportunities, a lead must have Added bonus: by understanding your sales acceptance rate, Budget, Authority, Need and you’ll be able to better fine-tune your scoring criteria. Timeline for purchase. This is a common definition developed > Two of the most commonly used scoring dimensions are: over the last decade for a qualified lead. XWho the prospect is, signified by explicit data that determines > But times have changed. Buyers fit, such as title, industry, and start their information-gathering company revenues. process well in advance of XHow interested the prospect is, indicated by implicit data having established things like that determines level of engagement, such as frequent visits budget and timeline. Even if these factors are in place, to website and responsiveness to promotions. buyers are unlikely to reveal this “inside” information to a sales Score your leads person that happens to make a against two dimensions: BEST FIT ACTIVE HOT LEAD BEST FIT well-timed cold call. who they are and what INTEREST ACTIVE INTEREST they do > Instead, buyers today rely on the HOT LEAD Web to gather information. They download whitepapers and case WHO THEY ARE WHAT THEY’VE DONE studies, connect with peers to validate their observations, turn Vp, Marketing Web Visits WHO THEY ARE WHAT THEY’VE DONE to social media to crowdsource Software Industry Form Activity experience. And, for the most VP, Marketing Web Visits $100m Rev Email Click-Through part, sales people have no Software Industry Form Activity visibility into these behaviors. $100m Rev Email Click-Through > To keep up with the changing buying process, advanced lead NOT A FIT scoring systems consider a wide NO NO INTEREST range of data points to determine NOT A FIT INTEREST lead quality.